Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: beyond good and evil, beyond good and evil 2, half life, half-life 3, Kingdom Hearts, kingdom hearts 3, Square Enix, tetsuya nomura, ubisoft, valve

Game Development Hell Is Closing Its Doors With KH3

Believe it or not, but Development Hell is closing its doors, at least the games division. The only games languishing in Development Hell are Kingdom Hearts 3, Beyond Good And Evil 2, and Half-Life 3. Previous punchingbags in the "never getting made" list were Persona 5, which is set to release in just a few days, Final Fantasy XV, The Last Guardian, and the ever-terrible Duke Nukem Forever. Part of this might be thanks to social media, we can now poke game devs on the daily to ask "yo, where's my game?" Which has led to some really interesting things. Duke Nukem was a disappointment all around, but both Final Fantasy XV and Persona 5 were well received critically and commercially.

The only games remaining in Development Hell are Kingdom Hearts 3, Half Life 3, and Beyond Good and Evil 2. So let's break those down for you in how they are or are not happening.

Square Enix has promised that we'll be getting Kingdom Hearts 3, but we haven't heard much about that game since the official announcement back at E3 in 2015 though we did get screenshots recently. So that's an almost certain release sometime before the inevitable heat death of the universe.

Beyond Good and Evil was a cult hit, and of course people wanted more of it. Ubisoft promised back in 2008 that they were working on Beyond Good and Evil 2, but lets be honest, do we really want it from Ubisoft now? Not only is it nothing like Ubisoft's current slate of games, they'd inevitably tie in micro-transactions (possibly the way they did in For Honor which would be awful), but they might also try to make a movie or show out of it and make the game itself nothing more than a multiplayer machine. Or maybe it could be great, I don't know. But since we've heard nothing since 2008, I'm willing to say we just aren't getting this one.

As for Half Life 3, which people still want desperately to this day, despite Valve officially saying that they aren't going to be making it. Not only has so much time passed that the window for Half Life 3 to be anything other than a let down, it also doesn't seem to be what Valve is into. They like to put out quirky weird games that help redefine the gaming market, but there aren't really ways for them to do so with Half Life 3. We've all been there, done that. This one is also pretty much permanently shelved.

So once we get Kingdom Hearts 3, Game Development Hell will officially be done. At least for this generation.

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