The year is almost over, in terms of new releases its definitely over, so I’m casting my eye on 2011, and what games scheduled to release that I want to play and announcements I want and industry elements I’m interested in.

Bulletstorm: Made by People Can Fly this insane take on the FPS genre looks amazing and as a gamer who has never been a fan of Call of Duty and Battlefield games, Bulletstorm looks like my sort of thing. Mixing the craziness of games such as Vanquish, the skill shot style gameplay of The Club and the flat out badass nature of Duke Nukem it looks amazing

Portal 2:   Although very recently delayed I still cannot wait to play it. The first game introduced a new and unique concept and exploited it excellently. While I worry the new additions may over complicate it, I assume that like the first game it will gradually introduce these concepts so you learn how to use them naturally. This is a part of why Portal worked so well, that and something about Cake and lies.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: As a huge fan of the original game Human Revolution definitely looks like a step in the right direction after the misstep of Invisible War. From the evidence in the trailers the art style looks amazing and looks to take its cues from Blade Runner, which is perfectly fine in my book. Also the time of the original release of Deus Ex is my favorite time in PC gaming with Half-Life and Unreal Tournament so recapturing that time is more than enough for me to play this game. Also Elbow Knifes are awesome.

Marvel Vs Capcom 3: As a fan of both Marvel comics and Capcom fighting games, MvC has always been a favorite of mine. I am so glad the Fighting game genre has been reignited over the past couple of years and this being a sequel to one of my favorite fighting games, I couldn’t be happier. I really dig the art style, I know some purists want Sprites but at the end of the day, I think the industry may have moved on. Here’s hoping people are playing it in ten years time like MvC2.

Metal Gear: Rising: Controversial maybe, but I didn’t mind Raiden in MGS2, yes he wasn’t Snake but he filled a roll in a very unnecessary and confusing game in the series, so his solo game excites me, first of all, I always wanted to play as one of the cyborg ninja’s from MGS and that the blade cutting stuff shown looks totally awesome.

Bioshock Infinite: This one may not even come out next year but from the little shown of it, it looks to be of incredible quality. Just the sheer mystery of this floating city with the robotic henchmen and the bizarre crow manipulation sets up a level of intrigue I’ve not felt since, funnily enough Bioshock.

Finally, from purely an interest in the industry I am really interested to see what Respawn(ex infinity ward) will announce, as well as Infinity Ward themselves and whether the Call of Duty franchise will lumber on with the FPS war genre.

In terms of what I want announced, I really want DICE to return to Mirror’s Edge, the first game fell short of its full potential and it really does deserve another chance.  Something that is probably even more unlikely is for Eidos to return to the Legacy of Kain series, Defiance finished on a real turning point in the games mythology and I’m very interested in what would happen and what Kain would do in this situation.

While clichéd I would be very interested if Valve actually announce anything about Half-Life 2 Episode 3its been a long time and several different games since Episode 2 so I’m wondering if it’s even still in production.

With the increasing dependence for persistent online multiplayer, systems of finding people to play these games with have been created. Over the last fifteen years players have evolved from simply entering a random server of choice and waiting for it to fill with players, with mixed results of success, to pushing a button and letting the game do it for you. While this is a clear improvement it’s still not perfect.

                One of my main frustrations is finding players of equal skill to play against. As it stands a majority of games uses XP and matches/lost to gauge who you should play against. While in theory this should work as it says, i.e. players of level 5 and 50 wins to twenty losses should be put into the same multiplayer lobby. It doesn’t take into account the players circumstances when playing.

                To demonstrate this point I shall tell you of my experience with Street Fighter IV (both vanilla and Super) I played SFIV a lot when it came out, I wasn’t the best, but I wasn’t too shabby either. However because of university assignments I played games a lot less for a couple of months afterwards. I then returned to playing SFIV in the summer of 2009, with the horrifying revelation that my skills had dwindled in the passing of time. As my ranking in the game specified it was pairing me with high skilled players, not helping my reintroduction to the game whatsoever. Now it has been well acknowledged that SFIV’s online ranking system was a bit rubbish and resulted in players with a high amount of points losing them all when they lose against low ranked, but high skilled players. This was fixed and improved with Super but the same problem I encountered still exists. Players who are inactive for a period of time still have the same player rank as they did before and if their skills are to diminish their reintroduction to the game will be a tough one.

                So from this anecdote I guess I’m saying a level of depreciation could be implemented in so they dedicated players don’t get punished and casual players can still find players of similar skill to play. Also this is one game in a thousand and other games such as Halo: Reach and Starcraft II have incredibly sophisticated ways of matchmaking. Starcraft II from my understanding has you drop leagues if your skill level diminishes which I think is a good idea, and Halo: Reach’s player specific choices in voice chat and the ranking level that only rewards with Armour items, not weapons and skills.

                So in summary while online matchmaking has advanced since the days of Quake and server browsing I think that it still has room for improvement in spite of some of this year’s significant improvements.