Discussing The Most Awaited Games Of 2004?

Thanks to 1UP for its end-of-year summary feature, in which the site editors discuss the most intriguing and perkiest gaming events of the year, but also "look ahead at the newborn trends of 2004." Next year's particularly lusted-after games include Psychonauts ("Double Fine's Xbox platformer has been delayed a lot now, which can sometimes spell trouble, but I have faith in them to deliver something amazing when they do get around to it"), Metal Gear Solid 3 ("After the talking-heads nightmare of Metal Gear Solid 2, I can't wait to just trot off into the jungle and start killing people"), and Halo 2 ("With a gun in each hand and the ability to hijack vehicles, this one has the potential to be as popular as the first one continues to be.") Which games are you particularly looking forward to in 2004?

Comments

For me

[shione]

They are:
Deus Ex 2 (still hasn't come out where I am yet)
Theif 3
System Shock 3
Freedom Force 2
Total Annihilation 2 or Chris Taylor's Version of it

Most of all I want to see a Lunar 3, they haven't made a true sequal for this game since 2 came out on the SegaCD.

DOOM3 & Half-Life 2

[CAPSLOCK2000]

DOOM3 & Half-Life 2, if I can have those two I don't care about the rest.

Re:there can be only one

[Hassman]

Too bad the game is suppose to be super short (something like 5 or 6 hours long only) and that the multiplayer only supports 4 people or so to play against each other.

I'm really disapointed with ID on this title. To me it looks like they more or less sold out and created DoomIII for the engine alone. This way they can sell it to other game makers, the fact that DoomIII is attached to it is more for a way to show off the engine than anything.

That being said, I'm still going to upgrade my computer so I can play it. :)

Please, if anyone has any knowledge to the contrary about this one let me know.

Re:Guess...

[chrismcdirty]

PD0 is vaporware. There has been nothing from that game except for artist renderings. Not even information or occasional screens.

Why haven't more people said Stalker????

[jmlyle]

Stalker looks very cool.

Holy christ. I'm afraid and excited that it might be better than Half-Life2.

Of course, I'm also afriad that it might suck.

Halo sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I was waiting for that damned game for soooooo long, and THEN Microsoft bought them for the XBOX.

I have never seen a game on a console that can have any where near the depth and JUSTICE that a PC game could have. I had such high hopes for it, and then my hopes were smashed to the ground.

Of course, they may have been going for that same, stupid "Run around shooting at anything that moves" strategy originally for the PC, but that would have been such an underachievment. Too bad it's the cream of the crop gameplay for a console.

I am royally pissed that they ruined the possability of a ringworld environment for a more contemplative, adventure based FPS like Half-Life. How likely is it that someone else will use a ringworld now?

Sigh....

Re:Halo sucks

[Pluvius]

Your assertion that there is no difference between console games and PC games as regards story presentation, strategy, depth, etc. is false. The limited control scheme of consoles is in fact a major reason why this difference still exists even though consoles are otherwise just as powerful as PCs are today. The Scratchware Manifesto describes the problem thusly:

Death to Sony, Sega, and Nintendo! Your insistence on controlling every step of development, of ensuring that no product strays too far from your own blinkered twitch-game aesthetic, your absurdly high platform royalties, your gouging prices for development stations and SDKs, your boxes with the controllers wholly unsuited to a game of any depth make you irrelevant to anyone who wants to develop games of enduring merit.

BTW, console FPSes are indeed inferior to PC FPSes because of the default control scheme, just like how most fighting games on the PC suck because of the PC's default control scheme.

Rob

some others

[ghettoreb]

this year will be the year that professional game developers like id Software and Valve will finally raise the bar on game development and on graphics card makers. So far 90% of the new power in DirectX 9.0b have not been utilized extensively in games. Sure some games have some here and there, but nothing that would truly stress the hardware.

The party is over, slackers

Half-Life 2 shows an excellent example of the power of DirectX9. Shaders 2.0 loops allow truly realistic effects on key map materials like water and clouds. Before, my gun smoke, clouds, steam and nerve gas all looked identical on my monitor. Now each one of these will have the unique features that distinguish them in the real world.

Dynamic lighting, whose implementation hasn't changed since Quake3, will now be carefully applied with attention paid to the textures underneath and the shiny properties of the bump maps. A big crab in HL2 is a work of art to look at, mainly because of the way his texture isn't shiny while his exoskeleton is--creating a stunningly realist effect

I'm excited to be gamer in 2004. Lame uninventive sequels, franchises, or console ports to x86 will no longer suffice. The real game developers are coming to town, and they are bringing with them all the good stuff.

Re:KOTOR sequel.

[PainKilleR-CE]

Personally I very much hope to see a 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' sequel sometime next year. That game was excellent and a definite 'Game of the Year' in my book.

Personally, I hope not to see a sequel to KOTOR next year, because the original spent a great deal of time in development to become what it is. The last thing I want is some crap sequel spun off in 12 months to cash in on the success of the first one. Give me a sequel in 2-3 years, probably on the next generation XBox, that's truly deserving of the name KOTOR has made for itself.

I'm also hoping that Thief III doesn't get the Deus Ex: Invisible War treatment. Ion Storm already butchered one franchise with their oversimplified garbage.

I haven't played Invisible War yet, but Thief 3, in general, wasn't as complicated as Deus Ex, anyway. Sure, they could butcher it, but it wouldn't be in all of the same ways (unless they simply decided to do a retexturing job on Invisible War and push it out as Thief 3).

Re:Trend?

[Snowmit]

Anybody else noting a trend in almost everyone's responses?

THEY'RE ALL SEQUELS! They all end in a freakin' number. Looks like '04 is shaping up to be the year of rehashing and revamping.

Can I just say that I'm sick and tired of people equating sequels with a lack of creativity in games? I'll go ahead and do it anyway.

I'm sick and tired of people equating a sequels with a lack of cretivity in games.

We need to get over the mistaken notion that sequel == uncreative. It may be true (but not 100% true) that sequels are indicative of recycled creative ideas in the world of film and books (though note that we have no problem with good dramatic television shows that run for many episodes). But games are different from these things. One of the important ways that games are different from movies is that games are software. I don't think that any of us would complain that Adobe keeps releasing sequel after sequel to Photoshop. Photoshop 7.0 is a dramatically better product than Photoshop 1.0. Linux kernel current.number is a more robust OS kernel than Linux kernel 1.0. Likewise, it is reasonable to expect that (game title) 2.0 could be a better title than (game title) 1.0.

To pick a recent example - by all accounts, Project Gotham Racing 2 is a dramatically better product than Project Gotham Racing 1. They tweaked the interface, they made it prettier, they added new gameplay functionality and they generally made it a BETTER GAME. It is uncreative? I would argue that the cool new things that they added were very creative indeed.