4 Games That Went AWOL in 2019

BioMutant

Honestly, BioMutant looks like it’ll be THQ Nordic’s best game since the publisher resurfaced and attempted to fill the A-tier games void that was left back at the beginning of the early 2010’s.

Players assume the role of a weird mutant animal that’s also adept at martial arts and has a bunch of other abilities no animal should probably possess.

There’s extensive customization options, and as you progress, your customization choices and chosen abilities will develop and evolve to become even more powerful. It’s all rather exciting-sounding stuff.

Despite being announced back in 2017 for a 2018 release, we’ve still not got our hands on BioMutant. Heck, we haven’t seen much of the game considering it’s been in development for a good couple of years now.

A financial report from the publisher’s parent company suggested that the game was no longer going to hit its 2019 release, and had been pushed back into 2020.

THQ Nordic has been oddly quiet on BioMutant, considering anticipation levels for the game are on the rise with every announcement made. Here’s hoping we hear something about it soon. PS5 and Xbox Series X launch title maybe? Possibly.

WiLD

PS4 exclusive WiLD had players’ interest piqued when it was first revealed back in 2014, the same year development began. A year later, a gameplay trailer was shown at Paris Games Week, highlighting the gameplay that saw players assume a human in the Neolithic period, who can use magic powers to possess and control various animals.

You could see through the eyes of a Hawk and scout out the landscape from above. Whistle in your bear (yes, a fucking bear) and ride on its back to the location, then use a wolf to pull off some stealthy, ferocious attacks on your target. If I recall correctly, there was also a giant sexy snake lady in the gameplay trailer. It was wild.

Alas, WiLD has literally gone completely dark since Oct. 2015, outside of some screenshots posted by lead designer Michel Ansel in Jan. 2017. Considering Ansel is now confirmed to be working on Ubisoft’s Beyond Good & Evil 2, there’s now a big question mark over whether WiLD will ever see the light of day.

Granted, I don’t know how many players remembered WiLD in 2019, let alone expected it to release. But with every year that goes by with no sight of it, the more the term ‘vaporware’ feels fitting for WiLD. Here’s hoping it’s just getting held back as a PS5 exclusive. Optimism, people!

Bayonetta 3

Bayonetta is a beloved demon-hunting witch that truly found her home on the Nintendo platforms. Fortunately for fans, Nintendo snapped up Bayonetta 3, the next chapter in the sassy witch’s story for the Switch. The bad news, we don’t know anything about it, and we’ve been waiting for a while now.

In April 2019, Nintendo quietly pushed Bayonetta 3’s release window from 2019 to TBA in a financial report. No reasoning was given for this decision, but we can only imagine the game wasn’t shaping up to meet Nintendo’s (and potentially PlatinumGames’) standards.

While 2019 was a depressing year for Bayonetta fans as a result of this release date uncertainty, PlatinumGames has promised Bayonetta 3 news is coming soon. In an interview with Inside Games, Platinum’s studio head Atsushi Inaba said that fans can “expect to see more soon.”

Here’s hoping we get a 2020 release date nailed down alongside some gameplay real soon.

Beyond Good & Evil 2

Fans lost their minds when Beyond Good and Evil 2 was announced at E3 2017. Having been wanting more since 2003, players had assumed a sequel to the cult classic was never coming. Oh how wrong they were.

Ubisoft had been quietly working behind the scenes with the likes of Michel Ansel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to start creating Beyond Good and Evil 2. It’d feature fan-made content, feel like a living world, and would actually be a prequel to the original game. That didn’t matter much to fans. It was another Beyond Good and Evil game and that’s all they cared about.

Despite being announced in 2017, we haven’t seen a whole bunch of BG&E2. We got another trailer that dazzled fans with its impressive scope in 2018, but nothing since. The playable beta slated for the end of 2019 never showed up, suggesting that the game’s a little bit behind where it was expected to be.

Considering we know that the PS5 and Xbox Series X are on the horizon, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Beyond Good and Evil 2 stay in the oven for a little longer to ensure it’s perfectly baked for the next-gen of systems. It may suck we’ll have to wait longer, but at least it’ll be able to take advantage of all that extra horsepower.