Cliffhangers – you can love them, you can hate them, you can feel indifferent towards them, but no matter what, you cannot avoid them.
No one likes to experience a movie, book, or video game without a resolute ending. The desire to know what happens next is something everyone feels, and that’s why cliffhanger endings are an ingenious way to guarantee interest in a sequel. Get people invested, leave the story unfinished, and then sell them the follow-up; it’s the perfect hook.
However, while the practice of ending a story on a cliffhanger is harmless for the most part, there are times when it can go very wrong, leaving a story stuck in limbo with no hope of ever resolving. This is, sadly, something that gamers are very used to, as it has happened time and time again.
A video game can fail for many reasons, and, as such, a sequel isn’t always guaranteed. The following ten games became victims of this, as they offered up cliffhanger endings with hopes of resolving them in sequels, only to never return.
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This list contains a severe Spoiler Warning!
For as much as people love to complain about Call of Duty, you’ve got to give the franchise credit for being able to cram out sequels to pretty much everything it produces. However, one bizarre outlier is Ghosts, a game that seemed poised to become a franchise before it played too close to its namesake and vanished without a trace.
Ghosts put you in the shoes of a collection of covert operative agents combating a villainous military organisation known as the Federation of the Americas. Throughout the game, you battle against a brainwashed American soldier named Rorke, who you eventually manage to shoot and leave for dead.
So, that’s it? Job done? Well, no, because a fatal gunshot wound is nothing in Call of Duty.
The final moments of the game show as Rorke reappears and captures one of the protagonists. He takes him away and begins a brainwashing procedure, attempting to indoctrinate him into the Federation’s control.
It’s a real downer of an ending, especially given that the game’s underperformance left this blatant sequel bait without a sequel.