I was recently replaying Crusader: No Remorse and its sequel, No Regret, and while the happy memories of these games were flooding back, I found myself wondering why there was never a third game. When you close both games back to DOS, a text message appears at the top of the screen reading:
No Remorse, No Regret, No Mercy.
After a bit of research, I discovered that, at one time, there was supposed to be a third title, Crusader: No Mercy. Given how much ass No Remorse and No Regret kicked, the logic escapes of me of why Origin would fail to make another one. Anyone have any thoughts?

No remorse, no repent, we don't care, what it meant, another day, another death, another sorrow, another breathe, war without end.

If anyone is going to know the answer to this it'll be Vagabond

Yeah, Vagabond worships that game.

I would imagine it would be EA's fault.
Can't exactly say why, but just a gut feeling! :P
The late 90s were a bit wierd. Loads of great games were released, but many suffered from being pushed for release before they were finished (I'm thinking BG3 becoming Throne of Chaos, and Fallout 2).
Couple that with the large-ish budget that Crusader games would require (they were very shiny at the time, lots of FMV n stuff), and I would imagine EA just thought they could make more money doing other things (like continuous sports games, and the sims).

Actually, the text when quitting games is "No pity, no mercy, no remorse" (or regret, if it's No Regret).
No Mercy was being developed and was scheduled for a 1997 release, with multiplayer and an extension to the single-player story. But it was scrapped half-way through, when Origin/EA decided they couldn't go through with it, since Tony Zurovec left to Digital Anvil that year.
Alongside No Mercy, concepts of four other games were in their hats... They were called No Survivors, No Escape, No Quarter, and No Pity.
I don't know much about No Escape and No Quarter, but quite a bit of information about Crusader 2/No Survivors can be found on my Crusader site. Echo Sector. Go to the Design Docs link.

Just found this on the Wikipedia page for the game series. Not sure how accurate it is, but it does seem to be the fact that Tony Zurovec left the team as the cause of the series not going further. Damn shame too, if the two games looked as good as they did for their time, imagine what the new ones would look like by todays graphical capability standards. Anyway, here is the info.
From Wikipedia:
A third game in the series (with a working title of No Mercy) was never released, possibly because Tony Zurovec of the Crusader team left Origin and joined Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts at his new company Digital Anvil, as well as Origin refocusing its efforts on Ultima Online. Preliminary storyline ideas included boarding a shuttle and making a daring assault to get back to Earth. On the message boards of the Echo Sector fan site, one of the site's operators claimed to have been in contact with some of the games' development team, and that as many as five games in total were planned.

wouldn't surprise me if Vagabond wrote the wiki.

I've been to Echo Sector several times in the past, I had no idea that it was owned and operated by someone on this site. He did a good job, its a fantastic site. Crusader 1 and 2 are high in the running for 2 of my favorite games of all time. :)

Vagabond delivered once again.

Well he can hurry the hell up & deliver the rights to the 2 existing games to GOG

Trust me, if he had them, he would have spread them far and wide a long time ago.

I did indeed write the Wikipedia page for Crusader. I should work on getting it as a Featured Article. That'd be neat. :D
I've almost convinced Jason Ely (lead programmer) of the games to send me the only known build of No Survivors, but he hasn't gotten around to that yet. Plus moving to Prague doesn't help.
He's also said that it would be quite easy to convert the game to Windows. He also hasn't gotten around to that. I'll hound him about it sometime.
Oh how I wish Crusader was on GOG...

LOL ! Brilliant Picture.

Agree, well done. :)