by y2ken
Here are games that are scheduled to (or might anyway) come out in 2016 that I am potentially excited for. This may be because I want to play them or because I think they are important or even just because I need to know.
This list is alphabetical, for simplicity.
If you want a more nicely-formatted version, check my blog on here or over at my own personal page.
Showing 1-10 of 37 items
Since the arrival of the New Telltale Order with 2012's The Walking Dead, I'd been waiting for them to apply their award-winning formula to a franchise that appealed more directly to me. In part this came from a preference for comedy over drama - I should note my fondness for their Tales of Monkey Island series. 2015 brought me what I wanted in the forms of Minecraft: Story Mode, which I have been enjoying as one might a Saturday-morning childrens' cartoon, and Tales from the Borderlands, which currently sits right atop my Pile of Shame. I doubt that Telltale will opt for the comedic route with Batman, but it is still a franchise I have a lot of time for. It fits well into the formula - making snap decisions about how to apprehend a criminal or pondering over the meaning behind a clue with Robin and Alfred could certainly make for a compelling title. My only real concern is how Batman's "no-kill" policy will affect the range of decisions you will have to face, but I'll leave that up to the experts for now. Telltale have been fantastic so far at capturing the essence of the worlds they are exploring, so I'm eager to get hands-on with their take on Gotham and its heaving underworld of unsavoury inhabitants.
Are we actually going to see Battlefield 5 already? Wouldn't be out of place after the timing between BF3 and BF4, but with Titanfall also presumably gearing up for a new release (more on that later) will we actually see the next iteration in core Battlefield during 2016?
I'm still a little sad that I didn't spend more time with Bravely Default. I picked up the demo and spent quite a while exploring what it had to offer, but didn't end up playing the final release for a variety of reasons, not least that I didn't have time for it at launch. I thought the battle system was creative, allowing you to essentially store up "turns" for each individual character and then blow them all at once. Between that and the way jobs could be combined to augment your skill setup, it brought a unique layer to the Final Fantasy-style battle system. It also included a bunch of neat, progressive touches, such as the ability to adjust random encounter frequency. Perhaps I'll find the time to get around to Bravely Default, but I've also heard several things about the structure of that game which make me a little wary of diving into it. With Bravely Second on the horizon in 2016, it's possible that this will prove to be a great jumping-in point. Second is set in the same universe as its predecessor, but a while after the events of the first game, so I'm hopeful that the story will still be approachable to those new to the series. If they manage to incorporate what the first game did well and build on those strengths, Bravely Second could turn out to be a must-play for fans of that style of JRPG.
Is this Ghosts 2? Or something else? Regardless, whatever the Infinity Ward team has become by this point they have an awful lot to prove. Ghosts was widely regarded as the most disappointing moment in the series - and had many suggesting this was the end for CoD until both Advanced Warfare and BlOps III proved that there's life in the old fish yet. They'll have to do a lot to transform the public perception.
I spent a not-insignificant chunk of time with the first Cook, Serve, Delicious! It's a game I go back to every so often and just run through a few days of restauranteering - balancing out orders and chores, trying to make sure that all the customers are satisfied; that no-one has an overcooked steak, that people get the right Flavor Blast in their soda, and that the toilets are polished and shining. It's a constant series of spinning plates - both metaphorically as well as literally, sometimes. I'm incredibly excited for the follow-up, which looks to be sticking with the formula but expanding and improving on it in a whole breadth of ways. More dishes to create, deeper customisation of your restaurant, new chores to take on, a wider variety of (wonderfully straight-faced) clientele to keep content, and much more. Developer David Galindo has been keeping an active blog on his Tumblr and the official CSD website explaining some of the improvements he's hoping to make. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2 looks to be shaping up to be a follow-up that does for it's predecessor what Rebirth did for The Binding of Isaac - taking the core formula and making it bigger, better, and more beautiful.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I could write one hundred thousand words attempting to sell you on Cuphead and still achieve less than a few seconds of footage could do. So I'll save myself the trouble and tell you to watch their trailers instead. The artstyle, the animation, the music... I wouldn't even consider myself as a fan of side-scrolling shooters, yet I feel compelled to get my hands on Cuphead. Were it not for reassurances from multiple people who have played it, I'd almost be skeptical that you could really control it, It's bizarro 1930s cartoons made into a video game, and it's dripping style from every orifice. Delightful.
Oh, Dark Souls, how I love you so. I doubt there are too many people out there now who don't have some opinion on this series one way or another, which seems like a rather spectacular ascent from where both Demon's and Dark Souls were at the time of release. Such a rise speaks to the power of From Software's creations, then. They may be divisive, but there's no denying that - for the people who love them - few other titles hit their marks more spectacularly. Even within fans the series there are advocates and detractors for every entry. Personally I enjoyed Dark Souls II well enough, but it felt like it was missing that special spark. Bloodborne rediscovered that spark for me, so I suppose there might be some real credence to the "Miyazaki magic" - at least for my own personal tastes. As much as I adore it, however, Bloodborne sacrifices a lot of variety in world design and character building to fit into its tight aesthetic. While that didn't bother me during my time engrossed in Yharnam, I'm certainly excited to return to the more open-ended approach that Dark Souls offers. I haven't paid too much close attention to the details of Dark Souls III so far, because it's very much a game I want to see in its whole form rather than attempting to pick apart pieces of the scraps that are thrown out to sate the initial appetite for teasers. That said, Miyazaki's team are huge fans of mystery, intrigue, and misdirection - as Bloodborne proved. So I'm sure there will be plenty to discover and pore over once Dark Souls III rolls around early this year (it's currently scheduled for worldwide release in April).
Darkest Dungeon has been available to users as part of Steam's Early Access program for a large chunk of 2015. Personally, I made the decision a long time ago now that even if I was interested enough in an Early Access title to buy in, I would wait until full release to start putting time in. After seeing some early footage of Darkest Dungeon at the time that rolled out, I was eager to see where Red Hook Studios would take things over the journey to a finished product. The initial offering certainly caught my eye: a randomly-generated turn-based dungeon crawling RPG where party members can easily die - or suffer any of a wealth of terrible mental or physical conditions thanks to dungeon-related trauma - and must be carefully treated (or replaced) between outings, as appropriate. I haven't followed the Early Access period too closely, but I've heard that there have been some ups and downs with regards to how updates have been received by the community. That said, the last news I heard sounded very positive and with everything that Darkest Dungeon looked to be shaping up to be from the outset, I'm keen to check back in with it once they hit version 1.0, which it sounds like will be fairly soon.
The original Destiny proved that Bungie can still create a gorgeous and compelling world and craft an immensely satisfying combat system. The Taken King proved that they are still capable of providing compelling content and quest progressions to undertake in those worlds. Now, with a possible Destiny 2 set for this year, it's their chance to prove that they really can make this thing work. Destiny 2 might be the make-or-break moment for this franchise, so it'll be interesting to see whether they push hard to release it for 2016 (especially given the apparent reduction in new content for the current game scheduled throughout the year) or whether they hold off until they are completely satisfied with the product.
The first Dishonored is another game prone to splitting opinion. I'm definitely amongst the Love Squad for this one; I adored the aesthetics and design of the world, I loved sneaking around on rooftops and down alleyways with Corvo's potent supernatural skillset, and while I thought the binary good/bad ending split based purely on your kill count was a little hamfisted, I adored pursuing the "alternative" solutions to each quest - solutions which almost uniformly turned out to be more terrifying and horrendous fates than if I'd simply given all the targets the ol' "Requiescat in pace." Bethesda has shown off very little of the upcoming sequel - it was unveiled officially during their E3 press conference in a rather unfortunate Doom/Fallout 4 sandwich, both of which had rather meaty gameplay demos and thus left more of an immediate impression. Yet I came away very excited about taking the reins as a grown-up PrincessThankfully, it sounds like developers Eidos Montreal learned a lot from the post-release community feedback, because despite a few minor flaws Human Revolution seems to have won itself many fans. Emily, alongside her protector Corvo, and seeing what new stories can be told in Dunwall. The city was certainly far from redeemed by the end of the first game, so I'm sure there will still be plenty of grimy city streets to wander and ravenous sewer rats to fear.
