Not Just Call of Duty – The Next Year of First-Person Shooters
What’s on the horizon?
While Call of Duty may be all that’s on the minds of most FPS gamers, a few will have their heads raised just enough to see the awesome collection of FPS games due to hit our shelves over the next year. Here’s what we’ve got in store.
New Games
There’s an increasingly accurate truism that says ‘it’s easier to update than to invent’. The First-Person Shooter games market, we could argue, stands to prove this as fact. But that’s not entirely correct – invention, rather than innovation, exists in the future FPS market too. Here are a few of the best new games on the market:
Tomb Raider. We haven’t seen Lara Croft in a long, long time (2008, in the reasonably OK Tomb Raider: Underworld). For many of us, that’s been a good thing – Halo 4’s development team recently wrote acridly about the prevalence of anti-female sexism on Xbox Live – but there might still be life in the old girl yet. Spawning comic books, roller coaster rides and a whole novel series, why are we sticking the age-old franchise on as a ‘new game’? Because it’s a reboot, that’s why. We’re going to see a younger, edgier Lara Croft taking on a whole host of Oriental challenges. It looks fun. FPS? Well, nearly.
HAWKEN. Mech-based FPSes just haven’t had all the exposure they deserve. HAWKEN aims to change this. It’s a thrilling reimagining of the tried-and-tested man-in-a-machine formula, but this time we’ve got Oculus Rift compatibility built-in, as well as next-generation graphics.
Updates to older lines.
Older lines are still getting a fair bit of attention, too. And it’s little wonder – games like Call of Duty are the revenue powerhouses for larger games studios. What’s coming?
Halo 4. Halo 4 seeks to reinvent the line that made reinvention a staple. The dev team is unusually broad-minded; headed by 343 Industries head Bonnie Ross and produced by executive producer Kiki Wolfkill, there’s a possibility that Halo 4 could take the franchise in a whole new direction. A less stereotypical approach to gender equality would make a welcome change in the FPS industry.
Dead Space 3. EA’s follow-on to the successful horror sci-fi FPS franchise that is Dead Space sees Isaac Clarke and John Carver travelling halfway across the galaxy to discover the source of the Necromorph outbreak. With hints of FEAR and Prey, and all the sci-fi elements of Alien, Dead Space 3 is one of the most exciting titles on the horizon right now.
Crysis 3. What list of upcoming shooters would be complete without the next installment of the hardware-busting benchmark FPS that is Crysis? It’s hard to express the frenzy of anticipation that lies in wait for what has been described as “the most badass Crysis ever”.
That’s by no means everything that’s coming. We’ve got a new Call of Duty: Black Ops, Hitman: Absolution, Bioshock: Infinite and Far Cry 3 on the way. There’s another Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid in the pipeline, too. Whichever way you look at it, 2013 is definitely going to be the year of the shooter.
