What are the worst missed opportunities you can think of in gaming?

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 Diablo 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 made, expansions that weren’t finished, games that released but were forgotten or overshadowed before they could make their mark. Like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, released the same year as Skyrim and quickly sunk thanks to the financial mismanagement of 39 Studios. Or the unreleased StarCraft: Ghost, the first-person stealth action shooter game of my dreams (and only my dreams, because it was never released).

Or Titan, the MMO that Blizzard eventually repurposed for use as Overwatch, but which could have been the big science fiction MMO of a generation. Or the Dragon Age 2 DLC about the Exalted Marches that ended up being scrapped so that Dragon Age Inquisition could be made — a fine game, to be sure, but I still wish we’d gotten that DLC.

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 Final Fantasy: The Spirts Within caused SquareSoft to collapse and led to the creation of modern day SquareEnix, costing us quirky fames like The Bouncer — but I’ve also seen claims that the Mass Effect series 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?

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?