I know that looks a bit like 2074, but it says 2014.
2014 was a year defined by new technology, impassioned discussion of social issues, billion dollar expenditures, and bold new frontiers in how badly a huge organization can fuck something up. It was a lot like the 1960s, only with Ubisoft instead of ‘Nam.
We entered 2014 with an entirely new generation of video game consoles. The latest and greatest machines feature the most advanced hardware, an increasing move toward digital delivery of gaming and other entertainment content, and a new focus on sharing video gaming experiences over social media. Gamers now have access to truly next generation hardware, and also the WiiU.
I’m just teasing the WiiU! I love Nintendo and you cannot argue with the value of the experiences they delivered on their console in 2014.
It’s unfortunate that they are simply a smaller company than their competitors. Sony and Microsoft have the resources and connections to fill their latest offerings, the PS4 and Xbox One, respectively, with hardware so cutting edge that it is only matched by the most mid-range of PCs from 3 years ago. Truly stunning technical achievements.
All that being said, let's look at some of the biggest news in gaming in 2014!
Sony announces Playstation Now, a new way to play games you probably already own, but at greatly increased cost. After a January announcement, the service went into open beta Playstation Later, and will be worth subscribing to Playstation Maybe Next Year.
In the first of many high profile acquisitions, Microsoft buys the Gears of War franchise from a Bleszinski-less Epic Games. In a statement, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer assured gamers that Microsoft was hard at work destroying this beloved franchise: “I wanted to make sure I had a great internal team, similar to what we did when Bungie moved out and Halo moved to 343 [Industries].” Look for the inevitable Gears of War Collection from wherever fine video games are sold and, more importantly, wherever multiple fine video game patches are downloaded from!
Tomb Raider Definitive Edition lands on PS4 and XBO. I played Tomb Raider Indefinite Edition on PC, so I can’t be for sure, but I think there was a tie-in with Digital Foundry offering free pre-spun console war talking points with the rerelease:
For its part, performance on Xbox One is palpably lower - massively so judged by the numbers alone, but the experience itself is more consistent overall.
I’m not sure how “It’s worse, but it’s at least consistent in achieving that worse performance” is a reasonable thing to say, but there you go.
Having set the kickstarter world on fire, Broken Age and The Banner Saga finally arrive to set the gaming world on medium-low heat.
The sublime Nidhogg, previously only available for play at gaming conferences, arrives. Reviews, while praising the fast-paced nature of the game and its ability to deliver an endless string of memorable moments, fail to label Nidhogg as “Joust meets Bushido Blade.” What is this - amateur hour?
Celebrated developer Irrational Games shuts down, possibly because of my personal disappointment with Bioshock Infinite, or maybe because of all the reports that kept appearing about what a butthole Ken Levine is. Whatever the case, fans of the series have been left adrift, waiting for another developer to deliver an FPS combining all the pretension of a high schooler with a library card with some of the most tedious shooter mechanics outside of Call of Duty. Hopefully someone will step up to the plate!
Hit iOS game template, Threes, launches. The game is named after the number of knockoffs of itself it lost out to on the appstore bestseller list in the first week of its launch.
Bravely Default lands on 3DS, calling back to a time when Squaresoft had a more experimental attitude towards both their games and their use of the English language. “This guy are Bravely Default!” indeed.
In other Square-Enix news (there will be a lot!), Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is released. This is a sequel to Final Fantasy XIII-2, but now with a subtitle placed before its main name. Innovation! Square deserves some credit for bucking the industry trend of dropping the numbers and subtitles from later games in popular series (e.g. “Tomb Raider”
, as well as for only taking three iterations of the the same Final Fantasy to make one that remotely resembles anything people actually want to play.Speaking of reboots, another Square-published sequel arrives - Thief. It is garbage and the series should be re-rebooted right away. Go ahead and call this one Thief again - I don’t really care and you’ve shown you REALLY don’t care. I will say that Thief is interesting for its cold open, which finds you in a room with an unknown drunk man passed out across the bed. The question I asked myself is, “Wait…am I gay? Did I just have sex with this man?” And frankly, I had the same questions about my character in the game, too.
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze arrives. Nintendo fans will be livid if I don’t say more about his game.
March turns out to be a big month for virtual reality, with Sony officially announcing their VR solution, Project Morpheus, and Facebook acquiring VR frontrunners Oculus VR for a cool 4/5 the-cost-of-the-rights-to-Minecraft dollars. The news that Facebook, the popular site for making your personal information available at no cost to advertisers, has acquired Oculus VR is met with palpable relief from the gaming community. Thank God this exciting technology won’t be left to small, independent, impassioned companies to develop!
South Park: The Stick of Truth, developed by Obsidian Games and published by “it’s a long story…” finally hits store shelves. Despite being an RPG with snappy writing, the game is barely recognizable as an Obsidian product due to the lack of egregious software bugs and cut content. Makers of unofficial game patches have their fingers crossed that Obsidian will return to form with Project Eternity.
In a rare case of Square-Enix re-releasing one of their games on a new platform, Final Fantasy X and X-2 HD Remaster(s) are launched for PS3 (fixed) and Vita. Gamers beg SE to consider bringing more of their classic games to just a few carefully chosen new platforms. But according to SE CEO Yosuke Matsuda, “The thought of remaking our old games on the cheap and selling them at exorbitant markups on fucking cell phones or some shit makes me physically ill. We would never do that.”
WoW CCG spinoff Hearthstone is officially released on PC, giving gamers an entirely new way to become addicted to a WarCraft product. Curiously, the three original RTS Warcrafts - the actual Warcraft Warcrafts, have proven to be the least popular entries in the franchise.
Titanfall, the new game by the people responsible for the Call of Duty series before it *completely* devolved to the level of self parody (to their credit, it was well on its way when they left), launches “exclusively” on Microsoft’s system. The word “exclusive” is increasingly used in the sense of its Latin root, excludere, meaning “and also on PC.” Titanfall is a hit with both critics and gamers alike, praised for its blend of parkour, gunplay, and hot mech-on-mech action. The game’s longevity is evident in the fact that, 9 months later, there are literally tens of people still playing it (at peak hours).
Dark Souls II comes out and surprisingly does not entirely crush the incredibly high hopes of fans of the notoriously difficult fantasy series. Unfortunately, some small concessions had to be made during development to make the game run on last gen hardware, including a teeny-tiny tweak to the impressive lighting system seen in the initial reveal trailers. The minor changes include scrapping all of it and trying again next time. Fortunately, few gamers even noticed.
Highly anticipated PS4 title Infamous Second Son sees a worldwide release. I admit to being vaguely mystified by this game, in particular the decision to set an open world game in Seattle, of all places. It’s not that Seattle isn’t a wonderful, vibrant place, with, among other charms, its own Space Needle. It’s just that, as American cities go, Seattle is among the most Canadian. If you tell me a game is set in Miami, NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, I think, well sure, someone needs to get in there and clean up those mean streets. If you tell me the game is set in the mean streets of Seattle, on the other hand, my first thought is, what, were the mean streets of Minneapolis - St. Paul too hard to model?
Goat simulator and The Elder Scrolls Online both launch. The former is a joke idea turned into a good game, while the latter is a good game idea turned into a joke. Comedy.
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn launches. We’re only up to April and I’m already wondering if SE does anything but remake and attempt to fix their own games any more. FFXIV is supposed to be a delightful new version of a game, the original version of which was developed during a period in Square history famous for the story about how long some poor soul had to work on designing a rock. But with Square-Enix, second time’s the charm! Or maybe third time. Either way, you’ll also get that same charm ported to more or less every platform in existence from now until the end of time.
Trials Frontier brings the popular motorcycle-y series to the mobile and handheld market, destroying gamer goodwill for developer RedLynx with its aggressive and pervasive freemium model. Fortunately, my own goodwill slowly refills over several years, or can be instantly recharged every hour with a $2.99 purchase from a RedLynx corporate credit card.
Child of Light, a new, smaller title from mega-publisher Ubisoft, arrives to great fanfare. The title is built on the UbiArt Framework, which has “art” right there in the title so what more do you want, for christsakes?? I have yet to play this game, but I know it has many fans. The wikipedia article includes this amazing line: “IGN describes the game's multiplayer experience as being co-operative…” I love that because it suggests to me that IGN cannot be trusted to not screw up even this simple thing. This is the website that famously declared that a squid is not an animal, so maybe their definition of “co-operative multiplayer” actually means “dynamic lighting.” I can’t say I’d be surprised.
Nintendo, sticking to their established position on the (lack of) future of online gaming, discontinues the WiFi connection service for Wii and 3DS. A bug in the WiiU system software that allows users to play online under a simple account system, without the hassle of exchanging individual “friend codes” on a per-game basis, is expected to be patched out shortly. “It’s a slippery slope, “ Nintendo president Satoru Iwata is reported as saying, “what’s next? People not having to repurchase their eshop titles on each new system? Who wants that?”
FPS throwback Wolfenstein: The New Order is released. This single-player-only shooter features an excellent blend of stealth-based and run-n-gun gameplay, a better story than anyone expected and, crucially, “the most tasteful use of a concentration camp level” in all of gaming. It’s odd how few games compete in that category.
Supergiant games releases Transistor, the followup to 2011 indie darling, Bastion. The game is once again an excellent simulator of a man with a wonderful, deep voice telling you about a game as you play it.
Thrilling new IP Watch_Dogs sets the pace for a year defined by Ubisoft just completely overdelivering in every possible way on their AAA titles. Kudos, Ubi!
Mario Kart 8 is…wait. There are really 8 of these? Jesus Christ I’m old. Anyway, the 8th edition in the kart racing franchise par excellence is both great and single-handedly responsible for changing my perception of Luigi from “harmless, forgettable buffoon” to “psychopathic boiling cauldron of road rage.” You’ve come a long way from being a Mario palette swap, baby. Oh God is he glaring at me? He is, isn’t he? I don’t want to look.
In other exciting “the future is online gaming!” news, beloved publisher EA shuts down more than 50 multiplayer games. “But trust us,” a company press release is quoted as saying, “there’s no way that will ever happen again, unless there is literally any possibility on earth it will save us even a tiny bit of money.”
Another UbiArt title appears! Valiant Heart, a gorgeous WWI adventure-ish game, appears on the first of the dozen or so platforms such smaller releases now appear across. There’s a scene in which you battle a Nazi zeppelin using a piano, so I’m not sure why you aren’t playing this right now.
Old school indie platfomer Shovel Knight launches following its successful kickstarter. The game attempts to recapture the magic of NES gaming with an 8-bit aesthetic and a chip tune soundtrack. In order to enhance the nostalgia magic, you should have started begging your parents to get you this game for Christmas two months ago.
Divinity: Original Sin solidifies 2014 as both a great year for kickstarter games and a great year for RPGs. This is a weird new type of release where, while the game is technically finished, they’re still making all sorts of huge mechanistic changes. My repeated requests for developer Larian Studios to one-up Bioware by letting my character have graphic sex with an actual dragon have gone sadly unanswered. Tweet with hashtag #dragonboner to join my campaign.
Acclaimed PS3 game The Last of Us is remastered in HD. Okay, I struggled coming up with a dumb joke here, so I crowdsourced it. My friend, MikeDip, told me, “(Tiffany’s) I think we're alone now = last of us, a cover can be like an HD thing. do your job and put it together man I dunno.” This is why I work alone. If you’ve hated this so far, trust me - it could be way worse.
In other thrilling remake news, fan favorite Falcom RPG (FFFRPG) The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky comes to PC. In thanks for their hard work on this game, developers of the excellent port, XSeed, have received many messages from fans of the series expressing the heartfelt sentiment, “Now give us the next one or we’ll murder you.”
