The following is a list of the games coming out for the rest of the year that I’m most interested in, including trailers (many taken from Kotaku’s Game Awards list) and links to interviews or previews. But first, a spot of news.
A Spot of News (Which was newer when I started this than when I published it)
Redfall, which was never on this list, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (which was) have recently come out to mixed reviews having in part to do with performance issues. Survivor’s reviews have been buoyed by a consensus of being a better, more interesting and fun game plus a day-one patch for consoles, whereas Redfall had much lower averages (which Xbox CEO Phil Spencer responded to) but the only person I know personally to have played it has enjoyed it. These developments are being seen as reflecting bad industry trends; with Redfall specifically a poor sign for what’s going on with Microsoft, Xbox, and Game Pass.
Microsoft’s deal to acquire Activision Blizzard has been blocked by the UK’s regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority. The U.S. FTC and EU regulators are still deliberating. The CMA is showing foresight about Microsoft’s designs on cloud gaming. Microsoft and Activision announced plans to appeal.
I am an X-Box Series X owner, and also one that didn’t own a console between the PS3 and XSX. So Game Pass is a great value for me because I have an infinite backlog. Feel like there’s so much “required reading” for me to do on the medium that I’ll never get through. Moreover, I think the Microsoft-Activision merger is a bad deal for labor and for consumers. Less choice in where you can work and who you can buy from is typically not good in a system where those choices are your primary leverage to control the price for which you sell your labor and buy your products.
However, I do understand the general concern with Xbox’s apparent inability to have a successful major launch of a triple-A title. Wo Long (a super-difficult Three Kingdoms-inspired soulslike) is apparently too niche. They’re hanging hats on Starfield, a game that has been delayed two or three times and which would not surprise me to be delayed again. Bethesda´s marquee tentpole games in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series are famously buggy, especially at launch, in part because they’re so ambitious. This one is apparently as ambitious as one has ever been. Even the “No Man’s Skyrim” moniker which I heard during last June’s Xbox showcase and have been recycling, while inherently reductive, actually alludes to the expansive. No Man’s Sky and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim are absolutely massive games that you can sink hours into. The idea of combining spacefaring procedural generation with the immersive open-world RPG formula is a lot to bite off. Doesn’t surprise me that Xbox Games Studios-Bethesda are having some trouble chewing.
This will be the Xbox Series X’s first marquee release for the mainstream audience. Forza Horizon 4 had its day, but it’s an open-world racing sim. Microsoft Flight Simulator was well-loved, but is even more niche. In the two and a half years since the console and its archrival the PS5 came out, the PlayStation 5 has had God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon: Forbidden West; while each also came out on the PS4, they’re at least reasons to choose Sony. Halo: Infinite has stumbled somewhat and its studio is now losing some key leadership. Gears of War is dormant. The first original Bethesda game since Skyrim (which came out twelve years ago and has been re’released several times in the intervening years) has to be a slam dunk. On June 11, there will be an Xbox Games Showcase followed by a Starfield Direct exposition.
So the following are just the games still to come out this year (followed by recent and less recent releases) that I’m excited to play with.
Most Anticipated Games
Starfield
Allegedly Releasing September 6
Directed by Todd Howard, Designed by Emil Pagliarulo, Developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks
No Man’s Skyrim, Fallout in Space, the hard sci-fi answer to the alien-laden Mass Effect series (a decade later), the serious version of labelmate Obsidian’s satirical Outer Worlds… I’m intrigued to see what the Bethesda design of open world third-person/first-person action-RPG/life sim plays like in space. But I also remember that my favorite game from the Bethesda Fallout era is actually Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas and then I worry again. Still, it could be, it will be very cool. I just hope it isn’t broken (been feeling lots of Cyberpunk vibes lately).
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Releasing August 25
Directed by Masaru Yamamura, Produced by Yasunori Ogura, Developed by FromSoftware, Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment
I’m not a long-devout FromSoftware fan, but I quite enjoyed (and, unsurprisingly, still need to finish) Elden Ring. I’ve heard great things of Armored Core (maybe I’ll pick up 2 for the PS2 or IV for the PS3, probably not, but maybe) and this trailer is just one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. “Coldest,” “hardest,” “hottest,” “most epic”; insert your chosen accolade here. It’s so fire. I’m trying to get back into anime and I’m getting all the Gundam and Evangelion vibes I need (well, maybe more Gundam than Eva but whatever, certainly not Big O, I’m not a mecha anime expert).
Release Date TBD – coming to Steam Early Access this year before it later comes to consoles
Developed and Published by Supergiant Games
I recently beat Hades for the first time (the character; I still have to do that nine more times to conceivably beat the game). Anyway, this is the first roguelite I’ve spent major time with, and I quite enjoyed it, and I’m interested to see how the new game transfers the combat and music from Zagreus to Melinoë, which Olympian gods are featured, what the stages look like. Hades is great and I expect its successor will be as well.
Immortals of Aveum
July 20
Developed by Ascendant Studios, published by EA Originals
So, when I saw the early trailer at the Game Awards I thought “that looks cool as hell,” while a lot of people seemed to think it was odd. I’m not always into straightforward FPS games. But replace guns with magic, replace rehabilitation of the U.S. military-industrial complex with some standard stop-the-evil-conquerors fantasy? I’m in there. The official reveal trailer has a lot of proper nouns, as many game trailers do. Replacing conventional weapons and stages with magic gives the thing more of a fantasy first-person platformer vibe, or a gunless-BioShock vibe. There’s a bit of the winking-at-camera dialog, but it isn’t as insufferable as some recent games. Anyway, I’m intrigued with the magical Everwar (will it have anything interesting to say as a commentary on perpetual warfare in the real world? Can I avoid that without seeming cowardly?) and the setting and the hands being hand-canons. Plus Waypoint and I believe No Clip had good things to say about previews.
Atlas Fallen
August 10
Directed by Jan Klose, Designed by Jérémy Hartvick, Developed by Deck13 Interactive, Published by Focus Entertainment
Third-person ARPG “set in the sweeping dunes of a great desert.” You’re fighting monsters, you’re surfing the sand, it looks like some far-future post apocalypse where the world has been reshaped. Xbox owners don’t get to play Horizon, and I’m interested in new means of traversal. It just looks cool.
Release TBD
Developed by Mega Cat Studios, Published by Skybound Games
This is a pixelated RPG based around the sport and spectacle of professional wrestling, two great tastes that taste great together.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage
Releasing sometime this year
Directed by Stéphane Boundon, Written by Sarah Beaulieu, Art by Jean-Luc Sala, Developed by Ubisoft Bordeaux and Published by Ubisoft
From 2007 to 2020, Ubisoft released 13 Assassin’s Creed games for home consoles. One of those was also released for handheld consoles; they released four other handheld games. They released five iOS games. That is a grand total of 22 games in 14 years (counting both ends). The mainstream titles became more like mainstream third-person action-RPGs after the success of the Witcher III. The collect-a-thons have expanded beyond any reasonable bloat. After traveling through Italy, Revolutionary America, early 18th century West Indies, the French Revolution of 1789, the French and Indian War, the Second Industrial Revolution in England, Ptolemic Egypt, the Peloponnesian War, and the Viking Age, I’m, interested to see the return to the Middle East of the Middle Ages (though this time Iraq and Iran in the 9th century as opposed to the Holy Land of the 12th). I’m also interested to see the return to a more linear gameplay style, much though that goes against some of my instincts. I just want to know if, after a three year break (which constitutes the longest between major releases in series history, though they’ve got a game set in Feudal Japan and another in the Holy Roman Empire coming next), AC can find the magic it may have lost along the way.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
FY 2024
Developed by Massive Entertainment (formerly Ubisoft Massive) and Published by Ubisoft.
Why I’m Interested: I didn’t much care for the first Avatar movie but the second one floored me with its visuals so I’m incredibly curious what Ubisoft’s open-world action-adventure formula will bring to a “never before seen region” of James Cameron’s beautiful world. The man has made a lot of money, will it suffer Ubisoft exploiting Pandora like the RDA to make it a microtransaction factory?
AEW Fight Forever
Release date TBD but allegedly 2023
Once upon a time, EA released EA MMA. The game featured Strikeforce and Mystic as opposed to the THQ-published UFC-exclusive title developed by Osaka-based developer Yuke’s, as well as faster-paced more fluid combat. Then UFC bought Strikeforce, eventually folded it, and gradually did things like removed the ability for fighters to get external sponsors on their fight gear, having more or less monopolized the top level of the sport. Then EA started making “EA UFC.” EA is who Dana White and the UFC wanted in the first place, casting THQ and Yuke’s aside. THQ used to publish the WWE games developed by Yuke’s, but now they’re made by 2K, one of two major publishing houses (alongside EA) in sports games. AEW is the next biggest wrestling entertainment promotion after WWE. They’re not small potatoes (they’re owned by Tony Khan, billionaire son of the Jaguars’ billionaire owner Shahid Khan, who bought and folded in the Ring of Honor promotion), but they’re the biggest challenger to WWE’s dominance. WWE just merged with the company that owns UFC, which isn’t exactly pertinent but is a bigger sign of the corporate atmosphere around sports and games and media and everything else – further consolidation, less choice for consumers, less protection for labor. AEW Fight Forever isn’t going to fix any of that on its own, but it will at least give wrestling fans another major game to play, which is more than can reasonably claimed for fans of any of the other sports dominated by EA (football, soccer, hockey) or 2K (baseball, basketball). If competition is going to disappear from certain genres, sports, or what have you, it should be because of product quality, not financial or legal exclusion from the marketplace.
Recent Releases I’m Excited About
Marvel’s Midnight Suns was super-fun in the short time I had with the trial. The only reason I haven’t purchased it is because of my existing backlog I keep going on about. It’s such a cool concept to me to make a card-based strategy game that also leans into relationships in a way that echoes what people love about Mass Effect, Persona, and Fire Emblem. To make it go nearly 70 hours, even. The director split from Firaxis after more than two decades with the studio, apparently (but I don’t think officially; rather he’s interested in building a studio to make life sims) because it didn’t move the units the publisher wanted, which is a real shame.
More recent than that is the return of Cal Kestis in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, follow-up to a game I much enjoyed. (That’s its predecessor Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, not prequel; a prequel is a sequel set chronologically before within the universe of a story, not a game/movie/book that precedes it. Words have meaning, and this conflation makes me crazy) It’s the most reviews I’ve read of a game in some time. It shouldn’t have been rushed out to meet Corporate Star Wars Day, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy it whenever I get to it. The worst reviews I’ve heard are “it’s a lot like Fallen Order,” and the best reviews are “this might be a GOTY contender,” and I’m very comfortable operating in that space.
Older Releases I Want to Get to
If I ever beat Final Fantasy VII, I’m going to pursue Final Fantasy X and X-2, the two of which originally came out on PS2, were ported to PS3, and are now available on XSX. So, all my systems.
Dragon Quest XI was on Game Pass when I first got it, and left before I ever started playing it. Also want to play Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2, the first I ever heard of and one of the most beloved.
One the thing about JRPGs is I’m actually really into pixel art (the only ones I’ve really put hours and hours into are the first three generations of Pokémon and Golden Sun, and that’s why the original Octopath Traveler appeals to me. It left Game Pass, so I’ll have to buy it for real sometime; I hear its sequel blows it out of the water, but that one won’t be on Xbox for a while (released exclusively to Nintendo and Sony, as JRPGs were wont to do for a long time).
More than that, I need to play the original Hironobu Sakaguchi-Yuji Horii collaboration before the Square-Enix merger, Chrono Trigger, which is available on PC now. But I need to get through FFVII first, since I already bought it. Though I’m also supposed to be playing Persona 4 for an RPG book club this summer. Will update on how and if that gets accomplished.
Last but not least is not a new game release, exactly, but new DLC for one of my favorite games. Suzerain: Rizia is coming later this year. For their May Broadcast, Torpor Games announced that they are releasing new DLC for genre-bending political RPG Suzerain – a prequel wherein you play a king near the original geographical space of the Republic of Sordland – as well as a new free content update that will further deepen an already very deep game. I had the pleasure of interviewing game developer Ata Sergey Nowak back in 2021. Besides this, they’re doing a standalone prequel adventure game where you play a spy, called The Conformist. Suzerain is a deeply engaging, thoughtful political RPG, it’s unlike anything else I’ve played, and I’m excited to see their continuing to build on it (it started on PC, and is now also on Switch and mobile; hopefully it comes to X-Box one day – I’ve got it on my laptop and my phone).
Alright, now that’s to bed. I’ll let you all know if I hear of, see, or read about anything else super exciting. I’ve heard a couple of interesting podcasts about Wartales, but I’m not sure my PC has the horses. I need to update and jump back into Chaotic Era while it’s still in early access (purchasable through itch.io or Steam; I highly recommend either way). I’ll be back soon for my Most Anticipated Movies of the Summer and Fall, links to work published in other spaces, and other random thoughts (maybe further reflections on sports, maybe something else).