Over the past decade, The Game Awards has become a home for major video game reveals. Geoff Keighley’s annual celebration of gaming is arguably as much about the trailers than the actual awards handed out to game developers, streamers, esports athletes, and voice actors every December. Publishers like to make a big splash at The Game Awards, even if the games they’re announcing aren’t expected to be out for years. Hence, big trailers that rarely promise release dates.
Some games revealed at The Game Awards go missing in action for uncomfortably long periods. Some games that were announced or shown as far back as The Game Awards 2019 still haven’t shipped. Others, like Campo Santo’s In the Valley of Gods, revealed at The Game Awards 2017, never will.
But people who love video games enough to watch The Game Awards each year know patience. Below are some of the big games we’ve been eagerly anticipating for years now, hopeful that someday we’ll get to play them.
[Ed. note: 2023’s edition of The Game Awards revealed more than 20 games that haven’t been released yet, but it’s only been a year. That’s nothing in game development terms, so we’re focusing on much older announcements.]
2019
Prologue
Prologue was announced nearly five years ago at The Game Awards as the mysterious new project from Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, otherwise known as the creator of the battle royale genre and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (now known as PUBG: Battlegrounds). Prologue was described as “an exploration of new technologies and gameplay” at the time, and it has since evolved to be just a taste of what Greene and his PlayerUnknown Productions team are working on.
Prologue certainly hasn’t disappeared. It now serves as a tech demo designed to showcase the terrain-generation tools that PlayerUnknown Productions is developing for an even bigger project, Artemis, “a massive multiplayer sandbox experience.” PlayerUnknown Productions has been posting regular updates on its in-house technology and the ambitions of Prologue and Artemis. Greene has also been very active on social media providing updates, so it’s not like PlayerUnknown has gone radio silent.
But as for when players will actually get their hands on Prologue and Artemis? That remains to be seen.
2020
Ark 2
Ark: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard delivered a big surprise at The Game Awards 2020. Ark 2 was coming, and Fast and Furious star Vin Diesel was going to be a big part of the sequel to the hit dinosaur-survival game. Studio Wildcard promised a “next-generation survival experience” set on a massive alien world, Dark Souls-inspired combat, and full utilization of the then-new Unreal Engine 5.
Ark 2 was originally expected to arrive in 2022, but Studio Wildcard delayed it to 2023 and then delayed it again to the end of 2024. The studio then delivered a remastered version of Ark: Survival Evolved instead, and has been pretty quiet about where Ark 2 stands. The game’s Steam page now has a “To be announced” release date. Polygon has reached out to Studio Wildcard for a status update on Ark 2, but has not received a response (yet).
The next Mass Effect
BioWare’s next entry in the sci-fi role-playing game franchise Mass Effect is coming. We know very little beyond that, as BioWare has been slowly drip-feeding details and mini trailers for the fifth Mass Effect game since teasing it at The Game Awards 2020. (The studio had actually confirmed a new Mass Effect about a month prior to its teaser trailer reveal at that year’s show.)
BioWare has been pretty busy, though, focusing on getting Dragon Age: The Veilguard out the door. Now that it’s done with that, BioWare plans to focus its attention on Mass Effect 5, the studio says. The most recent N7 Day, the annual celebration of the Mass Effect franchise, was incredibly quiet. Perhaps that’s the calm before the storm (or maybe I’m just coping).
In the meantime, BioWare fans have something else to look forward to, now that Amazon MGM Studios is moving forward with the Mass Effect TV show.
Perfect Dark
Joanna Dark will return in Perfect Dark, developer The Initiative’s reboot of the Rare-created spy shooter. Originally unveiled in a cinematic trailer at The Game Awards 2020, we’ve since seen some progress. At this year’s Xbox Games Showcase in June, we got a taste of actual Perfect Dark gameplay, a hopeful sign for a project that’s rumored to have had a rocky development cycle.
There’s still no release date for Perfect Dark, but a 2023 report from IGN said not to expect it until at least 2025. But at least we know The Initiative and co-developer Crystal Dynamics are making progress.
2021
ARC Raiders
ARC Raiders has had a fascinating journey so far. Announced in 2021 as the debut title from Embark Studios, ARC Raiders was surprisingly back-burnered so that the team of ex-Battlefield developers making it could release a completely different game instead: The Finals.
Embark has since turned its attention back to ARC Raiders and is aiming for a 2025 release. The extraction shooter was recently playtested and, nearly three years after being announced, we got our first look at actual ARC Raiders gameplay.
ARC Raiders is now slated to launch sometime next year on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
Star Wars Eclipse
When Star Wars Eclipse was announced at the 2021 Game Awards, we knew we were in for a long wait. Detroit: Become Human developer Quantic Dream said Eclipse was in “early development” when it showed off its intriguing cinematic trailer, and early reports pegged the game’s arrival to sometime in 2027 or 2028.
Quantic Dream hasn’t said much about Star Wars Eclipse over the past few years, but we know the game is set in the franchise’s High Republic era — the same time period explored in The Acolyte — and that player choice will feature heavily in this intricately branching action-adventure game. Despite the already long wait for Star Wars Eclipse, the game’s quiet period was expected. Like all announced Star Wars projects, it’ll get here when it gets here.
Wonder Woman
Warner Bros. and Monolith Productions, creators of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and sequel Shadow of War, promise to bring back the vaunted Nemesis System in a new game starring DC’s Wonder Woman. Featuring an original story and open-world game mechanics, Wonder Woman is highly anticipated as a much-needed turnaround for WB Games’ superhero properties.
But we haven’t heard almost anything new on Wonder Woman since late 2021. A supposed leak of game details from a marketing survey from earlier this year indicated that Diana — armed with super strength and her golden Lasso of Truth — will face the sorceress Circe and her army of cyclopes, gorgons, and other monsters, who have invaded the Amazonian island homeland of Themyscira. Expect other DC characters to show up in Wonder Woman, based on those supposedly leaked details.
It’s unclear if WB and Monolith’s plans have changed at all under the new regime at DC Studios, and whether the new Wonder Woman will have any connection to the reborn DC cinematic universe forming under James Gunn. We’ll just have to keep waiting…
2022
Transformers: Reactivate
Developer Splash Damage made, well, a splash with its surprising reveal trailer for Transformers: Reactivate in 2022 — and not just for its trailercore cover of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Hasbro and Splash Damage’s cinematic announcement trailer looked like it was something else altogether; only in its final moments was it revealed to be a Transformers game. That alone piqued our interest in what Splash Damage is cooking up.
But we’ve heard little to nothing new about Transformers: Reactivate in the intervening months. Is it still in development? Can we expect it anytime soon? We’ve pinged Splash Damage for an update and will see what it has to say.
Earthblade
There were plenty of massive AAA games unveiled at The Game Awards 2022 — including Dune: Awakening,
Death Stranding 2, and Judas, all of which we’re supposed to get next year — but there’s a smaller game we’re anxiously awaiting more news on. Earthblade, from Celeste developer Maddy Thorson’s Extremely OK Games, was once expected in 2024, but no dice.
The good news is that Thorson said earlier this year that Earthblade is still coming. “We had hoped to be announcing a firm release date around now, but it just isn’t in the cards,” Thorson wrote in March. “We know that this will be disappointing for a lot of you and we’re sorry for that. Maybe this was predictable, but still it always sucks when the haters are right. The good news is that the game is not stagnant, we are still making progress and we’re still excited to work on it.”
If Earthblade, an “explor-action platformer,” is even close to as good as Celeste, it’ll be worth the wait.
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