Video game development is often shrouded in secrecy. While some developers and publishers are trending toward greater transparency, others still go years without providing updates on highly anticipated projects.
Over the past two console generations, a number of high-profile games have been announced that have seemingly fallen by the wayside — games that have gone long without public updates yet haven’t been officially canceled.
We reached out to the creators of 18 such games to determine whether they are still in development, on hold, or potentially stuck in development hell. In the (frequent) case a company wasn’t forthright with the status of its game, we compiled all the available information surrounding its development to come to the most likely conclusion.
(“Time elapsed” dates were recorded on April 21, 2020.)
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In the Valley of Gods
Time elapsed since announcement: 2 years, 4 months, 14 days.
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At the 2017 Game Awards, developer Campo Santo announced In the Valley of Gods, a first-person adventure game set in 1920s Egypt starring a pair of documentary filmmakers exploring the lost Tomb of Nefertiti. Like Firewatch, the studio’s excellent debut, In the Valley of Gods aims to balance its adventure with an emotional, interpersonal tale.
Shortly after the announcement, Campo Santo was acquired by Valve. At the time, the studio said it’d continue work on In the Valley of Gods, but the following year, studio co-founder Jake Rodkin announced the project was “on hold” as the team moved to other projects within Valve, such as Half Life: Alyx.
As of April 2020 In the Valley of Gods is still on hold, though its Steam page remains up and Rodkin said it “certainly feels like a project people can and may return to.”
STATUS: ON HOLD
Witchfire
Time elapsed since announcement: 2 years, 4 months, 14 days.
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Witchfire, from developer The Astronauts (The Vanishing of Ethan Carter), was also announced during the 2017 Game Awards.
The studio went dark for a year after the reveal and has remained relatively quiet, but work on the “dark fantasy” first-person shooter remains active. The Astronauts provide occasional development updates on its website — the latest, posted in February, details the studio’s philosophies on displaying enemy health bars and damage numbers.
Regarding a release date for Witchfire, the studio wrote in an April 2019 blog post, “It’ll be done when it’s done.”
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
Metroid Prime 4
Time elapsed since announcement: 2 years, 10 months, 9 days.
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The long-awaited Metroid Prime 4 was revealed at E3 2017, 10 years after the release of Metroid Prime 3.
After a no-show at E3 2018 and the 2018 Game Awards, Nintendo broke its year-and-a-half-long silence by announcing the project was being restarted and moving to original trilogy developer Retro Studios. (Development was previously being led by Bandai Namco, according to reports.)
Retro has been expectedly quiet, as the studio only began development a year ago. Last we heard, former DICE art director Jhony Ljungstedt joined the Metroid team. Ljungstedt’s credits include Battlefield V and Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
Skull & Bones
Time elapsed since announcement: 2 years, 10 months, 10 days.
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At E3 2017, Ubisoft announced Skull & Bones, a seafaring pirate game featuring competitive multiplayer and a story campaign.
Skull & Bones has since been delayed twice — once from Fall 2018 to 2019-2020 and again from that window to an undisclosed date after March 2020.
Ubisoft Singapore announced that second delay in May 2019, and there hasn’t been so much as a social media post since. A beta (which you can still register for) was announced prior to the delay, but there’s been no word on when it’ll take place.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
Payday 3
Time elapsed since announcement: 3 years, 10 months, 22 days.
Payday 3 was first confirmed in May 2016, when developer Starbreeze acquired the rights to the franchise from the series’ former publisher, 505 Games.
Starbreeze entered production on Payday 3 the following February and was candid about its expected release window, saying it “will enjoy as much time as we deem needed.”
The Swedish studio remained silent for a couple years as it worked through financial woes, filing for reconstruction in late 2018 “due to a shortage of liquidity.” Starbreeze completed the reconstruction process in December, noting its prioritization of game development on the Payday franchise.
Payday 3 has a tentative 2022-2023 release window, and Starbreeze is currently seeking a publisher, according to PC Gamer.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
The Talos Principle 2
Time elapsed since announcement: 3 years, 11 months, 2 days.
A sequel to 2014’s The Talos Principle was quietly announced at the 2016 Nordic Game Conference. In the nearly four years since, developer Croteam hasn’t released any official information on the puzzler.
While there’s still no news on a release window for The Talos Principle 2, Croteam’s Daniel Lucic did shed some light on its development in a 2019 post on Steam: “While we are working on it to some extent, all our focus is currently on Serious Sam 4. We’re still a small team, and it’s tough to work full-steam on several projects.”
According to its Steam page, Serious Sam 4 will be released in 2020, meaning Croteam will presumably shift its focus to The Talos Principle 2 sometime this year.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
Two Worlds III
Time elapsed since announcement: 4 years, 28 days.
TopWare Interactive announced Two Worlds III was in the concept stage back in 2016. At the time, it expected development to take three years, putting its tentative release date sometime in 2019.
On the brink of 2019, Wccftech reached out to TopWare for an update. The outlet was told Two Worlds III was still in pre-production and likely four to five years away, putting its revised release window around 2022-2023.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
System Shock 3
Time elapsed since announcement: 4 years, 4 months, 8 days.
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System Shock fans have had practice with patience; the series’ third entry wasn’t made official until 2015, 16 years after the release of System Shock 2.
Things were largely quiet for the next three years as OtherSide went to work on its biggest project to date. That silence was broken last September when a promising gameplay trailer (above) debuted on IGN. Then, in February, VideoGamesChronicle reported development was “critically behind” and the entire System Shock 3 team was “no longer employed.”
However, just this week, Larry Kuperman of Nightdive Studios (owner of the System Shock IP) told IGN, “OtherSide Entertainment has licensed the rights from us to develop System Shock 3. We have not received any notice or communication that would lead us to believe that there has been a change in that status.”
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
Red Ash: The Indelible Legend
Time elapsed since announcement: 4 years, 9 months, 20 days.
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Following his departure from Capcom, Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune founded a new studio, Comcept (now known as Level 5-Comcept).
In 2015, Comcept announced a spiritual successor to Mega Man Legends called Red Ash: The Indelible Legend, and a Kickstarter campaign quickly followed. Red Ash fell well short of its $800,000 USD goal, but found funding from Chinese publisher Fuze just days before the campaign ended.
In the nearly five years since, Comcept has released Mighty No. 9, ReCore, and a mobile game called Dragons & Colonies, without providing any update on Red Ash. The game’s official Twitter account has been inactive since October 2015, though its website remains live.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT HELL
Wayward Tide
Time elapsed since announcement: 5 years, 7 months, 14 days.
In 2014, Stardew Valley publisher Chucklefish announced Wayward Tide, an internally developed co-op adventure set on a “treacherous archipelago during the golden age of piracy.”
Chucklefish hasn’t provided an official update since that initial announcement. The last communication related to Wayward Tide came three years ago from former Chucklefish dev Molly Carroll on Reddit, who said “it’s been shelved for the moment because [of] Starbound. You’ll hear more about it once Starbound is finished.” Carroll has since moved on to Valve and Starbound was released three-and-a-half years ago.
According to another Chucklefish dev on Reddit, development “halted” on Wayward Tide when its main programmer left the studio. That message was posted four years ago.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT HELL
Wild
Time elapsed since announcement: 5 years, 8 months, 10 days.
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Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil creator Michel Ancel’s ambitious open-world PS4 exclusive was revealed at Gamescom 2014. The game showed tons of promise, and we were especially impressed with Wild’s originality after learning more during 2015’s Paris Games Week.
Unfortunately, that’s the last official word on Wild, save for a couple Instagram posts from Ancel in 2017 and 2018. Ancel is now leading development on Beyond Good & Evil 2 at Ubisoft (more on that later), and it’s been years since he or developer Wild Sheep, a studio he co-founded, has mentioned Wild.
However, there is hope for Wild: Wild Sheep listed two job openings this year and its website was recently updated with new artwork, which you can see in the gallery above.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
Dead Island 2
Time elapsed since announcement: 5 years, 10 months, 12 days.
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At E3 2014, publisher Deep Silver revealed Dead Island 2, and thus began one of the more tumultuous stories of video game development in recent history.
Dead Island developer Techland was originally involved with the sequel, according to Polygon, but instead shifted its focus to Dying Light, opening the door for Yager (Spec Ops: The Line). Dead Island 2’s woes began with a delay from its initial Spring 2015 release window to 2016. A few months later, Deep Silver removed Yager from the project after the companies’ “respective visions of the project fell out of alignment.” LittleBigPlanet 3 developer Sumo Digital took up the mantle in early 2016 and three (mostly) silent years went by until we got our next big update on Dead Island 2.
In August 2019, THQ Nordic announced Dead Island 2 was once again switching developers: Sumo was out, Dambuster Studios (Homefront: The Revolution) was in. The move put Dead Island 2 into the hands of its third developer, where work on the long-awaited sequel is presumed to be quietly underway.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
Deep Down
Time elapsed since announcement: 7 years, 2 months, 1 day.
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Remember Deep Down, Capcom’s then-next-gen dungeon crawler shown off during the PlayStation 4 reveal event in early 2013? You’d be forgiven for thinking it was quietly released to little fanfare (as I did), but you’d be wrong (as I was). Seven years later, Capcom has yet to release or cancel Deep Down.
A Japanese beta for the free-to-play game was expected to go live in February 2014, though it was eventually delayed to “summer” of that same year. Summer passed, and Deep Down wouldn’t resurface until the following February, when Capcom said it was undergoing some massive changes to address “concerns about it not being able to capture an audience.” Two years later, Capcom filed a second trademark for Deep Down, which is still live today, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Two more years of silence followed before producer Yoshinori Ono briefly touched on Deep Down during a November 2019 interview with Eurogamer. The original development team is “no longer together,” according to Ono, but the project has “not been completely given up on.” He noted as long as Capcom keeps the trademark “it means we haven’t given up on the title completely.”
STATUS: ON HOLD
Star Citizen*
Time elapsed since announcement: 7 years, 6 months, 12 days.
*Unlike the other entries on this list, Star Citizen is playable (it’s available for $45 USD), though it remains in alpha with no timeline for a full release.
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No game on this list has a more convoluted development story than Star Citizen.
Since its initial crowdfunding campaign was launched in 2012, the ambitious project from longtime game- and filmmaker Chris Roberts has raised over $275 million USD from 2.5 million backers (plus an additional $46 million in private funding), according to the Star Citizen website. It’s by far the most successful video game crowdfunding campaign of all time.
Despite those resources and seven-and-a-half years of development time, Star Citizen has still not been released — in fact, it hasn’t even moved into beta; the current version is labeled Alpha 3.8. Worse yet, according to Forbes, Roberts has “stopped trying to guess” when it’ll be released.
In 2015, Roberts revealed a star-studded cast for Star Citizen’s standalone single-player component, Squadron 42. The first of its three episodes was expected to be released that fall but was ultimately delayed a year. A year later, it was delayed again. The game has yet to be released, and its date continues to shift — the beta for Squadron 42 was most recently moved from Q2 to Q3 2020. As of March 6, not one of the first episode’s 28 chapters has been completed, according to the developer’s roadmap.
Sewn throughout this have been a number of controversies, from absurdly priced DLC and tricky refund policies (via Eurogamer) to over 100 Federal Trade Commision complaints (via Forbes) and a now-settled lawsuit filed by Crytek over Cloud Imperium’s use of its CryEngine.
Star Citizen remains in alpha with no full release in sight, and while the Squadron 42 beta is expected to be released in Q3, multiple delays over the past five years have backers rightly skeptical about that date.
STATUS: (PERPETUALLY) IN DEVELOPMENT
Hellraid
Time elapsed since announcement (via Polygon): 7 years, 7 months, 26 days.
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Hellraid was first revealed as Project Hell in August 2012 by developer Techland (Dead Island, Dying Light). The co-op slasher was initially announced for last-gen consoles, before development moved to PS4 and Xbox One in 2014.
A year later, Techland announced Hellraid was “on hold,” as the build wasn’t meeting internal expectations. “We decided the best course of action would be to send it back to the drawing board and invent our dark fantasy title anew,” the company said at the time.
However, the studio ultimately decided to shift its resources to expanding Dying Light and had been mum on Hellraid since. That is until today, when Techland senior level designer Mateusz Piaskiewicz released the following statement to IGN:
Bringing what was best about the Dead Island gameplay into a dark fantasy world was something we’ve always wanted to do. Hellraid was being developed parallely to Dying Light by a much smaller team. Our expectations for the project were different than the shape the game was in. At one point it became clear we have to shift our focus, and prioritize Dying Light, especially after its launch. We weren’t expecting for Dying Light to become as big as it did, and in order to constantly develop the game and work on The Following, Dying Light’s expansion, we had to regroup, and put Hellraid on hold.
In 2015 Techland CEO Pawell Marchewka said Hellraid was “definitely not dead.” Five years later, based on Piaskiewicz’s comment, it appears that’s still the case, though there’s no word on if or when development will resume.
STATUS: ON HOLD
Routine
Time elapsed since announcement: 7 years, 8 months, 8 days.
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Routine, a promising PC-only horror game, was announced in 2012 with a 2013 release window. Though it missed that window, developer Lunar Software remained active on its blog at the time, assuring fans progress was being made.
In late 2015, Lunar acknowledged Routine was “a huge undertaking where we have clearly underestimated a lot of the workload.” In October 2016 a new trailer revealed a revised release window: March 2017. As evidenced by its inclusion on this list, Routine was not released that March. Instead, Lunar published another blog post, explaining one of its two “paths” (i.e. endings) “was just not as strong as the other.” These final tweaks wouldn’t take “more than a month or two,” the dev wrote.
That’s the last time Lunar Software posted to its website or social media pages. The studio’s only communication since came in a 2018 statement sent to Vice, in which the developer said it’s still working on Routine and planned on sharing more info when the game is “at least 99% complete […] as we don’t want to miss a release date again.”
Another two years have passed since that statement was released, and there’s been no indication development on Routine has progressed.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT HELL
Agent
Time elapsed since announcement: 10 years, 10 months, 20 days.
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At E3 2009, Sony announced Agent, a Rockstar-developed PlayStation 3 exclusive. Dubbed the “ultimate action game” by Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser, Agent was a tale of espionage set during “the height of the Cold War at the end of the 1970s.” A release date was never announced, but an FAQ posted to Rockstar’s website (via Eurogamer) hinted at a potential 2010 release.
2010 came and went, but in 2011 Take-Two confirmed Agent was still in development, while an artist’s portfolio provided our first look at the increasingly mysterious action game. After two more years of silence, Rockstar quietly renewed the trademarks for both Agent and its logo, which it did again in 2014 and 2016, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In 2018, nearly a decade after the announcement, Rockstar officially abandoned the Agent trademark. Two sources told Polygon some locations and missions from Agent ended up in Grand Theft Auto V, lending to the wide belief that Agent has long been dead.
Despite that sentiment and the trademark abandonment, Rockstar has never officially cancelled Agent, and its webpage remains live.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT HELL
Beyond Good & Evil 2
Time elapsed since announcement: 11 years, 10 months, 25 days.
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In 2008, Ubisoft showed off a beautiful trailer for Beyond Good & Evil creator Michel Ancel’s followup. Possible gameplay footage leaked the following May, and in early 2010, Ubisoft confirmed to IGN the sequel was still in development. The company provided a similar update the following year, adding BGE2 would not ship on the then-current generation of consoles. Ancel later told IGN “it was too challenging to put [BGE2 on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3].”
Development was still active in 2012, though Ancel’s need to juggle its development alongside that of Rayman Legends was “slowing the process,” said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot.
While it had no new information to share, Ubisoft again confirmed the game was being worked on in 2014. Ancel reiterated this point in early 2016, but after eight years of waiting, fans’ enthusiasm waned, and in its place grew skepticism.
Hope was reborn later that year when Ancel posted character art of Mammago and confirmed BGE2 was in pre-production. The sequel was officially confirmed by Ubisoft two days later, ahead of its big unveiling at E3 2017. Since then, Ubisoft has been more transparent about the state of BGE2, occasionally providing updates such as new gameplay details and concept art.
There is still no release window for BGE2. All we know is it won’t be released during Ubisoft’s current fiscal year, which ends on March 31, 2021. Best case: Ubisoft releases BGE2 later in 2021, thirteen years after its 2008 trailer reveal.
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT
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Which games on this list are you most looking forward to? Which have you lost hope for? Let us know in the comments.
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Jordan is a freelance writer for IGN.
Additional reporting by Matt Kim.
Source: IGN Video Games All
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