T w e n t y S i d e d
I have a history of not getting especially excited over unreleased games. I didn’t trust the hype on the lead up to No Man’s Sky. I was very apathetic about Cyberpunk leading up to its release. I have ZERO interest in GTA6’s release. I just don’t trust that a game is going to be as good as the marketing and hype machine insists it will be.
In the coming year I have nothing in particular I’m looking forward to. I’m knocking out my backlog one game at a time, whether it’s by completion or an acceptance of lack of interest. I suppose I look forward to the Fallout remakes, but other than that I don’t have anything on the horizon to care about.
I’m happy to be wrong here because I like anticipating things if it doesn’t feel overblown. So tell me, what else should I be hyped about in the next year or so?
My wife and I are helping friends with a sudden and difficult move. Plus I’m having some fun PTSD symptoms that need to be endured. So that’s the reason for the brief post and there’s a good chance that I miss posting next week. Everything is fine, exciting even. Its just a lot. This summer has been crazy and fall is looking just as nuts. Thanks for hanging in there.
Also I really appreciated your insight on my thoughts last week. I just don’t have the wherewithal to respond individually right now.
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This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
I have some games on my wishlist which are yet to be released which I’m kinda looking forward to. Things like Quiet Express and Double Shake, for example. That said, I’m not as hype for them as I was for Time Stranger or Assetto Corsa Rally (I kinda am still hype for ACR because it’s still in early access and I can’t wait for the update to land which adds full modding support). It may be just the combination of nothing super exciting being announced and my head chemicals not being in a hype balance.
In the building game area, Transport Fever 3 is due Sept 29, and it’s trying to expand its logistic empire roots into some city-building elements, invading Cities Skylines territory. I’m looking forward to see how they do.
And Star Wars: Zero Company came out a week or so ago, and if you’re into XCOM-like turn-based tactical games this is good. A bunch of the XCOM team bailed from Firaxis a year or so ago, and this is their first. It plays like a slightly more forgiving XCOM (not a bad thing – still XCOM, baby) with a top tier IP story layer and companion bonds formed through sharing missions. I’ve been enjoying it.
I’m also not hyped for anything specific.
But I am very excited about the future. There are so many indies and AA studios rolling out stuff that you just don’t know where the next hit is coming from. A lot of the good stuff from last year were debut games that nobody was expecting. But there’s also a crowd of indies who had a breakthrough hit and are now following that up.
The reality is that gamemaking is hard, and you can’t know how a project will turn out, sometimes it comes together at the very last moment. Sometimes not. And that absolutely sucks for employment and financial stability in the industry. But due to the volume of output, the ever rising experience of devs and some of the financial asshats that have been in charge burning their fingers and getting out I think the quality of games will only increase.
I don’t watch trailers anymore, you can’t trust those. But I read plenty of reviews.
I think I stopped paying attention to gaming entirely late last year. I know about GTA 6, because that one’s big enough to cross ordinary news outlets, but basically everything later than Donkey Kong Bananza remains a black box. Except for, uh… the Dark Pictures Anthology. The last one was bad enough it made me try to write a parody. Which has since stalled, because my attempt at scriptspeak is indecipherable and the plot is lost within it.
So someone let me know about the big RPGs. If they make another Like A Dragon I’ll probably get it.
Big RPGs? Depending on your definition of ‘big’, Owlcat is working on Warhammer 40,000 Dark Heresy. Rogue Trader was pretty good, so I imagine DH is going to be of the same quality or better. That said, I’m not very fond of the 40k setting, so I can understand if you don’t get very excited about the game.
The Like A Dragon makers Ryu Ga Gotoku are working on Stranger than Heaven. It’s a prequel to all of Yakuza/Like A Dragon playing in a time span from 1915 till 1965. But it will be real-time-combat like Yakuza 0 – 6 / Judgement.
Nothing wrong with ignoring hype, hype is there to try and get you to stop thinking and just buy.
Discussion of the Witcher games – and replaying Cyberpunk 2077 – has got me curious about the upcoming Witcher 4. I don’t care about Ciri at all, and don’t see where the story goes from the end of Witcher 3….but hey, the studio’s last two games were very good, so…
Ciri’s character is exponentially more interesting in the books. So are all the non-Geralt characters actually. In WitcherIII, most of the primary NPC’s were base representations.
It took almost 3 games before Geralt really got fleshed out and made whole, and I suspect it will be the same with Ciri.
I’m looking forward to Songs of the Past and obviously the next Ryu Ga Gotoku-game Stranger Than Heaven. And Talos Principle 3, whenever that will come around. Other than that, my pile of shame is so huge I don’t need a new game for the next 20 years plus.
Slight interest in the next-next Tomb Raider, if it is made by Crystal Dynamics and not Eidos Montreal and drops the chest high wall cover shooter parts of the last trilogy and has a better story than Rise or Shadow. A lot of ifs.
I’m mostly in the same boat as you, although among my friends’ circle they are absolutely hyped for Final Fantasy VII: Revelations and for the Ocarina of Time Remake. (One of them swears that OoT is objectively “the best video game of all time”. :P )
I pretty much gave up getting excited for unreleased games, too. Was burned way too many times by marketing hype over the years. I basically haven’t been more than cautiously optimistic about an unreleased game since Dragon Age 2.
I don’t tend to get hyped for game releases either. Also, tangentially related, but I don’t really mess with early access games – until the actual finished game drops, early access is basically just a glorified demo promising it’ll be awesome eventually, and I’ve just been burned one too many times. Either from games just being abandoned, or technically still being worked on but not having gotten anything other than minor tweaks and bugfixes for several years (Project Zomboid has been out almost 13 years and is STILL in early access), or even having been finished but just being shit (I’m still salty about what happened to Cube World). I only get excited for a game when it’s fully released and people say it’s worth checking out.
Looking forward to the Songs of the past DLC for the witcher. Also for Streets of Rogue 2, whenever it comes out (hopefully it will at some point)
Also, since apparently there’s been no mention of that film anywhere here.. I think Shamus would have appreciated that the Backrooms directly answers his question “But what do they eat?” :)
Not hyped for GTA6 either. There’s only so many times you can beat a hooker to death or run over a crowd of pedestrians in a tank before it gets old. For GTA series to rally progress they need to really get even more controversial, more gritty. Kin of the same way Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been able to keep a TV show about obnoxious kids on TV long after we would have expected it to get boring,
I doubt rockstar has the balls.