One of the things that I often do at the beginning of a year is to try and project out some of the things that I think I might be interested in on the upcoming release radar. I’ve not done that at all this year because I have been overwhelmingly obsessed with the current Path of Exile league. I thought it might be interesting to peer into the future and talk about some of the games I am interested in that have release dates for the common year, or at least look likely to release in one form or another. The further into the list, we get the more likely these things are to be bumped because they don’t have firm dates associated with them. There are going to be some big titles missing from the list that you might feel is important, because this is a deeply personal outing. For example the new Zelda game, I will likely ignore it until the emulators can run it and I can disable weapon durability because that construct ruined the first game for me.
Atomic Heart – February 21
Atomic Heart is one of those games that I have been amped for since I first saw it in a trailer presentation. It looks like a soviet block spin on the Fallout games, with weird robotics and psychic phenomena. I am largely on board for all of this. I fully expect it to have some jank but also I’ve played and loved Bethesda games so I am mostly used to that. I’ve played the Metro games and they were for the most part a giant mess, and I still enjoyed them. I have high hopes but also they have been tempered by past experience with games wanting to be the Russian Fallout.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor – March 17
Jedi Fallen Order was one of my favorite games when it came out. It proved to me the possibility of what a “soulslike” game could be if it had a difficulty slider. If you want the Dark Souls experience you play it on hard, and if you want just a fun narrative romp you play it on easy. I played the game happily on easy and enjoyed the hell out of the experience. I am looking forward to another outing as Cal Kestis, and I really hope that at some point this character is going to intersect with some of the Disney live shows because it seems too damned good not to use given that Cameron Monaghan is right there ready to go.
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores – April 19
I am throwing this out here because it has a fixed date, but I have to be honest… I am not sure if I will play this when it releases. I never actually finished Forbidden West, and in large part, it is because I don’t really play consoles that often. I would far rather do what I did with Zero Dawn, and play the expansion whenever the PC release comes out because playing this game with a mouse and keyboard is so much more enjoyable than playing it with a controller. We will see if I stick to my guns on this one, and while I enjoyed HFW it is nowhere near as compelling as the first game for me. Everything about how Aloy moved and controlled was so much better, but the story was just less interesting and didn’t really push me forward as fastly. Don’t get me wrong I loved all of the world-building and I look forward to playing this on PC whenever it releases there.
Redfall – May 2
We got new gameplay yesterday in the Microsoft presentation, and I have to say I am probably more interested now than I was before. It feels like this is going to be interesting as a completely single-player game, and also really interesting as more of a co-op Left 4 Dead type experience. I am going to have to sort out ways to be online at the same time as the rest of AggroChat folks to be able to experience this together. It honestly reminded me a bit of how State of Decay 2 feels, where you have bases that you operate out of and then go out into dangerous areas to collect resources and complete missions.
Diablo IV – June 6
I am throwing this on the list because I am very interested, but also very conflicted about it. Blizzard continues to not exactly be an exemplar for things that I want to engage with right now. I was hoping that by now we would be further along in the Microsoft acquisition and that Bobby Kotick would be on his way out the door. I want to play this, but I am not sure if I can play this. What is there looks interesting so far and I am very interested to see how a “post Path of Exile” Diablo game operates. I was burnt so heavily on Diablo Immortal as was pretty much everyone else, and my confidence levels are lower than they normally would be.
Final Fantasy XVI – June 22
I am exceptionally bummed that this is a PlayStation Exclusive. I would far rather play this on the PC full stop and it is dumb that I can’t. That said there is no way in hell that I am not going to play a mainline PC game that was crafted by the same team that gave me the FFXIV story experience. ARR to Endwalker was the best Final Fantasy experience I have ever had, and as a result, I am completely going to “day one” this game and probably “no life” it. I am in fact an acolyte of Yoshi P, and am willing to sign up for any nonsense that he is involved with. I mean it looks fucking gorgeous so there is also that. I am going to have to drag my PS5 back upstairs so that I can have undivided access to it.
Arc Raiders – TBA 2023
We’ve not seen a lot about this game since the Game Awards in 2021, but recently it has apparently been confirmed to be a 2023 release coming to Playstation, Xbox, and PC including Gamepass. I mean I love me some looter shooter action, so you know I am going to check this out regardless of how non sequitur using a Robyn song about masturbation is for the trailer. I loved the 1970s gritty science fiction vibe about it that a lot of games have been adopting. We still don’t know a ton about how the gameplay is going to unfold but this is firmly in my wheelhouse so I will be watching as a proper release date is assigned.
Hellboy Web of Wyrd – TBA 2023
I love Hellboy and I love the art style of Mike Mignola so I am completely onboard with a game that features a reasonable adaptation of both. We have no release date for this but it is supposedly coming during the calendar year. I kind of expect this to be a shorter very narrative-focused game. It has a Steam page that appears to be active, so here is hoping that it comes out on PC at the same time as everywhere else. This does not exactly seem like the sort of game that Sony would pay for exclusivity to.
Nightingale – TBA 2023 ???
We got an updated trailer for Nightingale at The Game Awards, and it gives me hope that maybe we will see it this year. This is probably the title that I consider to be the most likely to slide to 2024 however given that we’ve not really seen anything resembling public testing. If this was active, I figure by now someone would have broken NDA and leaked some footage of it. Because we have not seen that, it makes me think that it might still be “in progress” to a point of not really being ready to ship soon. I was deeply suspicious of this game until it was confirmed to be a purely PVE experience. I am going to play it when it comes out because I am here for the victorian gaslight-type setting.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – TBA 2023
This is another one that I question if we are actually going to see this year. CDPR has had a less-than-spotless record lately with being able to release things in the timeframe that they originally expect. We’ve heard that this is a bigger DLC than all of the DLC for Witcher 3 combined, and I know for certain when it lands I will be starting over Cyberpunk from scratch in order to be able to play my way through this seamlessly with the rest of the content. I love Cyberpunk 2077 and I cannot imagine that I won’t also love this expansion content.
Alan Wake 2 – TBA 2023
This game was announced at the 2021 Game Awards and so far we have not gotten much more information on it than this original trailer. At the end of this trailer, it shows a 2023 release date, but given the radio silence so far… I am not sure if that is going to be a realistic date given that everything takes slightly longer than anyone originally expects. When this game drops… I will stop whatever I am doing and play it. Last year’s journey into the “Remedyverse” has turned me into a dedicated fan of their particular style of narrative fiction. I am excited as hell to see what a Remedy game looks like post-Control which for me at least was their magnum opus. I am hoping to see even more blending of the settings and maybe have Jesse Faden play a role in this game.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn – TBA 2023
I am throwing this game on the list because it looks interesting, and I know for certain it will be a Game Pass title when it finally comes out. That lowers the bar of entry enough to make me want to give it a spin. It looks like a souls-like, and I don’t exactly have a great track record with those. I don’t go in for frustration gaming. If I am playing a game for the story, I want to see the story play out without a lot of false steps. If I am playing a game for the mechanics, then that is a totally different type of experience for me. I’ve never really managed to bridge the gap in a souls game to where I actually care about the mechanics and I mostly have played them because I am curious about the world. Flintlock looks really cool but I am also throwing it a bit of side-eye, but will check it out for free when it launches on GamePass.
There are a bunch of titles that I opted not to include. Destiny 2 for example has a brand-new expansion landing on February 28th for example. However, I’ve grown away from that game because I hated the content vaulting removing a bunch of things I loved, and have never really reached a point of forgiveness. I’m also deeply interested in Death Stranding 2, but somehow doubt we will see it released this year. These are the games that I am looking forward to the most, but given my track record, there are going to be a bunch of things that spring up along the way that catches my attention.
What games are you looking forward to the most this year?
I know the “Remedyverse” as you put it encompasses Alan Wake and perennial GOTY, Control, but I tried playing the original Alan Wake for the first time about half a year ago and I could NOT get into it and I only say that because it makes me very, very sad.
I guess for me there are a few things that are important. I also played Alan Wake so many times since its release and bounced off of it every single time. What it finally took was the PC Remastered version only available on Epic Game Store, and having played through Control and the Alan Wake themed DLC. That gave me enough narrative interest in the game to suffer through some of the janky mechanics to see my way all the way to the end. Honestly you would probably get as much enjoyment out of finding a “Let’s Play” for the game because it isn’t necessarily a game I enjoyed mechanically. I played the games totally out of order… Control > Alan Wake > Quantum Break.
Similarly, it took me really getting int The Witcher 3, to be able to suffer through the subpar gameplay experience that is Witcher 2. This is the problem with diving back into the game catalog before they had solved several mechanical challenges and locked things into the modern standards.