GregHowley.com

I realized recently that there aren't too many upcoming games that I'm really honestly looking forward to. I'd been looking forward to Beyond: Two Souls, but the reviews panned the game. I'm hoping that when I play that game, eventually, I like it more than the reviewers. I was looking forward to Batman: Arkham Origins as well, but between the new studio and the lack of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, I'm not sure how great that one will be either.

Still, after looking into it, I did come up with a short list of upcoming games that I am looking forward to.

Project Eternity

This is the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate for which I've been waiting. It's a fantasy RPG, real-time combat which you can pause to issue commands. It's purported to explore adult issues such as slavery, drug use, and bigotry. Given that the mature themes in Dragon Age: Origins were a huge part of why I loved that game so much, I'm very much looking forward to what Obsidian is doing with Project Eternity. They're hoping to release the game in Spring 2014.

Thief

"Violence is left as a minimally effective last resort." Ah, Thief. That's what I love. Although I didn't play the first two Thief games, I did love the third, Deadly Shadows and its latter-day spinoff clone, Dishonored. This game is more of the same. It's a reboot rather than a fourth sequel, hence it's no longer Thief 4 or Thi4f.

I can't expect anything out of this game to rival The Shalebridge Cradle level in Thief: Deadly Shadows, but it should still be an enjoyable game.

Wasteland 2

Everybody heard about the big-ass kickstarter for Wasteland 2 in 2012. If you don't belong to that particular everybody, Wasteland is an old old game that I played on my Commodore 64 when I was a kid. The original combined the top-down strategic combat of my beloved Ultima series with the faux-3D first person view of The Bards Tale series, and all of that in a well-realized tongue-in-cheek post-apocolyptic world. The new Wasteland game is going to be the same thing, but much updated.

It takes place in an alternate history in which there was a nuclear war in 1998. It's turn-based, party-based, and lets you create four characters and recruit an additional three. And the NPCs are going to have their own agendas, a la Baldur's Gate. Sounds awesome.

Wasteland 2 should be beginning public beta testing any day now, as their site says "November 2013". Woo!

Dragon Age: Inquisition

I loved Dragon Age: Origins. I've played the game two and a half times, and that's not a short game. It's a shame that the sequel turned me off so badly that I couldn't even complete the demo.

This third game is giving Bioware a chance to redeem themselves. I don't think I've ever played the first and third game in a series without playing the second, but I guess there's a first time for everything. If the reviews paint a good picture of the game and it seems more like DA:O than DA2, I'll probably buy it.