It's a good year to be a gamer, isn't it? There are so many releases slated for the following months.. it makes NOT burning a hole right through your wallet very difficult. At least for me. Where awesome games are concerned, I have little to no restraint. Probably a good reason as to why I got into game development in the first place. Haha.

I'm curious. What game has you waiting with baited breath for its release?

Mine's kind of a toss-up.. there's a lot of really good stuff coming. There are two indie titles in the works that I'm really excited about, for starters.  One is called Cube World , being developed by a one-man army that goes by the handle "Wollay". The first thing anyone would likely say upon seeing the game would be "minecraft clone", but the reality is the game seems to have more in common with Diablo and other loot-happy action RPGs. There's less crafting and house-building, and more exploring caves and forests and such, hacking and slashing your way through skeletons and orcs and stuff. Truth be told, I'm not sure what sort of balance the game has between sandbox and RPG.. it's a very lofty goal, trying to marry the two of those elements in a really engaging way. Something the Terraria guys did rather well, but Wollay seems to be taking to a 3D world instead.
Speaking of the Terraria folks, that brings me to the next indie release I'm looking forward to. Tiy, the sprite artist who helped put Terraria together, is heading his own project called Starbound, a multiplayer sandbox adventure game about exploring the galaxy and claiming a planet as your own. It seems like the next iteration of the popular sandbox formula, with features like exploring planets, terraforming them to your liking, inviting characters you've met in your journey to live there, taking care of them, etc. THAT has me excited. One of the best things about a sandbox game is carving out your own little nook, and making it truly unique, then having others able to come over and see what you've done. Extending that customization to an ENTIRE PLANET? That is awesome. Procedural generation of planets sounds like a fantastic thing, since I always did worry about having to create new worlds in Terraria just to keep up with the rapid depletion of resources me and my friends caused on our shared online world. I love anything that allows me to just really settle down in, and begin building and building without worrying about such things. I wish Team Chucklefish the best with this project, and I will be there on day one when it's released. :]

And in all this talk of action RPGs, hacking, slashing, looting and the like.. well. I'm willing to bet at least one person out there thought of another game with all those other features, slated for release in the near future.. of course I'm talking about none other than Diablo III.  I played Diablo II until my wrists were ready to spring for early retirement from the art world.  My god. Loot-centric games are the devil. (Pun fully intended.) There's not really much to be said about this game, to be honest, as anyone who enjoys action RPGs most definitely is aware of this anticipated release. Your attitude about the release may differ, of course. There are a few controversial things coming along with Diablo III, so I've learned. One of which is the real money auction system, implemented to curb the exchange of cash for ingame items amongst the playerbase. The other, arguably more notorious issue, is the need to always be online when playing the game. It renders it more an MMO in that sense, though the merits of that approach with a game so well suited to extensive single player gaming is.. debatable, I'll say that much. Hell. I'm still going to be buying the game first day, and I'm willing to bet a great deal of its naysayers will be doing the same exact thing. Blizz just makes damn fine games, there are no two ways around that.


But, all in all, I never did really say what was my MOST anticipated game this year, did I? Welp. Got to say, without a bit of doubt in my mind, Guild Wars 2. The sheer amount of innovation Arenanet is putting into this game ALONE has me excited, never mind the character creation, gorgeous artwork and extensive lore. Making the combat 100% cooperative so that everyone involved in any fight gets full credit, being able to dodge/roll out of the way of attacks ingame instead of just whacking one another repeatedly in a standstill, implementing a server queue system that allows you to take your character to a different server and play while waiting for a queue to finish on your current server in the event of overpopulation, and above all, ABOLISHING THE MMO TRINITY OF TANK/HEALER/DPS. This is utterly fantastic. I can't name how many times in previous MMOs I'd wanted to play a certain class, but ended up re-rolling because the pressures of being a tank or healer far outweighed the consistent need for them. The idea of being incredibly important to a team in the way a healer or tank generally is.. well, it was always alluring. But my god, the pressure? In order to stay competitive or participate in any higher level content, it always seemed like tanks need to play the game nonstop just to keep their gear CONSTANTLY tipped off, or you can't stay toe-to-toe with anything worthwhile. Blech! Granted, I am more of a DPS man myself, but I'd at least like the option to try out another class without feeling the need to perform at WoW-raid levels of uncompromising difficulty. The idea that in GW2, you can just assemble a team of any five people together and go out adventuring? With everyone helping to keep everybody else alive? No CONCRETE ROLE, just making your well-being based on everyone's level of skill, not just the healer? Oh hell yes. I could not be more excited about this game, and I applaud Arenanet for the steps they're attempting to take to change up the standard MMO formula. Now I just need to figure out whether to main a Thief or an Engineer..


But enough about what I'm looking forward to. What about you guys? Any of you going to be playing the games I mentioned above?