2015’s Cautiously Optimistic Games – GameSided Roundtable
Greetings! This is our weekly GameSided Roundtable feature, where our writers converge to provide their opinions, wishes, statements or critical thought on one general topic centered around video games. Sometimes it can be funny, sometimes it can be serious. Contemporary, classic; we hope to cover a wide variety of things in this segment as a group. If you wish to submit an idea for a GameSided Roundtable discussion topic, you can leave the editor an email at: daniel.george@fansided.com. We’ll totally give you (and your Twitter account, if applicable) a shoutout!
This week’s GameSided Roundtable topic: “What 2015 game are you most cautiously optimistic about?”
Martin Benn (Twitter)
I am cautiously optimistic about The Order: 1886. The game has many of the things I like in my fiction; Knights of the Round Table, Lycan lore, alternative history, and other things I really enjoy in books and movies. My cautious outlook is in response to the game being delayed on not just one occasion, but three occasions. These polishes could have been just graphical, but with a delay of over a year there was likely a lot of changes to a bit more of the game than just the graphics.
I prefer the delay approach as opposed to the Day 1, Day 15, Day 30, and Day 45 patches to fix games that have taken place this year, yet it is still difficult to shake some of the concern over how a game delayed for significant periods of time will deliver.
Keith Myers (Twitter)
The Order: 1886.
My worry isn’t for any specific reason, other than the hype I’ve seen for this game. This is an ambitious world that they are working to create, and one in which they can change the year in later titles and move to a completely different era in history.
The real concern for me is that they spent too much time creating a new franchise, and not enough making this particular game. Ubisoft made this mistake with the original Assassin’s Creed game, as did Activision with Destiny.
Hopefully, Ready At Dawn learned from the mistakes of those other games and made sure this edition works as a stand-alone game. I’m excited for this game, but I’m also a bit worried.
Daniel George (Twitter)
Ubisoft had an unbearable 2014. Whether it be the release of games that were broken at launch, microtransaction-heavy or drastically different from preview marketing materials, their AAA offerings last year set the company in a bad light. However, if there’s any AAA title coming out in 2015 that can reverse this outlook, to me it will be in Tom Clancy’s The Division.
Showcased first as Ubisoft’s E3 2013 conference cliffhanger, not much is exactly known about The Division. We know it will be a near-future team-based third-person MMORPG shooter developed entirely for next-gen and PC. Ubisoft’s Red Storm will be working on the project, who have brought us many top-notch Tom Clancy games in the past. Even back in 2013, it looked visually impressive and recent game engine update videos have confirmed that it’s still looking sharp. Plus, the team-based tactics seem to work well in third person versus first.
However, this is Ubisoft we’re talking about, here. We’ve been duped by early visuals before, and it’s possible to happen again. The grimy just-post-apocalyptic New York setting provides an intriguing look, but with Destiny’s late-2014 release people may get burned out with the genre. It would be a shame, as we could be seeing a circumstance where the early bird gets the worm.
Next: Three Multiplayer Games That Are Very Different Beasts