PC Games To Watch For In 2013

An anonymous reader writes "PC Gamer has put together a huge list of PC games that are due to come out in 2013. They've broken out the lists by genre, and each list is pretty long. It looks like a good starting point for finding the games you want to keep an eye on. Here are some highlights: Star Wars 1313: 'Early glimpses suggest the game will ignore lightsabers and force powers in favor of gadgetry and guns, and the claims are for a more grounded and gritty fiction, instead of the fruity pan-galactic melodrama to which we are accustomed.' The Elder Scrolls Online: 'The real reason to watch The Elder Scrolls Online is the talent behind it – the ex-Mythic developers responsible for the innovative Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and, before that, Dark Age of Camelot. Don't write off the old-school MMO just yet.' Mars: War Logs: 'Say it with me: a cyberpunk RPG set on Mars. That's all you need to know.' Ring Runner: 'Missions challenge you to escape exploding trenches, battle bosses bigger than your screen, race against NPC pilots and engage in spectacular space skirmishes in an engine modeled on the laws of Newtonian physics.' There will also be new installments of Dragon Age, SimCity, Grand Theft Auto, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, and Everquest."

Comments

PC gaming is dying.

[MindlessAutomata]

But still, PC gaming is dying. I know this because I have a game coming out on the XBox360 that I'd like you to buy.

Re:PC gaming is dying.

[RogueyWon]

Oh come on, you're 2 years out of whack here. The current mantra is "console gaming is dying at the hands of tablets/phones/handhelds/PCs/free-to-play/lego (delete as appropriate). We might have missed it at the end of the PS2 era, but that's actually the traditional chorus of the latter part of a console cycle.

If you want to sing a rousing chorus of "PC gaming is dying" then wait until after the launch of the next Sony and MS consoles - everybody else will join in at that point.

And it will be no truer then than it was when we heard it at the start of the PS3/360 era, or the PS2/Xbox era, or the PS1/N64 era, or the SNES/Genesis era.

Re:PC gaming is dying.

[travbrad]

..but wait, I thought the "death of the PC" had already come? How are people gaming on something that doesn't exist?

Re:PC gaming is dying.

[crazyjj]

PC gaming died just after the Year of the Linux Desktop

Mars MMO

[MindlessAutomata]

"'Say it with me: a cyberpunk RPG set on Mars. That's all you need to know.'"

Oh boy, playing as Adam Jensen in a spacesuit in the Badlands in WoW sounds super fun!

Re:Mars MMO

[bfandreas]

We already have a steampunk game set on Mars. Had it for a long time, too. It's even free on GOG.
Tho I preferred the installment with those dinosaurs in that valley which was forgoten by time. That one is free on GOG, too.

The Ultima series sure took you places. It all went downhill when they focussed on online gameplay and the accessible to the masses(ie cashgrab).

Ranting aside, the thought of Agatha Heterodyne on Mars appeals to me. It could be a mixture of The Incredible Machine and Mass Effect. With nice hats.

Elite: Dangerous.

[kfsone]

Braben's back, Look who's back.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous

Re: serious question about SimCity

[Black Parrot]

do the cartoon people fuck yet? and if not what do they do?

They're modelled on you, so you can probably figure it out.

What about Duke Nukem Forever?

[Dracos]

Dammit, nevermind...

SimCity, a DRM game to stay away from

[Paska]

I don't play games, like ever. Last game I played was Age of Empires (original) and the Sim City's on my Apple.

I was excited for the new Sim City, and was going to buy a few copies for myself and my girlfriend. But after following the Reddit AMAA from the Maxis developers and their complete dodge of answering any questions regarding the totally stupid online only DRM that's being built into the game.

I'm no longer excited for the game and will not be buying it.

How many of these games on this list are purely online DRM playable only?

Re:SimCity, a DRM game to stay away from

[bertok]

Often. Recently.

I travel for work, just like millions of other business people.

I would like to play games on airplanes. I'd like to while away the spare hours in a hotel room with games.

Unfortunately, few planes have WiFi, and even if they do it's usually too unreliable for online DRM. Worse are hotels, which charge exorbitant fees for internet access, often on the order of $10 per hour, particularly in some countries like New Zealand where there are ZERO free access points, and hotels seem to make their profit entirely from overcharging for access.

Game publishers basically tell people like me: don't buy our games -- even our single player games -- because you can't check in with us every 5 seconds, so you must be some sort of dirty pirate.

Fine. I won't buy their games then.

Re:SimCity, a DRM game to stay away from

[Tagged_84]

Exactly what I told myself when I pre-ordered Diablo 3...

Re:SimCity, a DRM game to stay away from

[Anonymous Coward]

When's the last time you were off line for any significant amount of time?

That's not really the issue, and just FYI the parent is being a little bit of a troll by calling it "DRM". The issue is that even when you play in single player mode, your city is still influenced (to a certain degree) by the Global Economy comprised of all cities, everywhere. The Global System is actually run by Maxis on their servers, so even when playing by yourself you need to be able to reach their servers. Think about that statement carefully- if you are offline, you're screwed. If Maxis goes offline, you're screwed. If they take the servers down, you're screwed. Not only is it no offline play, but even "solo" play is not truly 100% solo.

Now it is true that it's perfectly possible for Maxis to allow an offline mode where the Global Economy is simulated locally, but they seem to have decided that's not a viable option. It also looks like there will be no God Mode Terrain editing prior to starting a city or region, and also no ability to make custom maps and scenarios won't exist either. My suspicion is that they are doing things this way in order to prevent people from being able to manipulate the global marketplace unfairly, for example by editing a new city full of nothing but power plants, which would depress the prices for power across the Global Economy due to the sudden increase in production. But again, they could have given us options to make and play cities completely solo- but they did not.

Since Maxis keeps ignoring the concerns of the fanbase (their forums are a major mess) I think I'm going to have to take a pass on this one, at least until someone puts out software to simulate the Maxis servers, etc.

Re:SimCity, a DRM game to stay away from

[Hatta]

That's not really the issue, and just FYI the parent is being a little bit of a troll by calling it "DRM".

No, that's the honest way to put it.

The issue is that even when you play in single player mode, your city is still influenced (to a certain degree) by the Global Economy comprised of all cities, everywhere

Then it's not a single player game. They should provide an actual single player mode, but they haven't. Why do you think they wouldn't?

The Global System is actually run by Maxis on their servers, so even when playing by yourself you need to be able to reach their servers.

And why would they do that?

Now it is true that it's perfectly possible for Maxis to allow an offline mode where the Global Economy is simulated locally, but they seem to have decided that's not a viable option

Again, what possible reason could they have to do that? Set all the parameters of the global economy to sane defaults, or let the player set them, and you're good.

But again, they could have given us options to make and play cities completely solo- but they did not.

Right, they could have but didn't, and they've offered no satisfactory reasons why they didn't. It's not possible to simply ascribe this to incompetence. They know what their players want and they are deliberately not delivering on it. The Sim City "Global Economy" is nothing but a DRM scheme. Period.

I'm betting on Valve being sneaky here...

[MetricT]

I suspect Valve will surprise us this year. We know they have their Steam console coming out this year. But the XBox 720 and Playstation 4 are also coming out.

So Valve has to be running right out of the gate. My hunch is that they have Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Team Fortress 3, perhaps even Portal 3 either sitting on the shelf, or close enough that they could ship within a few months. Those title are to Valve what Mario is to Nintendo, or Halo is to XBox. Drop them all at once, and I suspect you'l sell a fark-ton of Valve boxes overnight.

SimCity? Command and Conquer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to save you all a lot of time and frustration here.

If you want to play either of these games, go fire up DOSBox and play the originals. Yes, the originals. In DOS. At 320x480 or 640x480 resolution.

If you're not open minded enough to take a nice retro trip into the past and enjoy yourself, fine- go play the next CoD game, I'm sure they're looking for fresh meat. If you're sick and tired of all this modern shit like I am, then DOSBox (or Boxer if you're on Mac OS X) is a wonderful vacation from the horrific nature of modern day grindfests.

SimCity 2000 may be simple, but it's clean and efficient and rewarding to play. There's no random bullshit like "atmospheric quality" driving down the cost of your land or stupid in-game region restrictions preventing the construction of skyscrapers.

And C&C... Man, the original is a work of art. The music, sound effects, graphics, and full-motion videos- amazing. Even the game installer is awesome (it's all animated and stuff if you've never seen it before- the first sound I ever heard a computer make was EVA saying "Sound hardware initialized" during the installation after I bought my first PC and a copy of what would later be renamed C&C Tiberium Dawn).

This modern day shit that EA has their hands over is all poo. SimCity 5 is an online-based game, and you can't escape the online features (some of which influence your game). Command and Conquer has never been the same since Red Alert 3 and C&C 3 (don't even talk to me about C&C 4- that game was such a bastardization of the franchise it deserves to be filed on the same shelf as Renegade).

So, seriously, if you're looking at the list of games we're getting in 2013 and thinking "What is this mindless clusterfuck of dead franchises and crippled games for people who don't appreciate a proper challenge", then take a trip back in time and play the originals. You'll enjoy them more then this cookie cutter bullshit EA is busy grunting out.

Re:SimCity? Command and Conquer?

[CastrTroy]

And then Starcraft took a step back and only let you select 12 units at a time. Moving frrom C&C where you could select as many units as you wanted to, and move them across the map, to Starcraft, where you could only select 12 units at a time, was quite painful.

Re:SimCity? Command and Conquer?

[RogueyWon]

Yes, that was deeply odd in Starcraft (and is one of the reasons why I never warmed to the game). See, I can understand why you might not need to be able to select many units in some RTSes - the likes of Mech Commander or Dawn of War 2, where the emphasis is on making best use of a small number of units. In fact, if you're playing Dawn of War 2 on anything above Easy difficulty and you find yourself drag-clicking multiple units, you're doing something wrong.

But Starcraft is a "big army" game, particularly if you're playing as Zerg. Now, I know that at the top-tier competitive level, players are using insane amounts of micromanagement. But for your average player working through the singleplayer campaign, having to break armies up into 12 unit parcels in order to move them just felt odd and unnatural.

Translation from market speech

[Anonymous Coward]

Star Wars 1313: 'Early glimpses suggest the game will ignore lightsabers and force powers in favor of gadgetry and guns, and the claims are for a more grounded and gritty fiction, instead of the fruity pan-galactic melodrama to which we are accustomed.'

A linear shooter.

The Elder Scrolls Online: 'The real reason to watch The Elder Scrolls Online is the talent behind it – the ex-Mythic developers responsible for the innovative Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and, before that, Dark Age of Camelot.

Another MMO brought to you by the guys that had NPCs standing 100% still, not moving at all, with no aggro range when they released Warhammer Online. Also, the quests were completely linear too. Considering the quality of their past efforts I think I'll pass.

Mars: War Logs: 'Say it with me: a cyberpunk RPG set on Mars. That's all you need to know.'

Impossible to judge anything about this game with this description. Since its all I need to know then apparently I don't need to figure out if its worth playing..

Ring Runner: 'Missions challenge you to escape exploding trenches, battle bosses bigger than your screen, race against NPC pilots and engage in spectacular space skirmishes in an engine modeled on the laws of Newtonian physics.'

Pretty much every collision library (and thus almost all 3D games) out there are based on Newtonian physics. However the quote does at least give *some* hope that this game could have something interesting game-play. The rest of the description doesn't really give me any idea what kind of game to expect though.

There will also be new installments of Dragon Age, SimCity, Grand Theft Auto, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, and Everquest.

Yay. More rehashed sequels.

Color me bored.

CoH and Rome 2

[happyhamster]

Company of Heroes 2 [http://www.companyofheroes.com/]

Total War Rome 2 [http://www.totalwar.com/en_us/rome2]

Re:PC has open source games and steam games

[mjwx]

And both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are real old next to to days pc's.

What do you mean "todays PC"?

They were real old compared to PC's on their release day.

Star Wars the Old Republic

[Billly Gates]

The rise of the HUTS expansion is coming out! I know those who played it just for 24 hours dumped it because it didn't have 7 years of updates like Wow, but it has improved and I actually like it and consider it a success regardless of everyone trying to make it a failure.

I look forward to playing it. FYI I have flashpoints, dungeon finders, and other things to do after I cap now. I think it got shafted by Wow users and management at EA before it hit the light of day.

Re:GTA V - No PC version

[Anonymous Coward]

You're better off without it. GTA IV required like four logins and nine kinds of DRM to even get to the point where it would crash.

Re:MMOs are done

[VortexCortex]

Perhaps 'tis not the MMO but the "grindfest" ye hath outgrown? What of "massively", "multiplayer" or "online" requires said grind?

I can remember my first MMOs: Offspring of the venerable MUD, the first MMOs were text based; The growth from "multiplayer" to "massively multiplayer" was simply due to the Internet's existence. Though the term MMO (MMORPG) hadn't yet been coined, they did exist and were played via Internet and its BBS portals even before the web came with it's standardized rich text and graphics capabilities. Many such games were evolved versions of (custom) MUDs. Many early MMOs had far less grind than many of todays' MMOs -- There was far less visual stimulus to distract you from boredom while you killed the statistically same foes over and over. Even the combat systems back then had to be more advanced and playful, incorporating full language parsing capabilities: "Blast the bastard!" and "Equip ranged weapon, then attack the Cyberknight." were both equivalent commands. Imagine what I could do today now that we have voice recognition... Having evolved over the years from my BBSs custom MUD, and text descriptions being cheaper and faster to make than graphics and audio, my own online RPG had "3D" worlds that eclipsed World of Warcraft in terms of size, narrative, and lore. My player power balance system relied more on combining effects of various weapons, items and modular upgrades (for cyborgs) or spells (mages) than the length of time you spent earning them. This along with planetary phases and attributes of the very locations added enough variety that even novices had a chance against seasoned players. You had to be smarter about using your stuff to win. There was no level cap needed, you can only carry so much stuff, and it's the combinations of stuff, not the price that gave power. The overarching gameplay was more about exploring an evolving world, and discovering the new untold stories, and also the roots of legends. I tried to make it like a good book, but where a book ends leaving you wanting more story, an MMO can continue: A digital text-based world can be so quickly and simply crafted and re-shaped and distributed.

The point is: "Grind" wasn't in my vocabulary... "Hack" and "Slash" were. Think about it: MMORGPs came from MORPGs (graphical MUDs) the latter of which came from RPGs -- Having ran many a dice & paper RPG campaign I knew that it was the new and compelling story which unpredictably changed due to interactivity that made such games magical -- Not hacking or slashing.

Nowhere is it writ that Grind be integral to MMOs. Indeed, much like in D&D, in my text based worlds charisma, zeal, and niceness of the players would often yield the fastest path to power vs grinding through quests. Eventually I will resurrect those gone but not forgotten worlds, but not today. It's the many comments like yours that reinforce my hunch that the world isn't quite ready yet -- Folks are already focusing less on the gimmick of graphical fidelity, even enjoying "pixel art" again. The subscription extending act of grinding is becoming tiresome to many. Now I'm waiting for folks to remember how to have fun, and expect it from games -- to remember how to play instead of grind, and not shun entire genres due to prevailing, yet fleeting, gameplay designs.

Ooh, ~Mythic~

[Bieeanda]

Dark Age of Camelot managed to survive for years and multiple expansions, despite Mythic's relentless inability to tune the game's main draw, massive realm-vs-realm PVP conflict. Warhammer Online's population more than halved in less than a year for the exact same reason. EA kept them on to develop content for Ultima Online, which has become what the Sims Online wishes it could have been, and virtually nothing came of that either. Seeing them attached to a big, risky project like this makes me wince.

Re:MMOs are done

[Greyfox]

That's why Blizzard's next game will be an MMORGY! Level cap: 69, armor choices: Leather, Latex, None, no quests, only grinding! It is expected to make ONE BILLION DOLLARS in the first month alone!

Stuff 2013, tell me about 2011

[MrL0G1C]

The games are not particularly improving in any way and the 2011 games are going cheap and have been bug-fixed and the DLCs are often all thrown in for free, So, what are the best 20 games of 2011, that is honestly what I'd prefer to know.

Re:MMOs are done

[JaredOfEuropa]

Radically different? Personally I'd like to see the return of "sandbox" style MMOs like UO or SWG. Mythic did ok but I'd be more hopeful for TESO if they had gotten Raph Koster on board (he was involved in both UO and SWG, having designed most of the crafting system in the latter amongst other stuff). A good sandbox game is a "complete" game that caters to a wide variety of play styles: grinding, exploring, building, inventing, or just plain messing about. Besides interesting combat and questing, such a game has a strong crafting system but also things like player housing (and the ability to decorate them, a popular pastime in past sandbox games), a viable player-run economy (in SWG pretty much everything was player-made) and elements that make the game conducive to role-playing. Most players will want to engage in one of any of these play styles depending on their mood, and catering to all of them means your MMO becomes a place to hang out rather than just log on to for the next raid.

Good point about mods, though. Any game will go stale even to the most hardy fan, but you can prolongue their business (or get some fans to return) by adding new content. The problem is: it is rather expensive to develop such content. The company that manages to drive down the cost of developing new content while maintaining quality has the potential to create a winner, and player-generated content / mods could be part of that.

Re:Dragon Age

[MareLooke]

BioWare is dead (also Westwood Studios says "Hi!"), it's EAWare now, with everything that implies. We had better get used to it. I have rather low expectations for their games now (good production quality but generic gameplay, I rather have the other way around if I can't have both). Didn't know Wasteland 2 was coming out this year though, and a new isometric Divinity game. Maybe we'll get some good RPGs this year for a change...

Re:Dragon Age

[Slalomsk8er]

I like playing Torchlight 2 and Rocksmith an my PC

Re:Dragon Age

[bfandreas]

The PC resurge is due to cheap and easy distribution with no cash barrier to get your stuff on services. AAA quality stuff gets released for 20 bucks. Steam shovels games by the metric crap ton. Then march over to GOG and marvel at their prices for the newish stuff they have. 3 bucks for the original Witcher? Yes, please. Then return to Steam and grab a couple of Jensens and Batmen for the price of a nice evening at the movies. Or read RPS for whatever tickles your fancy and swing over right to the developers homepage and grab the game for the cost of a packet of cigarettes. I've just finished LA Noire picked up at a bargain price and enjoyed every bit of it(except the driving sequences, skipped those).

Gabe "The Gabe" Newell said that game piracy was a service problem and boy did he show them. Next thing will be free money hats in TF2. For everybody.

"PC gaming is dead", by Simon Cowell's codpiece, nothing could be wronger.

Here's a real cracker: Digital sales still aren't included in all game sales statistics. So by applying Hollywood logic, all non-boxed instances of played games flow nicely into the piracy statistic. And therefore piracy is rampant on PC, so we need more DRM. Except most indies don't have that. Which is why the indie devs must have starved yonks ago. And it must be their dessicated corpses who made the also massively pirated sequels to their massively pirated first installments. Zombie indies want your brains! Fight the Zombie indies! Buy Activision, EA, UBI! For the children!

Re: serious question about SimCity

[bfandreas]

Buy Skyrim and mod it accordingly if you need fornicating polygons. They got lizard people on cat action, too. And dead people doing the nasty.

On the first day there was the Dragonborn. And Bethesda saw that it was good.
On the second day there was The Construction kit. And Bethesda was pleased.
On the third day there were hordes of naked people shouting at dragons and clubbing them to death with giant purple dildos. And Bethesda recieved all Game of the Year awards known to man.

Re:MMOs are done

[drinkypoo]

The first modern-ish MMO I can remember was BTechMUSE, which drew you hexmaps of your view. And there were clients that would read an alternate interface and draw you a GUI, I used one on the Amiga. They couldn't handle the load though. I was in a battle with over 100 players, it was aaaaagony. I did manage to take out something big (mauler? atlas?) by repeated DFA with a spider though, glorious.

Re:Dragon Age

[PrimalChrome]

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not..

I'm not sure if this is trolling or not.

X-Com : Enemy Unknown
The Walking Dead
Dishonored
Farcry 3
Mass Effect 3
Fez
Torchlight II
Journey
That's just off the top of my head.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Being able to feel the buttons

[tepples]

The current mantra is "console gaming is dying at the hands of tablets/phones/handhelds/PCs/free-to-play/lego (delete as appropriate).

Some games involve picking or placing objects at a given position on the screen; these are ideal for a phone or tablet. Other games involve controlling a character that moves around; these are a bit harder to adapt. I understand how to simulate the directional pad or left stick with touch: find the direction between the initial point of contact and the current touch point. But I don't understand how to provide more than one fire button. In my tests on a Nexus 7 tablet, I couldn't reliably press multiple on-screen buttons without looking at them: I'd end up either pressing the inactive area between the buttons or pressing a button adjacent to the button I wanted to press. The cause is that on a console or a dedicated handheld gaming system, the player's thumb can feel the edge of each button. A phone or tablet, on the other hand, has a completely flat sheet of glass that provides no such feedback.

Re:Being able to feel the buttons

[Chubby_C]

agreed, I find it much harder to play FPS on my tablet versus PC or Xbox

Re:What is this new SimCity?

[tompaulco]

you cannot play the game offline.
Oh, that is a shame. I have been a constant fan of Simcity and have had and played many many hours on every version to date. Unfortunately, I guess I won't be playing this one. I have no interest in playing online with other people and no interest in a piece of software that I have bought and paid for that is not payable because they choose to shut down a server.