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Upcoming PC Games in 2019
Jolene Dobbin
|
November 3, 2018
Warning: Some of the video games listed below are not suitable for younger viewers. Please use caution and check each game’s ESRB rating before allowing children to play it, especially those rated M for Mature. M-rated video games may contain content that is inappropriate for children and/or unlabeled content that exposes younger viewers to explicit messages and themes.
While 2018 quickly comes to a close, gamers have set their sights on what to play next within the coming year. We’ve put together a gaming guide to help you discover new game releases and PC games slated for 2019.
Learn what these trending titles have in store for PC gaming fans everywhere, including new characters and storyline updates, gameplay enhancements, and epic visuals. Here are 8 of the best new game releases and top new PC games to look forward to in 2019.
1. Metro Exodus by 4A Games
An upcoming and highly anticipated game, Metro Exodus is the third installment in the Metro series of video games, based in the world created by Russian novelist Dmitry Glukovsky. In 2002, he imagined a post-apocalyptic Moscow where a young hero named Artyom struggled to survive in the maze of the mutant-laden Russian subway system.
Accordingly, he wrote a novel he released online, where it gained a massive following and has since gone on to be a worldwide bestseller, translated into many different languages. It has spawned both a shared world where other authors tell stories, as well as an interactive empire of video games, starting with Metro 2033 and continuing in Metro: Last Light.
Metro Exodus is a first-person shooter/stealth game that employs the latest, most polished iteration of the 4A Engine. It will present the player with a vast and detailed world that ambitiously combines many different genres of gameplay and styles: survival horror, stealth, exploration and discovery, and tactical combat.
With Metro Exodus, 4A brings Artyom out of the underground tunnel system and into the wasteland of nuclear-ravaged Russia, opening up a sprawling sandbox-style gaming experience in the horror-filled world.
Metro Exodus will give the Metro fan an open-storytelling style and world similar to Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2; how you choose to have Artyom navigate the physical and moral landscape will affect how the story unfolds, and the ultimate fate of your character and the world he survives in.
Previous versions had a "morality system" that tracked how you played Artyom and interacted with non-playing characters (NPCs) which adjusted the game’s ending according to your choices. Metro Exodus promises a richer and more dynamic open world, where these choices and gameplay styles affect much more.
The expansion into the world above, and the scale and scope of the game will see you playing through all different seasons and weather conditions, which will dynamically affect the types of things you will be running into as well as the strategies that will work to deal with them. For instance, during rainstorms, it becomes harder for creatures to hear you sneaking up on them, making sniping an easier and more effective strategy.
Taking the Metro play mechanics above ground, while still offering the tense stealth and shooting aspects established in the previous games, opens up whole new approaches to surviving and completing the story.
2. Ori and the Will of the Wisps by Moon Studios
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a side-scrolling, platforming/adventure sequel to 2015’s Ori and the Blind Forest. This is a genre made popular way back in the 1980s with classic Nintendo NES games like Metroid, Castlevania, or Blaster Master, but updated for the present technical world with polished, beautiful graphics, an orchestral score, and a more robust series of upgrades and elements that modern computers and consoles can provide.
In the original Blind Forest game, players guided Ori, a guardian spirit, through a mystical, mythical adventure to restore the balance of the elements of Waters, Winds, and Warmth to restore and revive the ruined and withered forest from a wasteland to a wonderland once more.
In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, developer Moon Studios seeks to expand upon all of the gameplay elements that they nailed in the first installment. They see this game as sort of spiritual inheritor to the kind of old-school platform game sequels that really upped the ante back in the day. Lead developer Thomas Mahler said, “Will of the Wisps should be to Blind Forest what Super Mario Bros. 3 was to the original Super Mario Bros [1]."
For those of you too young to know, this means a lot. While the original Super Mario Brothers was a genre-defining milestone and instant classic, Super Mario Bros. 3 managed to deliver the same gameplay elements and skills while pushing the boundaries in every possible direction; it’s seen, to this day, as one of the most ambitious and successful sequels ever made, expanding into huge and innovative directions. Moon Studios is looking to do the same, taking Ori out of the forest and into the bigger world beyond the Forests of Nibel to discover and achieve his destiny.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps will be a throwback to a style of platform-jumping, pattern-unlocking, boss-battling gaming but with the production values and emotion of a high-end animated movie; the inspiration for the feel and scope of the story was “The Lion King meets the Iron Giant,” but set in a lush and magical, beautiful and organic world of painted forests and animal spirits.
3. Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red
Cyberpunk 2077 is from CD Projekt Red, the studio and team that brought us the award-winning The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Blood and Wine) and, from the preliminary buzz, it looks like they’ve done it again.
Instead of the third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective of The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077 is presented as an all first-person game, seeing the player assume the role of V, a mercenary in the sprawling open-world metropolis of Night City, California.
Just who V is is wholly up to the player: a highly customizable character engine sees you choosing the sex, body type, hairstyle, body modifications, and background of the character you will guide. These choices will have impact. How you craft your personal V, what clothes you choose, and what cyber-punk style and aesthetic you create will affect how different NPCs in the game react to him or her; from attraction to enmity.
It is set in a William Gibson-style near-future world of implanted neural tech and bio-hacking upgrades and wetware. This means the kinds of gear and modifications you acquire will lead you through many different possible playthroughs. You’ll explore and take contracts in the six different regions of Night City: the corporate, high-end tech and building of the City Center area; the lower-class immigrant enclave of Watson; the moneyed elite homes of Westbrook; the gang violence of Pacifica; the suburbs of Heywood; and the factories and docks of Santo Domingo.
Numerous quests and sub-quests are in the offing, all depending on who and how you decide to make and play V at the heart of your particular story.
In the wake of E3 2018, the preview of Cyberpunk 2077 won a pile of awards, including Best Game, Best PC Game, and Game of the Show at Game Informer, so this is definitely an upcoming game to watch for.
4. Kingdom Hearts 3 by Square Enix
Kingdom Hearts 3 has been a long time coming. The world of Kingdom Hearts is a strange mash-up of old-school Japanese role-playing (JRPG) style characters of the Square Enix Final Fantasy franchise with the pantheon of Walt Disney characters from Mickey, Goofy, and Donald through to all the various Princess and animated Disney properties.
On paper, it sounds absurd. But in practice it has captured the imaginations and gameplay hours of millions of gamers through a series of games, for multiple platforms of video game systems, starting way back in 2002, with the original Kingdom Hearts launching on the home console Sony PlayStation 2.
Don’t let the “3” fool you into thinking that there have only been two previous installments of the franchise. Ten other Kingdom Hearts games have been released, leaping from platform to platform, across handheld systems, mobile phones, and PCs… not to mention the “remix collections” released!
So the release of “3” in January of 2019 comes as a very big deal for a very big installed user fan base that has been growing for sixteen years now.
Legendary game director Tetsuya Nomura has revealed that all of the various prequel hand-held and mobile versions of the game have been an ongoing experiment in different approaches to combat and game dynamics, and that the release of Kingdom Hearts 3 will synthesize and tweak the elements that worked well in each, all while maintaining the same hack-and-slash feel that Kingdom Hearts 2 perfected.
Animators and artists from all the various Disney and Pixar movies whose “worlds” the characters will visit were brought in on the design to ensure that each realm has the true feel of the movie and properties, ensuring that Kingdom Hearts 3 will be a visual wonder and delight.
This time around, the Square Enix JRPG hero Sora returns to team up with a host of returning party members and new characters, as well as Mickey, Goofy, Donald Duck, and Jiminy Cricket, to explore the worlds and realms of the animated movies Toy Story, Big Hero 6, Monsters, Inc., Frozen, Tangled, Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
The Final Fantasy characters are transplanted into the Disney worlds to fight and adventure alongside their cartoon friends. The plot follows the previous game, with the Seven Guardians of Light confronting the Thirteen Darknesses, to thwart the sinister plans of the evil Master Xehanort, who, like all sinister masters of evil, just wants to destroy everything.
5. Anthem by BioWare
Anthem is an intriguing release for 2019. The minds at BioWare software (makers of Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age) have come up with a wholly new world of sci-fi fantasy in the form of Anthem, a single or cooperative squad-based online multiplayer sci-fi role-playing game (RPG). Adventuring heroes playing the role of “Freelancers” pilot exo-suits called “Javelins” to explore and conquer the uncharted lands and worlds beyond their own.
They are planning for this to be a “10-year journey” in gaming, with Anthem being the first in a world-building series, in a similar way that the arc of the seminal Mass Effect world spelled itself out. If their past development is precedent, getting in on the ground floor with Anthem would seem to make sense for the gamer who wants rich, sustained, and well-thought-out narratives with plenty of combat and action along the way.
6. Devil May Cry 5 by Capcom
When a game has reached its fifth sequel, there must be something that keeps people coming back. The Devil May Cry series of games are hack-and-slash third-person shooter games with a heavy emphasis on action and constant combat, developed by the same designer who created the survival horror genre of games with Resident Evil.
The world of Devil May Cry 5 is not our own, but rather an alternate world where demons and humans have interacted for a long time and built a kind of alternate modern timeline. The backstory involves a noble demon knight called Sparda who, thousands of years ago, defeated an ambitious demon lord intent on overrunning the human world. Sparda formed the Order of the Sword here in the human realm, fell in love with a human bride, and fathered two children: Dante and Vergil, the heroes of the game.
Of course, the star-crossed love of demon and mortal will never end well. Mundus, the overlord that Sparda thought he had defeated those thousands of years prior, murdered the beautiful Eva, mother of Dante and Vergil. Dante then set about to avenge his mother’s death way, way back in 2001 when the original Devil May Cry was released.
Fast forward to 2019, where Dante and Nero (introduced in Devil May Cry 4) are sent on a mysterious mission that sees them hunting a string of demons across the world, this time with a new robotic, prosthetic combat-ready arm dubbed “Devil Breaker.”
Quite honestly, it’s all very trippy with weird continuity, and has spawned manga animation, comics and novellas, but the draw is the “stylish” combat system that has the player fluidly blocking, intercepting, and chain-combination striking waves of opponents that becomes second nature as you play.
Millions of copies of the various installations of the game have been sold across different generations of home consoles and PCs, and Devil May Cry 5 promises to bring more of the same fun that has kept them coming. This time, though, it’s with photorealistic graphics built with the newest game development engine in Capcom’s studios.
7. Beyond Good and Evil 2 by Ubisoft Montpellier
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is kind of like “the little engine that could” of video game sequels. It is a follow up to a critical darling of a sleeper-hit game with a cult following, originally released in 2003 for the original Xbox home video game console. The original game followed Jade, a spunky young photojournalist adventurer in the year 2345 and her guardian Pey’j, a kind of lovable, brawny boar-creature. They live on a distant planet called Hillys, which is under siege by an invading alien force.
It’s a compelling and quirky story. The true likability of its protagonist, along with innovative gameplay of puzzle solving, stealth, and investigative journalism, made it a game that was much loved and raved about by the people who discovered it. In fact, because of this small but passionate group who played it, a dedicated bunch of developers, who seem genuinely in love with the project, are planning on releasing its sequel in 2019.
If a game idea has people who believe in it so much, it just might be worth discovering for yourself.
8. Psychonauts 2 by Double Fine Productions
Psychonauts 2 is another passion project sequel to a game with a small but dedicated cult following. Tim Schafer of Double Fine had always loved the original platform, which failed to become a financial success in its 2005 release for Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation, but has garnered critical acclaim for its funny and smart approach to platforming.
Over the years, with re-releases and nostalgia-based retro-gaming, a community of gamers have recognized Psychonauts as an overlooked sleeper classic, and it has become a kind of “gamer’s game for gamers,” as a hidden gem.
So much so that Double Fine launched a crowdfunding drive for the development of the sequel through the software crowdfunding site Fig, and raised over $3.8 million from more than 24,000 backers in 38 days, securing development funding for this labor of love [2]. The plan for a 2019 release to a small but enthusiastic player base sees the return of the original voice actors, as well as movie and voiceover star Jack Black, of School of Rock, Kung Fu Panda, and Tenacious D fame.
[1] Bandcamp Daily; Gareth Coker is a Name You Should Know in Video Game Music
[2] GameSpot; Psychonauts 2 Successful Funding Campaign has Ended
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About the Author: Jolene Dobbin is a contributing writer for HP® Tech Takes. Jolene is an East Coast-based writer with experience creating strategic messaging, marketing, and sales content for companies in the high-tech industry.
