The Games That Will Define 2013: part 5
Feature
Part 5 of the games we think will define 2013. They might not all be AAA titles, but they will make a difference this year.
WATCH_DOGS
Ubisoft Montreal has amply demonstrated their ability to create compelling narratives and believable worlds through Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry. WATCH_DOGS, their latest foray into open-world experiences, first revealed in a mesmerizing trailer during E3 2012, allows the player to hack into any and all electronic systems and use it to their advantage. This is the first game in which the digital age will be made available for you to observe, hack and tamper to your will, in a dynamic urban metropolis. The game also features hand-to-hand combat, dynamic firefights, and parkour-style traversal of the populated metropolitan areas.
The initial gameplay footage showcased the player using the city’s central Operating System (ctOS) to jam signals on cellphones, tap into a live conversation, determine a person’s aptitude for violence via detailed personal history, and change traffic signals at will to cause a pileup. Whether you can hack into your ex’s email account remains to be seen!
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Fortnite
Fortnite is being developed by Epic Games, the studio behind the critically lauded and beloved Gears of War series. It is a co-op, sandbox, survival game where you scavenge by day and fight (survive) by night. During daylight, you will need to find and gather raw materials of all sorts that will aid you in building your fort. Then you build said fort, laying down walls, stairs, ceilings, traps and all manner of doodads in between. At night, monsters throw themselves at your fort in a desperate attempt to breach it.
There are two reasons why Fortnite is an important game in 2013. It will be the first game to use the Unreal 4 engine, and it will be a marked departure from a studio that specializes in beefy space marine protagonists and the colors black, brown and muzzle-flash. There is a difference between trying something new for the sake of ingenuity and evolution and trying something new simply because you do not want to be labeled as “that beefcake studio”. Whether Epic Games will be able to pull it off, especially after longtime President Mike Capps stepping down, remains to be seen.
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Planetary Annihilation
Planetary Annihilation’s first trailer shocked and awed audiences on August 15, 2012. True to its name, the trailer showed the ability to retrofit an asteroid with boosters and crash it into the enemy base on the planet. It was an unprecedented, novel take on what many consider to be a dying genre, and may well be the breath of fresh air it needs. The popularity of the Kickstarted game can be gauged by the fact that Uber Entertainment was able to raise $2,228,000, when they initially asked for a backing of only $900,000.
Jon Mavor, lead designer for the game, has revealed some tasty bits of information about the game so far. Matches can be short half-hour battles between two sides, or massive 40-player skirmishes across multiple planets or even systems. Maps are planet based and thus circular, so you can walk in one direction until you get back to the point where you started. Following the inspiration from 1997’s Total Annihilation, the focus is on the macro with the developers aiming to game a million in-game units. My first order of business, crash a giant meteor into those smug Australians. Those smug kangaroos!
0x10c
Inspired by 1984’s Elite and the Nathan Fillion starred Firefly, the man behind MineCraft has a new project in the pipeline and it is called 0x10c. That fact, alone, should be reason enough to look forward to this game. But then you take one look at the list of features, and it keeps getting better and better.
It is the year 281,474,976,712,644 AD. Why? Because a bug in the deep sleep cells (invented in a parallel universe where the space race never ended in 1988) caused the shipmates to sleep for that long. These long lost are finally waking up, and all they have is a ship with a fully-functional 16-bit CPU. Everything you do on the ship requires wattage, and you have to manage it carefully in order to ensure you run the smoothest enterprise. You can write code to run on the DCPU, and perhaps even exchange scripts with other pilots. There will be random encounters, an advanced economy system, space-to-planet transitions, mining, engineering, space battles, trading and laser guns! The game will feature of a consistent universe, called the Multiverse. The single-player (boring!) will not require a monthly fee, whereas the multi-player will.
Oh and according to Notch, it is pronounced “ten to the see”. You have been warned people!
Read part 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the series.