I wrote about this last month, but Polygon's piece on development hell got me thinking about the long haul again, because the games stuck in it the longest tell you something the fast turnaround blockbusters never will. Development is hard. Competent games are hard. Some of the ones we now call masterpieces feel like small miracles that survived their own production, and then there are the games that have been cooking for more than ten years with nothing on the shelf to show for it.

Polygon highlights five of them. I've got scar tissue with every single one.

Star Citizen. The one everyone reaches for, and for good reason. Chris Roberts announced it in 2012 and the thing has raised over half a billion dollars while shipping pieces of itself for fourteen years. I remember when Wing Commander felt ambitious because it had live actors. Now Roberts has turned ambition itself into the product. Say what you want about the timeline, and people do, constantly, but no game in history has been this publicly built in real time. Whether it ever lands as a finished game almost stopped mattering years ago.

Beyond Good & Evil 2. This one hurts. Ubisoft showed a teaser in 2008, which means this sequel is old enough to drive. The original Beyond Good & Evil was a commercial disappointment that became beloved anyway, proof that commercial failure and cultural failure are two completely different scoreboards, and the sequel has drifted through engines, directors and reboots ever since. Michel Ancel left, the team reportedly rebooted it more than once, and Ubisoft will confirm it exists roughly once per console generation. Two decades of limbo. Fans deserve better than a logo.

Vampire: The Bloodlines 2. The original Bloodlines from 2004 is one of the great broken masterpieces, shipped early by Troika against Half-Life 2 and patched into legend by fans. The sequel announced in 2019 has burned through developers like a Las Vegas nightclub burns through DJs, with Hardsuit Labs, then The Chinese Room taking the wheel. It's still nominally coming. Nominally is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Duke Nukem Forever. The cautionary tale that sits at the top of every one of these lists, and Polygon rightly treats it as the genre-defining entry. Announced in 1997, shipped in 2011, and dead on arrival after fourteen years of engine swaps and perfectionism. I played it at launch and the saddest part wasn't that it was bad, it's that you could see a dozen different games from a dozen different years buried inside it, like geological strata. Time doesn't fix a game. It just changes what the game is competing with.

The Elder Scrolls 6. Todd Howard announced it with a teaser in 2018 and Bethesda has said almost nothing since. To be fair, this is the least worrying entry on the list, because Bethesda was always going to ship Starfield first and we all know the pipeline. But eight years of a logo and a coastline? The release date rumors surface every few months, and Bethesda keeps smiling and saying nothing. Skyrim came out in 2011. There are high school seniors who have never known a mainline Elder Scrolls launch.

After four decades of watching this cycle, my read is that silence should only worry you in proportion to how long it's lasted, and a couple of quiet years is now just normal. A decade plus is something else entirely. The pattern that repeats, from Duke to Bloodlines, is perfectionism plus engine churn. Studios keep resetting to whatever the new hot tech is, and every reset throws away work. Squaresoft shipped Final Fantasy VI in about a year, FF VII in about a year after that, because the scope was achievable and the team was stable. Nobody wants to hear that in 2026.

Nina and I argue about this constantly. Her view is that live service games like FFXIV erased the pressure of a forever-ship date, and she has a point, Star Citizen basically is a live service already. My counter is that a game you can actually finish still means something, and the five games above are all promising exactly that.

Some of them will get there. Bethesda will ship Elder Scrolls 6 eventually, Bloodlines 2 might actually land, and Beyond Good & Evil 2 will probably outlive us all as a logo and a dream. If you want the full breakdown, Polygon's article is worth your time. Just don't hold your breath while you read it.