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After the production delays and supply disruptions of the last few years, 2023 is where the games industry is set to really start picking up speed.
The Pacific Northwest is home to two of the biggest scenes for game production in North America, in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., as well as the various studios within the growing Xbox Game Studios umbrella. Here are 23 new games with ties to the Pacific Northwest to play in 2023.
Ark 2
For the last few years, if you’ve wanted to play a game about riding dinosaurs around, your first port of call was likely Ark: Survival Evolved, from the Redmond, Wash.-based Studio Wildcard. Ark is a survival game where players are left empty-handed on the shores of a mysterious island, where you must contend with other players and hostile wildlife by building tools, fortifications, and weapons.
Wildcard announced Ark 2 at the 2020 Game Awards, which raises the stakes by marooning players on an entire jungle planet. Vin Diesel (The Fast and the Furious) and Auli’i Cravalho (Moana) are along for the ride as characters within the new game’s story, which is currently slated to debut at some point in 2023.
Baldur’s Gate 3
If you were into PC games at all in the late ’90s, you’ve probably at least heard of the two original Baldur’s Gate games. Set in the Forgotten Realms with rules derived from the second edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Baldur’s Gate and its sequel are sprawling CRPGs that sucked in a generation of players.
A long-anticipated third game in the series, Baldur’s Gate III, has been under production for the last few years at the Belgian developer Larian Studios, which is best-known for its CRPG series Divinity. Naturally, it’s created the game in partnership with Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast, the owners of D&D. BG3 is currently available in early access on Steam and GOG, with plans for a full release in August.
Colossal Cave 3D
After a couple of delays, Ken and Roberta Williams’ update of the classic text adventure Colossal Cave arrived on Jan. 19, as both a virtual-reality adventure on the Meta Quest 2, and a 2D first-person game that’s available on PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and Epic.
Colossal Cave 3D is an explicit reimagining of the original Colossal Cave, as opposed to a remake or sequel. It features the same puzzles, characters, and environments, but they’ve been carefully recreated in a visual environment. Once again, you’re a nameless, faceless treasure hunter who descends into a cavern in search of riches, but end up having to contend with hostile dwarves, random traps, sleeping dragons, and peculiar obstacles.
Company of Heroes 3
2023 is turning into a weirdly good year for new entries in old franchises. Company of Heroes began as a 2009 real-time strategy (RTS) game set in World War II by Vancouver, B.C.’s Relic Entertainment (Homeworld), which got a surprise sequel in 2013. After a delay, Relic is publishing a new Company of Heroes through Sega on Feb. 23 for Windows PC, with console versions for Xbox and PlayStation coming at an unspecified point later in the year. CoH3‘s solo campaign puts players in the role of the Allies during the North African campaign in World War II, which will involve the invasion of Italy. In multiplayer, four armies are available, including the U.S., the British, the Wehrmacht, and the Afrikakorps.
Destiny 2: Lightfall
Bellevue, Wash.-based Bungie begins its tenure as a PlayStation studio with Lightfall, the latest expansion for the massively-multiplayer first-person shooter Destiny 2. It sends the Guardians to the city of Neomuna on Neptune, where you’ll have to deal with a colony that’s been cut off from the rest of human civilization for long enough to get weird; fight the cloned forces of the fallen emperor Calus; and play with a new subclass, Strand, which features its own grappling hook.
As usual, a new Destiny 2 expansion means new dungeons, a new raid, and a brand-new set of exotic weapons to grind for, along with a planned balance pass to certain weapons’ effectiveness. Lightfall is expected to release on all platforms Feb. 28.
Dungeons of Aether
Since it was founded in 2021, Seattle’s Aether Studios has been planning to build the next big game world, with the setting of its now-complete platform fighter Rivals of Aether as a basis. In the game’s fiction, Aether is a planet inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, who use various elemental powers to fight on behalf of their respective civilizations.
Developed by an internal team at Aether, Dungeons is a dungeon-crawling RPG starring four original characters, who end up in a fight against a crooked mining company underneath the town of Julesvale. It was initially announced for last October, but was then quietly delayed to Feb. 28 on Steam.
Fire Emblem Engage
Engage, released Jan. 20, is a bit of a throwback to the last few Fire Emblem games, particularly 2019’s Three Houses. Earlier games in the series were a peculiar balance between managing your characters’ social relationships with one another and simple but unforgiving tactical/strategy action. You’ll gradually assemble an irregular unit of fantasy warriors from whoever you can find, befriend, rescue, or bribe on your way across the world.
Forza Motorsport
The eighth entry in Microsoft’s first-party racing series has explicitly been designed to show off the Xbox Series X’s graphics technology. Developed in Redmond, Wash., by Turn 10 Studios, Motorsport provides you with a large fleet of digitally-recreated, licensed real-world cars that you can tweak, customize, and kit out as you see fit. You can then take them out to compete in-person and online against other racers, with a level of detail up to and including the effects of the in-game ambient temperature on the racetrack. FM8 has no set release date at time of writing, but is planned to come out this spring.
Gunbrella
If you attended last year’s PAX West, you might’ve seen Gunbrella in action at the Devolver Digital booth. It’s very much the sort of video game that’s been made by and for people who play a lot of video games, with retro graphics, a peculiar hook, and a steep difficulty curve. Created in Portland, Ore. by the indie studio Doinksoft, Gunbrella is currently listed as “coming soon,” with plans for release at some point in 2023. It describes itself as a “noir-punk” action game, where you investigate a run-down island in the 1930s in search of answers about a magical umbrella that’s attached to you by a curse.
Homeworld 3
Gearbox Publishing is bringing back the Homeworld series in 2023, with Vancouver, B.C.s Blackbird Interactive attached as developer, with several of the original Homeworld developers from Relic Entertainment along for the ride. Set 100 years after the events of the original two games, Homeworld 3 is a real-time strategy game where your space fleet is put up against a mysterious Anomaly that’s sweeping across the galaxy. It’s supposed to make its debut in the first half of the year.
Kerbal Space Program 2
For fans of imminent space disaster, a new Kerbal Space Program is planned to launch into Steam Early Access on Feb. 24. KSP2 has been redesigned from the ground up for current-generation systems, and is reportedly bigger than ever before, with unspecified “new features” that will be added over time. KSP2 is in production at Intercept Games in Seattle, after its original studio Star Theory was effectively shell-gamed out of existence in 2020.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Tears of the Kingdom is a direct sequel to 2018’s Breath of the Wild, which swept that year’s awards season, sold millions of copies, and provided the Switch with one of its first exclusive killer apps. The genius of BotW was that it broke away from the typical Legend of Zelda formula in favor of an open-ended approach that mixed its traditional gameplay with survival mechanics. With Tears, out on May 12, it looks like Nintendo’s decided the best way to go from there was up, with new flight and gliding mechanics that are reminiscent of 2011’s Skyward Sword.
Lifeless Moon
Lifeless Moon is a surreal, creepy adventure game, by Snohomish, Wash.-based Stage 2 Studios, about two astronauts whose lunar expedition suddenly takes them back to what appears to be a deserted version of their hometown. It’s an adventure game that co-creator David Board described to me at PAX as “not quite full horror,” as well as “sort of a prequel” to 2014’s Lifeless Planet. It’ll arrive via Steam in the first quarter of 2023.
Minecraft Legends
Minecraft‘s gradual infiltration of all other genres continues with Legends, an action-strategy game set in the game world’s mythology that’s due out April 18. Made as a collaboration between Mojang Studios and Vancouver, B.C.’s Blackbird Interactive (Homeworld 3, Hardspace: Shipbreaker), Legends is the story of a hero who unites and defends the Minecraft overworld against an invasion by the Netherworld. As with most things Minecraft, Xbox Game Studios will publish it across all platforms, including PlayStation and Switch.
Open Roads
Portland-based Fullbright has built its reputation on environmental-storytelling games like Tacoma and Gone Home, but Open Roads moves the studio into new territory as it creates an interactive mystery/thriller, about a mother and daughter digging up skeletons in their family’s closet. After Fullbright faced internal issues in 2021 that slowed the game’s development, Open Roads is scheduled for release sometime this year.
Pacific Drive
Ironwood Studios quietly opened its doors in Seattle in late 2019, just in time for COVID to keep everyone distracted. Its debut title, Pacific Drive, sets you loose in a version of the Pacific Northwest that’s suffered from some unspecified disaster. Your customized car is all you’ve got to outrun and occasionally run over the monsters that now inhabit the “Olympic Exclusion Zone,” as you head deeper inside it on a search for the source of the problem. Pacific Drive is due out this year for PC and PlayStation 5.
Redfall
Redfall is one of Microsoft’s big three games for Xbox in 2023: a 4-player open-world shoot-’em-up where a team of eccentric vampire hunters invades a small town in Massachusetts that’s been overrun by the undead. Come for the high-impact action with an assortment of strange abilities and technology; stay for the reliably weird design and story from Arkane Studios (Dishonored). It’s scheduled to come out at some point in 2023.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition
Nightdive Studios, in Vancouver, Wash., specializes in getting the rights to classic “abandonware” PC games and updating them to run on modern systems. It’s teamed up with Texas-based Apogee and the distributed team at New Blood to resurrect Rise of the Triad, a deeply silly 1995 first-person shooter that did a lot more to define subsequent games in the genre than it gets credit for. The new Ludicrous Edition for 2023 runs at light speed, preserves the feel of the original, and can be played without pulling your 486 out of storage.
Sons of the Forest
2018’s The Forest was a bit of a sleeper hit, which mixed survival horror with actual survival in a first-person game about a plane crash survivor trying to find his missing son in the middle of the wilderness. Endnight Games, out of Vancouver, B.C., returns to the theme but not the storyline in Sons of the Forest, where you’re sent to find a missing rich guy and end up fighting an isolated tribe of freaks. It’s planned to debut in February on Steam.
Spirit Swap
This has been on my radar for a hot minute. Spirit Swap, by Redmond, Wash.-based Soft Not Weak, is an indie game about playing competitive match-3 games to music. It is, by design, a colorful, calm chill-out experience that mixes lo-fi beats with occasionally demanding puzzle mechanics. That also comes hand in hand with a sort of indie-comics aesthetic, featuring cheerful witches, snooty demons, and a little bit of dating simulation. Spirit Swap is due out later this year.
Starfield
On the one hand, we just talked about this; on the other, it’d look weird if Starfield wasn’t on this list. Bethesda Softworks’ follow-up to 2012’s Skyrim takes its approach to open-ended RPGs into space, where you can fight or join pirates, navigate an awkward post-war peace, and completely ignore the primary mission objectives for hours upon hours of exploration. Expect it in the first half of 2023.
System Shock (2023)
1999’s System Shock 2 is one of the most influential first-person shooters of all time, to the extent that it’s overshadowed its predecessor, which was actually a dungeon crawler from the people who made Ultima Underworld. Vancouver, Wash.-based Nightdive Studios plans to put the original System Shock back on the map with this ground-up remake, which keeps the story but updates the gameplay to match SS2. This also serves to reintroduce players to one of video games’ great all-time villains, the hostile AI SHODAN. System Shock 2023 is due out in March.
Wizard With A Gun
Seattle’s Galvanic Games has put together some of the more interestingly weird indie games of the last few years, such as Gurgamoth, Some Distant Memory, and the Cyanide & Happiness-themed battle royale Rapture Rejects. Wizard With A Gun teams Galvanic up with the equally weird indie mega-publisher Devolver for a strange sort of Western adventure, where you and up to three friends craft items, fight monsters, and use the ancient magical technique of “having a pistol.” After several delays, Wizard is scheduled to drop for Switch and PC this year.
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