Nintendo Pro
In just a few months, the Nintendo Switch will be six years old. Six long years, and what years they have been! 115 million units have been shipped making it the company’s third biggest hit ever after the DS and Game Boy and it’s now time for the sequel, or successor. Nintendo themselves have dismissed the idea of another update to the old model (no Switch Pro in other words) which of course makes us expect something completely new, which with any luck will be announced in 2023. Here at Gamereactor we really love the Switch and have done so since day one but it’s time for a desktop, powerful console from the people behind Mario/Zelda, once again. It seems highly unlikely that they will rise to the peak of performance and war with Sony, Microsoft and the PC part of the gaming world, but we can dream, we can always hope. Live on hope. I dream of a Nintendo console far more powerful than the Xbox Series X that will be able to offer that Zelda and Mario adventure that floor me, purely graphically as well as gameplay wise. I want Metroid Prime 4 in the gaming world’s most advanced graphics with haptic feedback in the controller, I want F-Zero, Starfox and Mario Kart 9 on release day and a new Pilotwings that combines the cute/fun of the Nintendo 64 game with the cloud technology of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
Playstation 5 Pro
In terms of pure processing power and the number of teraflops per second that our “new” consoles move/perform, we all know that the Xbox Series X is a bit more powerful than the Playstation 5 and this together with the development on the GPU front that Nvidia and AMD have been behind the past year has us yearning for more. More punch. More power. Give us a Playstation 5 Pro and an Xbox Series XSX-XXX-Super-S-2 with the equivalent RTX4090 including working memory, bigger hard drives and faster processors.
This is an ad:
Assetto Corsa 2
Kunos said 2024 a little over two years ago. Then… It felt like an eternity and considering that the relatively small team in northern Italy tinkered feverishly with constant improvements to Assetto Corsa Competizione, it feels like this in the face of 2023 rather unrealistic that an Assetto Corsa 2 will be released this year. But you can dream. And it is dreams this article is made of. I want to see a newly built 2.0 version of the game engine from Assetto Corsa, focus on everything other than GT3 racing with the most detailed tire physics system on the market and the best force feedback of the genre. I want a game that is completely open to modding, just like Kuno’s debut title, and I want a lot more focus on older touring cars, preferably late 90’s WTCC and BTCC.
Starfield will be good
On November 11th, 2011, Bethesda released Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 12 years on now and even though they’ve squeezed out both Fallout 4 and the online fiasco Fallout 76 since then, it’s certainly not the world’s most prolific studio. That thing is certain. But! Todd Howard & Co mean that they worked for eight years on what will be the most detailed science fiction role-playing game the gaming world has ever seen and that Starfield will be like Skyrim x 100, in space. Several of us at Gamereactor including the undersigned remain extremely skeptical. Why? Because what was shown last year really looks like a precocious No Man’s Sky copy without the Sony game’s colorful and fancy space design. Visiting 1000 planets sure sounds nice on paper but how impersonally meaningless and empty will these auto-generated worlds be? Part of me sees Starfield right now as a new Cyberpunk 2077. A magnificent castle in the air. I hope I’m wrong though. Super error. arch fault. Practice error. May it be so epic huge super great now. May everyone’s soaring expectations be fulfilled.
This is an ad:
GTA VI is released
Ten years have almost passed since Rockstar last released a Grand Theft Auto and of course the time is now… Or yes, it’s been five years but when we saw how well GTA V continued to sell five years ago it said clearly we wouldn’t be getting a sequel in any kind of reasonable future. Parts of some unfinished developer tests were leaked last year which gossiped about, among other things, the game series’ first female main character as well as completely redesigned movement patterns with new animation work and in addition to that, we at the editors hope that the rumors about part six are true. We want to jump between the roles of female FBI agent and male drug dealer, we want to live the life of the flea in late 80s Miami and we want to be drenched in neon, Whitesnake music, white, waist-short leather jackets and satirical violence. We also want to play it in the fall.
Metal Gear Solid is coming back
It was so boring, that. The end of an era. The end of Hideo Kojima’s fantastic game series, with the infighting that resulted in the demon producer behind the creation of Solid Snake leaving to found his own game studio. Since then, nothing has happened, nothing has been said and Konami has not really achieved much. Here’s hoping this changes in 2023. We want to see an announcement of Metal Gear Solid VI where Solid Snake heads to Northern Russia to sneak around and carve down terrorists in an icy cold and superbly orchestrated atmosphere painted with the most beautiful of graphics.
Killzone strikes back
One of the release titles for PSVR 2 should reasonably be Killzone VR. Or maybe not reasonably, but if we want to. I’d like to revisit Helghan just before the Second War really broke out, as the spy and deserter Colonel Hakha and then take turns fighting invading forces on a large scale, on Vekta. I don’t want to sit and wave some Move-based pretend buffer or any other nonsense, just the same kind of basic game control as in Half-Life: Alyx, thanks. And gorgeous graphics, please.
That Half-Life 3 shows up
For many, long years, there was zero hope for a third of everyone’s favorite scientist Gordon Freeman. Hope was dead. All was lost. But then Half-Life: Alyx appeared like a bolt from the blue and when the final sequence featured a war-hungry Gordon announcing with his orange protective suit and trusty crowbar that both he, Alyx and Eli had “A lot of work left to do” new hope was born . Lots of it. Since then, it has been dead quiet about the continuation of Half-Life, but considering that Gabe & Co. said that they are working on three new games, at the same time, we continue to dream of a Half-Life 3 where Black Mesa will be revisited, many years after the disaster from the original game. I want a dark, decaying Black Mesa where the aliens have mutated and where the vegetation has crawled in through the ventilation shafts and wound its way down the once chalky white tile walls.
We get to see Bioshock 4
The years go by… Huh-huh, yes-Yes. Bioshock Infinite was released in 2013 and bizarrely it looks like Ken Levine will get his new indie game out before his old colleagues manage to squeeze out Bioshock 4, absurdly enough. However, I sincerely hope that Take Two succeeds in announcing the next Bioshock in the coming year and that it matches the 60s-drenched space cozy on the moon, with all that that implies.
Microsoft is copying Sony
The single best part of our two new consoles, in my opinion, is Dualsense. The PS5 box. Because while I prefer asymmetrical placement of the joysticks over symmetrical, everything else is really superior on Sony’s controller versus the latest Microsoft rolled out. The haptic feedback, when implemented well in the game, is brutally good and the adaptive triggers and how they feel especially in action games where you pan automatic weapons. Microsoft, with the always down-to-earth and humble Phil Spencer at the helm, have been open that they simply missed that boat, but that they are working feverishly to solve a counterpart, which I suspect will trump Dualsense, once it arrives. I’m guessing a summer release, and a controller we’ll all adore.
