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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."
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.
Braben's back, Look who's back.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Dammit, nevermind...
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.
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.
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.
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.