After another slew of impressive announcements at this year’s The Game Awards, we look back at some previous reveals we haven’t seen in a while.
The Game Awards have come and gone, offering gamers a plethora of new announcements to enjoy. But, as we all know, there are plenty of games revealed during the event of the years that have been MIA for quite a bit. Sometimes we end up waiting several more years before those big reveals actually release (or even get an update). As such, I thought it’d be fun to take a look back at five of the TGA’s bigger, more hype-inducing, reveals that haven’t released yet and get to the bottom of their most recent updates.
For the purposes of this article, I’m looking only at games which had their initial reveal at The Game Awards. So no, you won’t be seeing Elder Scrolls VI on here as that was revealed during E3 2018. I’m also ONLY including games that haven’t been officially cancelled. Sorry, Earthblade, Perfect Dark, and Transformers: Reactivate.
On top of that, I’m not really looking at anything from last year’s (2024) just because a year isn’t much time in the world of game development and it would feel mean-spirited to include them.
The Wolf Among Us 2 (TGA 2019)
The sequel to Telltale Game’s 2013 hit has had a long/rough road. Going through a cancellation, the studio going under, only to eventually be revived which finally led to The Wolf Among Us 2 popping up at The Game Awards 2019. Despite all that’s happened, gamers were thrilled to discover the sequel would still follow-up on the original story with a bunch of former Telltale devs (now at AdHoc Studios) who worked on the original set as co-developers.
The game was originally given a March 2023 release date, but was ultimately pulled from the schedule and given a tentative 2024 window. Ostensibly this was a decision made to avoid crunch and burnout (something Telltale’s previous iteration had been infamous for), but there was much more going on behind the scenes. In October 2023, Telltale confirmed layoffs had happened in which “most of” The Wolf Among Us 2 team was let go. Despite that, the studio continued to insist the title was still in production.
AdHoc would ultimately leave the project, citing concerns of creative control and the fact Telltale was dragging their feet. As such, they pulled back and chose to focus on their own game, Dispatch, which has been met with oodles of critical acclaim and sold over 1 million copies just 10 days after its release in October. During an interview with Eurogamer, AdHoc’s Nick Herman explained their work on The Wolf Among Us 2 before they stopped:
We wrote a season, Season Two. We think it’s better than Season One – and we were on Season One. And yeah, we’re really proud of it. We were doing tests. We were in cinematics and animation and stuff. And then basically they needed more time.
They weren’t… We weren’t running the project. It was Telltale we were doing it in partnership with. And we couldn’t wait around and do nothing, so we had to move on to Dispatch to keep the studio moving, and they needed to go their own way.
We’re looking forward to seeing what they do with it. I don’t know how much of our version of the script is going to make it into what they end up making. But if one day we were able to make the thing that we wrote and were in the middle of directing, we think people would love it. So, you know, good luck.
Considering Telltale themselves haven’t offered an update, and the studio co-developing the game managed to release a completely DIFFERENT game since leaving…I’d say it’s not looking good for The Wolf Among Us 2 right now.
ARK 2 (TGA 2020)
It’s been roughly five years since the sequel to ARK: Survival Evolved was announced. Since then, updates have been as frequent as the delays. The developers even managed to release a whole remaster in the time since with ARK: Survival Ascended. Meanwhile, ARK 2 has largely been a no-show and it’s promise of a “late 2024” release (following other delays) came and went without a peep until we were well into 2025. Even the ARK roadmap released for players this year made no mention of it.
Over the Summer, studio co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz spoke with PCGamesN about the status of the sequel, in which he confirms it was put on hold a couple years ago:
We’ve been only nibbling at it since then. A small portion of our team continues to refine the mechanics of [Ark 2’s] combat… It’s very difficult to do soulslike combat in a multiplayer PvP context. You could probably count the number of games on one hand that have even attempted that in an actual PvP context.
[It would take] 18 months of hardcore team focus to [turn] that vertical slice into an early access game, when we get to put the vast majority of our team back on it.
So yeah, fans are looking at at least two years before ARK 2 might be playable in an “early access” form.
Untitled Mass Effect (TGA 2020)
Bioware brought a massive surprise to the The Game Awards in 2020, offering the first tease for the next Mass Effect. Considering their main focus was on the new Dragon Age game (which was still a few years away), and the fact they announced a new Mass Effect was in development just a month prior, no one was expecting to see a drop of footage for a long time. Especially one that revealed a fan favorite character that ostensibly teases the return of Commander Shepard.
We knew it’d be a little bit before there would be any big movement on the game, but with the layoffs hitting Bioware (and EA in general), plenty of fans have had reason to worry. With the annual N7 Day having brought excellent teases for the game over the last few years (posters, art, etc), this year’s N7 Day was definitely muted (a tease of the Krogan Civil War, but nothing else substantial). Mass Effect executive producer Mike Gamble assured fans the game is still in development despite all the shake-ups at the company:
…currently, the team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect. We have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out. We’re excited by what we’re building, and we promise you: when we’re ready, it’ll be a lot of fun to show. Until then, thank you for your patience because y’all are thirsty for news and I see you looking for secret meaning in my tweets (okay, sometimes they have secret meaning).
Ideally, we’d be getting a great new Mass Effect game without having a bunch of developers lose their jobs needlessly. With Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s release just a year past, we’ve probably got a bit of a wait still. Hopefully we’ll get the game before the TV series comes out.
Judas (TGA 2022)
The problems with Judas can be summed up fairly easily with two words: Ken Levine. The last game he published was 2014’s Bioshock: Infinite DLC, Burial at Sea. Soon after, the studio shut down and in 2015 he started up Ghost Story Games. Since then, he’s been talking about his new Sci-Fi game and how it would build upon—yet differ from—the iconic Bioshock series he created.
Things were pretty quiet for a while after that, with a report from Jason Schreier in early 2022 claiming it was in “development hell.” I mean, we all knew that was the case, but the report offered a look behind the scenes and into the chaos Levine brings to developing games. By the end of the year, however, gamers were given their first look at Judas thanks to The Game Awards. Soon after, we learned the game was targeting a March 2025 release window…which obviously didn’t happen.
Over the Summer, however, Levine confirmed the game is still chugging along as Skill Up had the chance to get some hands-on time with Judas:
…we’re working every day on it and I’m simultaneously exhausted and filled with excitement.
It’s a fairly recent update, but it also makes it feel more curious that it was a total no-show at this year’s Game Awards show.We did get a Developers Blog this month (December 2nd) offering some fresh details on the game…so it’s definitely showing lots of signs of life. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long into 2026 to get concrete news on Judas.
Marvel’s Blade (TGA 2023)
I went back and forth on including Arkane Lyon’s upcoming Blade game on this list. Even when it was first announced, Dinga Bakaba implored fans—from the stage—to “sit back, let us cook.” The implication here being that we’d have a bit of a wait before seeing more of the game. That’s totally fair…but it’s still been two years and updates have been almost non-existent.
The last official word on the game came from Arkane’s financial statements in which it was revealed the game went into “full production” near the end of 2024 following up on delivering a prototype. And that’s pretty much all we’ve got. Two years from announcement without even a glimpse at new artwork, or even official statement regarding it’s development, is kind of a bummer. Combine that with the continued development hell of the Blade film and the cancellation of Marvel’s Black Panther game over the Summer, fans were hoping to get some assurance on Marvel’s Blade during this year’s Game Awards.
Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Still, the game has been in full development for a year now, which is still pretty early. It’s definitely not time to start panicking, but let’s hope some of the 2026 gaming events brings us some good news.
Hopefully, this has been enlightening for some of you. Games taking a long time from announcement to launch is nothing new, but let’s cross our fingers the newly announced games from TGA won’t end up on this list in the forthcoming years.
[Note: Some of you may be wondering about Star Wars: Eclipse; perhaps one of the most high-profile Game Awards announcements back in 2021. As long as David Cage (noted piece of shit) remains attached to the game and Quantic Dream, I’ll hold off on reporting on it.]
