10 Video Game Cliffhangers That Will Never Be Resolved
Press X to continue... in your imagination.
Who doesn't love a good cliffhanger?
Avengers: Infinity War's dusty mess of an ending, Modern Warfare 2's stab-a-thon final showdown, homeless Luke Skywalker in the closing scene of The Force Awakens... the list is near-endless.
Cliffhangers are great at keeping gamers and audience members buzzing long after they've finished the story, theorising and speculating about what the hell is going to happen next. But there is a downside to this: over time, these "to be continued" style endings can turn sour when it becomes clear that they will never be resolved.
Maybe the developers expected to make a sequel - only to have the first game flop - or maybe they just chucked in a cliffhanger for the hell of it, without outlining a real plan for wrapping the story up. This is particularly frustrating considering most games take over ten hours to complete, and spending so much time investing yourself in a set of characters, only to have their stories go unfinished... is annoying, to say the least.
So, just to annoy you all over again, let's take a look at some of these unlikely-to-be-resolved gaming cliffhangers, and cry salty tears all over our keyboards at the thought of where the followup games could have taken us.
10. Bulletstorm
Bulletstorm is one of those mid-tier FPS games that were oh-so prevalent during the PS3 era, and it's one of the most underrated of the lot. It also ends on a tantalising cliffhanger that teased a followup game, one that would have brought back characters who supposedly died during the main story.
In the final level you confront bad guy General Sarrano onboard his rescue ship, slaughtering your way through waves and waves of goons to get there. A short gunfight later, you whip Sarrano into the air and kick him onto a piece of metal sticking out of the wall, which seems like it should kill the guy... but nope. Sarrano ejects you from his ship, having you face off against more enemies before the credits finally roll.
Wait around after said credits and you'll be greeted by some extra dialogue that sheds a little more light on Sarrano's fate, while leaving a lot of questions unanswered. This extra scene reveals that Sarrano survived and is now a cyborg, and that Ishi - your former teammate - has also survived, implying that the two will be working together.
The reason Bulletstorm 2 is first on our list is because it has the highest chance of getting a sequel - albeit a small chance. The most recent update we had was that the developer has no plans to revisit the IP, even though they did remain hopeful.
Considering that this kind of non-committal, vaguely optimistic response is all we've had for the past eight years, it's hard to have faith that any movement will actually happen here. Maybe if the recently-released Switch port absolutely slays?