{"id":172864,"date":"2023-08-30T08:00:26","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/?p=172864"},"modified":"2023-08-30T07:47:23","modified_gmt":"2023-08-30T12:47:23","slug":"worst-missed-opportunities-can-think-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/2023\/08\/30\/worst-missed-opportunities-can-think-gaming\/","title":{"rendered":"What are the worst missed opportunities you can think of in gaming?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think a lot about games and gaming moments. What if Black Isle had gotten to actually finish Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader<\/em><\/a>? Was the version of\u00a0Diablo 3<\/em><\/a> worked on by Blizzard North going to be better than what we ended up with?<\/p>\n

One of the things I obsess about are games that didn’t get made, expansions that weren’t finished, games that released but were forgotten or overshadowed before they could make their mark. Like\u00a0Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning<\/em>, released the same year as\u00a0Skyrim<\/em> and quickly sunk thanks to the financial mismanagement of 39 Studios. Or the unreleased StarCraft: Ghost<\/em>, the first-person stealth action shooter game of my dreams (and only my dreams, because it was never released).<\/p>\n

Or\u00a0Titan<\/em>, the MMO that Blizzard eventually repurposed for use as\u00a0Overwatch,\u00a0<\/em>but which could have been the big science fiction MMO of a generation. Or the\u00a0Dragon Age 2<\/em> DLC about the Exalted Marches that ended up being scrapped so that\u00a0Dragon Age Inquisition\u00a0<\/em>could be made — a fine game, to be sure, but I still wish we’d gotten that DLC.<\/p>\n

Gaming as an industry is full of these kinds of moments, when the forces of the market and\/or the vagaries of the moment doom a perfect piece of gaming potential with sordid fact and what’s actually happening. I’ve seen people argue that\u00a0Final Fantasy: The Spirts Within<\/em> caused SquareSoft to collapse and led to the creation of modern day SquareEnix, costing us quirky fames like\u00a0The Bouncer \u2014 <\/em>but I’ve also seen claims that the Mass Effect<\/em><\/a> series<\/a> took a lot of visual inspiration from it. So is the failure of that movie a missed opportunity? It was a harbinger in many ways to modern CGI films and video game inspired films, and we may have seen a very different gaming industry had it not failed. But would that be better, or worse?<\/p>\n

So I ask you — what are your personal missed opportunities? What games, gaming properties, franchises, studios do you often look back on and wish things had gone differently?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think a lot about games and gaming moments. What if Black Isle had gotten to actually finish Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader? Was the version of\u00a0Diablo 3 worked on by Blizzard North going to be better than what we ended up with? One of the things I obsess about are games that didn’t get…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":172865,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60356,75925,24,275,66854],"tags":[7210,77642,77643,3873,77641,77640],"yst_prominent_words":[8181,11111,45496,18179,26617,10746,16819,9046,17220],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172864"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172864"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":172889,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172864\/revisions\/172889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172864"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blizzardwatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=172864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}