Great Games released at the WRONG time.

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

*snip*

I'd never even heard of Salvatore before KoA, but I was really impressed by what he wrote for the game. You could tell that KoA's story was just the beginning of something greater. It was so good that I was dumbfounded every time the IP was passed up at auction. The pundits suggested that the IP was toxic because of its association with 38 Studios, but I can't believe that nobody saw the potential in continuing a story that was already so thoroughly and carefully crafted.

I'm glad he got some exposure from the game, and it really is weird how no one wanted to touch it. You figure someone would have seen the sales alone on KoA and said "hey we could totally make $$ off that IP" but no. Headdesk-frustrating that is. I've not ventured to ask Bob yet if Amalur has turned him off from writing for more games or not, I don't want to see the answer. He's a good writer overall and a great worldbuilder.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Everything that was being developed on the original DOOM engine right before ID revealed Quake...

 

[NPC009]

Resonance of Fate (PS3/X360)- March 16, 2010
Final Fantasy XIII (PS3/X360) - March 9, 2010

Sega made a fairly niche but certainly interesting JRPG go head to head with the newest and highly anticipated installement of Square Enix' juggernaut. You can guess how well that ended. And the saddest part is, Final Fantasy XIII wasn't all that amazing anyway.

God bless Tri-Ace, they make some pretty decent overlooked JRPGs like Valkyrie Profile. Interestingly enough, it was Tri-Ace that worked on most of Final Fantasy XIII-2.

I'll add to the Tri-Ace love with my love of Infinite Undiscovery, possibly the stupidest title in the history of titles, but an awesome game with a memorable story.

I also have a huge soft spot for the studio. tri-Ace knows how to make a game fun and that's a rarer and more valuable skill than some people assume. Their storylines and characters are often kinda silly, but they always deliver an entertaining experience thanks to some of the best and most innovative battlesystems out there.

 

[Mekado]

The Freespace series (1998, 1999).
For my five cents:

The flop of Beyond Good and Evil baffles me even to this day. It had great reviews. It won a plethora of awards. It had a great community reaction. All my friends played it and we all absolutely adored it. Even today it is still considered a cult classic, yet it had terrible sales, and no one really knows why. It's just sad.

I loved that game immensely too, sad that it wasn't the success it should have been...i mean even the music was awesome

 

[CaitSeith]

Earthbound (1995). Sure, now there is a large cult following for the Mother series. But when that game was released in the west, it was a flop. It was near the end of the 16-bits era, and the SNES had two of the best JRPGs of that generation.

How could gamers who saw console RPGs with graphics like these...

Spoiler

...could see this...

Spoiler

...as something good.

Spoiler: Spoiler: Except by playing all up to here

"Can I start therapy now? Or I should wait until the nightmares set in?"

 

[Recusant]

As for others... Well, there's Tribes: Vengeance. It is an extremely fun FPS with a decent single player campaign following five different characters through almost two decades, great gameplay- and movement-mechanics (different armor-suits with different abilities, "skiing", jet-packs and so forth) and map-design. The only problem was that it was released just a few months after Doom 3 and just a bit before HL2, with practically zero advertisement support (not to mention it was using the updated Unreal 2 engine at a time where everyone was trying to wow the public with high-def graphics and textures and physics and whatnot). It was a commercial fail, and I don't think it had much of a cult following either, but it was still a pretty good, fast-paced old-school FPS. Yathzee would probably love it too.

Vengeance didn't fail because of bad timing, it failed because it abandoned everything good about the prior games. The one and only good thing it did was give itself a story (which was more than Tribes 1 or 2 had) and tie that story back to the earlier games.

 

[Idsertian]

Haven't seen this gem mentioned yet, so without further ado: Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psi-Ops:_The_Mindgate_Conspiracy].

This game had everything you could possibly want out of a psychic warrior game: Picking things up with your mind. Throwing things with your mind. Surf on objects you picked up, with your mind. Make people's heads explode, with your mind. Control other people with your mind. Make other people kill themselves, with your mind. Scout ahead with your mind. See another dimension with your mind.

Set people on fire, with your mind.

I mean, you get all that and it's developed by Midway so you know it is decently bloody, what more could you possibly want? Yet you never hear anyone talk about it, and it never got a sequel. Thanks Obama Ed Boon.

 

[renegade7]

In all their infinite wisdom, Nintendo released every single Metroid Prime game in the shadow of the Halo releases.

Obviously Metroid Prime is nothing like Halo, other than being a science fiction themed first-person shooter. And I know there's going to be someone who leaps on this to honk at me that Metroid Prime is "an adventure, not a shooter", so let's just get the semantics right out of the way. It has a first-person perspective, and you shoot aliens. To a casual player who doesn't follow the press and doesn't know the details of what Metroid is, they look close enough, and Halo has the power of name recognition where Metroid Prime does not.

If it had only happened once, it could be forgiven as a strategic mistake. They thought that the success of Halo would get people excited for sci-fi shooters, and that they could tap into the new market for console FPS games that Halo would create. This did not work. If they had changed tactics and learned from that mistake (Nintendo learning from a mistake, heaven forbid) it would just be a single misstep. But instead, they did it for both of the sequels (Hunters being the only exception). Now, as a result of the poor sales this has caused, the board of directors has been made skittish, and that's why Nintendo does not do any in-house or second party (like Retro Studios) Metroid games any more.

 

[Lightspeaker]

Going too go with a more unusual one: TimeShift.

To be fair it wasn't a "great" game honestly. It was quite linear and weapons were imbalanced and various other problems. But by the gods it was a lot of fun. You had a time manipulating suit that allowed you to slow, stop and even reverse time over short periods. And the multiplayer was incredible, throwing "balls" of time at people to slow them down or stop them in place temporarily.

Why was it released at the wrong time? Because of a certain other super-suit shooter with gigantic marketing behind it from a different publisher.

TimeShift - 30th October 2007
Crysis - 16th November 2007