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."

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

[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!

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.