Gaming is far and away my favorite hobby, but it's also extremely time-consuming. This appears to be doubly true for a new breed of upcoming current-gen games, which are leveraging the power of new hardware and the gaming community's love of open-world environments to create adventures that are poised to obliterate my free time.
The next two years look especially hopeless considering my personal play style, which usually involves a lot of aimless wandering, unplanned chaos, and obsessive collecting/crafting. It's for those reasons that I am both salivating over and fearing the following games.
Just
Cause 3
Few games offer up a more fun and consequence-free sandbox
than the Just Cause series. The last installment was one of my
favorite games of last generation, and it appears Avalanche is super-sizing
everything for the next outing. The new wingsuit looks like it transforms Rico
into a full-blown superhero, and having an unlimited supply of C4 at your
disposal is yet another sign that the developer knows gonzo chaos will always
trump realism when you're trying to overthrow a ruthless dictator. A greater
emphasis on physics and destructibility pretty much guarantees that I'll be spending
an absurd number of hours orchestrating crazy explosions (and probably blowing
myself up in the process).
Ghost
Recon: Wildlands
The announcement of Ghost Recon: Wildlands at E3 was a surprise,
but it's already made my short list of anticipated games. I enjoyed a few of
the older games in the series, and am glad Ubisoft is eschewing the futuristic setting of...virtually every other military shooter on the market right now for
something more grounded in reality. However, the big selling points are the four-player
co-op and massive open world – coordinating and approaching missions the way
you want to sounds like it's putting the "tactical" back into tactical shooter, which would be a welcome shift in focus.
The big question is whether Ubisoft can fill the world with enough
missions and distractions to make it worth going off the beaten path. I've lost
plenty of hours roaming the landscapes in Ubisoft's Far Cry series; if
Wildlands can deliver a more realistic world that's focused on co-op, it may
hold my attention long after other military shooters lose their appeal.
Mad
Max
Avalanche sure knows how to sink its hooks in me. The second
game from the developer on this list stars one of the coolest post-apocalyptic anti-heroes
of film, who seems like a perfect fit for open-world mayhem. In addition to
exploring the wasteland and taking down enemy outposts, you can also completely
customize your car with a variety performance upgrades and bandit-puncturing
weaponry. Mad Max is yet another game that takes its combat cues from the
Arkham series – the last game to ape Rocksteady's approach to combat was Shadow
of Mordor, which kept me slicing off orc heads long after most gamers moved
onto other adventures (which reminds me – I really need to go back and finish Shadow
of Mordor). Hopefully Avalanche can nail the vehicular combat, because I can
see myself spending days happily combing the wasteland for scrap to build the ultimate death
machine.
Coming Up Next: Three more games destined to take over 99 percent of my gaming time...