The CRPG Book Project - Website Updates

Since last month Felipe Pepe has updated his website for his CRPG Book Project. The first update takes a look at 15 RPG games that never got a release.

Talking about canceled games is a hard thing… there’s little concrete information, a lot of rumors and, sadly, there are way more canceled games than I can ever hope to address here.

Restricting ourselves to CRPGs, there are numerous titles such as Deus Ex: Insurrection and Deus Ex 3, Alpha Protocol 2, Betrayal at Krondor’s original sequel Thief of Dreams, Arcanum 2, Backspace, Ishar 4, Black Isle’s Torn, Ascendant, Armalion, Stonekeep 2, Cyclopean, Tannhauser Gate, Whichwood, Lord of the Rings: The White Council, etc…

There are also canceled MMORPGs, such as Ultima Online 2, Shenmue Online, Blizzard’s Titan, the World of Darkness MMO and Fallout Online/Project V13. Plus all the countless kickstarter projects that never made it, including Guido Henkel’s Deathfire. And even fan projects, such the recently canceled Project Vaulderie - a remake of VtM: Bloodlines. The list goes on and on and on… and those are the ones we know about. Most of them go silently into the night, with developers spending years of their lives without the audience ever seeing their work or being aware it existed.

Thus, this isn’t an absolute list, nor a best-of rank., but rather a collection of some of the most interesting ones that we know about. And a small tribute to those that worked so hard on a game that never saw the light of day.

His second post shares a list of books to read for any CRPG fan.

The discussion about canceled CRPGs last week was very productive, spawning some interesting forum threads and showing me a lot of games I had missed.

So today I’ll bring up another topic for debate: Books on Computer Role-Playing Games.

I’ve been working on the book for about 9 months now, and during this time I tried to read every book on CRPG & gaming history that I could find. Bellow is a selection of the best ones I found that might be useful to other CRPG fans – including a few on tabletop RPGs and general gaming history.