Development hell is a tale as old as the business itself, and MSN rounded up five current offenders that have been cooking for more than a decade without shipping. I've been around long enough to remember when Duke Nukem Forever was the joke. Fifteen years of broken promises that ended with a 2011 game nobody loved. Some of these might actually beat that record.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 is the easy number one. Announced in 2008, teased again in 2017 with that gorgeous cinematic trailer, and then silence, mostly. Michel Ancel left the project, then left game development entirely. Whatever's happening behind closed doors at Ubisoft these days, the public trail has gone cold.

Star Citizen technically exists in early access, but the persistent universe, the shared-world slice that's supposed to be the whole point, remains incomplete according to the roundup. The finish line keeps moving. If you backed this thing during the crowdfunding era, I both admire and worry about you.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 got announced in 2019 and still hasn't shipped. The original Bloodlines from 2004 was a buggy masterpiece, so maybe suffering is just part of the brand. Whether this one ever escapes the oven is anyone's guess.

The list also covers a couple of quieter cases, smaller projects that slipped off the radar entirely, games announced with enthusiasm and then never mentioned again by studios that stopped returning emails. Those are the ones I feel for. The loud ones at least get memes.

My take after four decades of this: long development isn't automatically a death sentence. FF XV spent a decade in the wilderness and came out pretty good. The difference is whether the studio kept building or kept restarting. Every time a project gets torn back to the foundation, you lose years, and fans can smell it.

Have you been waiting on any of these since the announcement? Drop a line. I'm genuinely curious how long some of you have held the faith.