The 2007 Review - a Year of PC Gaming
Contents1. Introduction & The First 6 Months2. A Year in PC Gaming, cont. 3. 2007 Stats: Reviews, Publishers & Developers 4. Best Game of 2007 5. Biggest Disappointment of 2007 6. Biggest Surprise of 2007 7. The Ones To Watch for 2008 8. Final thoughts Well, that's it - 2007 done and dusted. Finito, over, no more; gone but not forgotten. All things being equal, it was a very important year for PC gaming - not least, of course, was the appearance of us! Over the twelve months, gamers were treated to hundreds of games, with every genre and budget covered. It's fair to say that there was nothing new on the IP front, but there was plenty of hot technology, bugs and dodgy platform ports! 2007: A Year in PC GamingNaturally, 2007 kicked off with a multitude of previews, from various publishers, about their forthcoming titles such as BioShock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Hellgate: London, and so on. But it was all a bit... well, boring. Even the "amazing" news that Unreal Tournament 2007 would be called Unreal Tournament 3 instead did little to liven things up. So that task was dumped on the doorstep of Blizzard, who picked it up and ran away like a three year old after eating too much sherbet; and to reward us all, they gave us World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. The general press had probably not seen anything like the kind of advertising Blizzard did for WoW:BC but it made a lot of people happy, and the developers a lot wealthier (but not wealthy enough for Vivendi, it would seem - see later on). At the megabig Consumer Electronics Show, Bill Gates showed us DirectX 10, Windows Vista and Games for Windows Live... to thunderous silence. February was much the same - few big releases, but plenty of previews and early betas. One foolhardy soul that braved the weather was SOE's Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, but it was rapidly obvious to anyone who signed up right away that the game should have stayed in bed for another 6 months. Other fun bits this month was Epic's half-hearted statement about a PC version of Gears of War, a new publishing company called Gamecock (good team, stupid name) and the fact that Supreme Commander needed a PC from NASA for multiplayer games.
Everything got far perkier and more exciting in March because YouGamers opened its doors to the world! Technically, the door was only half-open, because it was only a beta launch, to gauge whether our reviews, previews, etc. were aiming in the right direction: it would be another 3 months before we had all the features we wanted up and running. Initially, people thought we were mad doing 5+ pages reviews for every single game and doing full hardware testing, but it paid off in the long run. March also brought an explosion of new games: STALKER (I'm not doing those periods every time), Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific, Test Drive Unlimited, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles being the key releases. None of these games used DX10 and despite the fact that DX9 was several years old, STALKER and SH4 were buggy as hell at first. They're much better, and far more playable, with the latest patches, but they were apt reminders that PC gaming's Achilles' heel is the inevitable "too-early" launch and subsequent updating; something that would be repeatedly noticed throughout the year. Another rumbling down below came from Take Two, announcing a new board of directors, whose main task was to stem the fiscal blood loss - BioShock had to be a winner for them, or else... The yearly April's Fool tradition of spoofing a Duke Nukem Forever exclusive slightly backfired for 2007, because 3DRealms had told us that DNF was definitely in production, although, naturally, nobody believed us! The start of spring heralded only a few new releases (though plenty of announcements) but the biggest news was certainly the launch of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. With EA holding the rights to making games of the films, Turbine and Codemasters had gone straight to the "daddy", using all of Tolkien's works to create a very pretty MMORPG. Inevitably facing comparisons to WoW, it held its head up pretty high - though not high enough in our case, because we "only" gave it 84 out of 100, incurring the wrath of LOTRO fanatics and the silence of the publisher. Ah well!
May was notable for various matters; some great, others risible. LEGO Batman was announced, to the joy of everyone; Flight Sim X received its first Service Pack, to the joy of the PC hardware sweating under the strain; Tomb Raider: Anniversary surprised us by actually being really good; and the golden trumpets of Microsoft gave tribute to the launch of Games for Windows Live, but they all played bum notes by using Shadowrun and Halo 2 for Vista to highlight its "features". Had Microsoft used something like Gears of War the reaction might have been somewhat different, but it's suffice to simply say that the decisions only made a bad idea look even worse. June is likely to be remembered for one thing only, in the UK at least. Amongst all the new releases, patches, trailers, interviews and so on, came the news that the BBFC had refused to issue Rockstar's Manhunt 2 with an age certification, which basically meant that no retailer was permitted to sell it. This saga would continue to roll on throughout the rest of the year, with the decision being reversed by another body, and it's currently back in a courts of law. The main argument that the BBFC had been using the whole time, was that Manhunt 2 presented an unacceptable risk because it could end up in the hands of minors. So what about the countless 18+ rated DVDs that are released each month? Does the BBFC believe that none of those are ever seen by under 18s? Regardless of the fact that the game is a pile of poo anyway, it's just another example of the "people in power" who see video gaming as something that's only applicable to children. Actually something else happened in June too: the first DX10 games appeared on the market! Techland's US version of Call of Juarez pipped Capcom's Lost Planet: Extreme Condition to the starter's line by a few weeks, although the latter did have a DX10 demo of their game in May. Although it could be argued that Call of Juarez was certainly a better game than Lost Planet, the DX10 performance in both was a stark warning that the promises of new API (essentially better graphics with a lower CPU overhead) might not be so truthful after all. Naturally we all hoped that Crysis, another 5 months away from release, would prove otherwise...
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