GAMES FOR 2018

Ones to watch from the forthcoming bumper PC gaming crop

The coming year promises to offer another bumper harvest for PC gaming, so allow us to sort the wheat from the chaff as we gather together the ones to watch.

YOU CAN ACCUSE THE GAMES INDUSTRY of many things—and people do, just look on the Internet—but never of staying the same. It’s an entertainment medium in constant flux, at once refining popular ideas and embracing bleeding-edge technology that might facilitate new ones. You wouldn’t always know it by the ultra-safe parade of triple-A games that flaunt their stuff at the big shows every year, focus-grouped to within an inch of their lives, but it’s true nonetheless.

Last year’s biggest game was a mod based on a mod, which turned into an Early Access phenomenon.

PUBG was as non-traditional a path to stardom as it gets, and 2018 promises more surprise hits, more genre-changers coming in from the left field, and even some brave and ambitious titles from the big triple-A studios. The otherworldly weirdness of Hideo Kojima’s DeathStranding, EA’s indie-on-a-blockbuster-budget AWayOut,

an actual MonsterHunter game on PC, and a loving renovation of Ageof Empires all await us over the next 12 months. But will they be the ones we remember? Any one of the following upcoming titles might be the one that changes the industry, eats our free time, and becomes an all-time classic. Just wait and see.