So far, I've gotta go with Witcher 3 as well. Despite the release bugs (which for me were more the fault of nVidia's drivers being a giant middle finger to Keppler owners) it's a great game and you could SEE it would be a better game. The free DLC are mostly hit-or-miss, but that it's a DRM free release on GOG actually made me give them the money. Which might sound weird, but seriously half the games I have with DRM don't work despite my legally owning them because I dare to have good hardware. Most of the games I legally own I end up having to use the cracks anyways just to get them to run! The newest 1.07 patch makes a good number of needed changes to the interface, and seems to have squashed the last of the bugs I was having issues with. It has gone from "you have to see this" to telling people "You have to buy this!". Though I've been a fan of the novels before there even were video games, and love all three games; it's funny to finally have Yennifer in the game, though my first playthrough I gave her the cold shoulder; second playthrough I tried to romance Yen and Triss at the same time with comedic results, this time through (yes, a THIRD replay) I'm gonna let the Witch Hunters torture Triss, then kick her to the curb. What's a few missing fingernails between friends. This has been a six or seven months for game releases. Last release I was happy with prior to Witcher 3 would have to be Dragon Age: Inquisition which is also a damned fine game... Well, that and Alien:Isolation, both of which set a really high bar that few games have come close to since. In the space between fall and now we've seen a LOT of garbage. GTA V for example continued the "serious turn" that IV started, where the humor and likeability of the characters was utterly and completely destroyed. Mix in that despite the TWO YEAR wait for a PC version that it STILL feels like a crappy port done by people who NEVER actually played a game on PC. GTA V, much like IV, is so utterly and completely NOT what I want from a GTA game, that to me the last game in the series was San Andreas... and I went and re-installed Saints 2, third and 4 so I can experience HUMOR with my mindless violence. Then of course there's the SPECTACULAR "epic /FAIL/" that was Arkham Knight, a game so bad it's been pulled from shelves and everyone offered a refund. I had a "gut feeling" that was gonna be a bomb given the nagging issues that remain unfixed in Arkham City [i\(see controlling the RC batarang with anything other than one of those crappy little useless consoletard "controllers")[/i] or the disastrously boring gameplay of Arkham Origins. (Where I pretty much walked away 20 minutes into the lather-rinse-repeat boss fight against Lawton). Asylum was SUCH a great game that every sequel has had a LOT to live up to -- and while City had a great story the cracks were already showing, and by the time of Origins it was just rubbish. Knight falling flat on it's face? Saw it coming. We'll see if they can salvage it, but I'm doubtful at this point since, as someone put on another forums, "How do you screw up a PC release when you're using Unreal Engine 4?" -- Developer ineptitude much? The sequel to last years "Wolfenstein, the New Order", aka "the Old Blood" is a far more typical ID release, and not entirely in a good way. I enjoyed it, but you can tell it was meant to be a DLC mod, not a standalone game. It lacks much of the fit and finish of the original, and Id's ridiculous "megatexture" bull still results in crappy up-close textures that look like something out of Quake II engine games, and STILL is plagued by "pop-in" issues. The laugh is they claim they use it to make stuff at a distance look better since you don't have texture repeats, but what good is that when everything looks like CRAP up close. Still, if it's a Wolfie game, I'm there. Of course, we're only halfway through the year. It will be interesting to see how Doom 4 fares, though I don't have high hopes for it given that ID releases have been a bit lacklustre. What I'm REALLY looking forward to would be Fallout 4: "Ya cahnt geht theyah frum heeyah". Fallout in Boston Taxachusetts should be good for a laugh since I was a southie kid. Being an old school guy still writing my own retrogames for thirty year old hardware, I'm also VERY interested to see how the new King's Quest is gonna turn out -- which comes out in just ten days. I'm not sure such a "classic" can be modernized in a meaningful manner or that it will even be a good game by modern standards, but I like to go in with low expectations so I'm NOT disappointed. Which of course is why when a game fails to meet my low expectations I'm all the more harsh on it. For those of you too young to know what King's Quest was, here's the original PCJr release: Which went on to spawn some seven or eight sequels, as well as the later improved game engine spawning a slew of similar games for Sierra like Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, etc, etc... Here's the trailer for the new game: So... 2015 started out weak, had one REAL standout... and some interesting stuff on the horizon.
Action Game - GrandTheftAuto 5 Racing game - Project Cars FPS game - Bioshock Infinite Adventure game - Assassin's Creed Syndicate