The Possible Retail Games of 2015

Street Fighter 5

Capcom set the internet a-raging with the announcement that Street Fighter 5 wouldn’t be coming to Xbox One. Undoubtedly a major coup for Sony, the latest entry to the franchise was debuted during the PlayStation Experience event to celebrate 20 years since the launch of the original console (though a teaser was leaked hours before).

The debut trailer showed only a brief glimpse of gameplay, which looked very similar to IV, if much more aesthetically detailed. Ryu faced off against Chun-Li in a busy market street, with Chun-Li knocking Ryu through a wall, showing off the new transitions, something unseen in the series before.

While SF5 is exclusive to PS4 and PC, it still remains to be seen whether or not the inevitable seven or eight iterations of the game will continue to skip Xbox One.

Even if SF5 slips out of the 2015 calendar, PS4 and Xbox One fans will be receiving Ultra Street Fighter IV “at some time of other” according to series producer Yoshinori Ono. Sadly, the game will not be making its way to Wii U, though.

Premature Ejudgeulation

Xbox One owners am cry.

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Scalebound

Another of the Xbox One exclusives revealed during the E3 press conference is Platinum Games’ dragon slayer. It’s being developed by Hideki Kamiya, who previously helmed Bayonetta and The Wonderful 101, but other than the fact it’s got dragons in it, we don’t know much else.

The fact that Kamiya is working on the project will be enough to get many fans excited, and with the battle for exclusives hotting up more than ever, it needs to be one of his finest.

Premature Ejudgeulation

Platinum Games. Dragons. Could be amazing.

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Crackdown

The next-gen reboot of Microsoft’s Crackdown series was revealed during the Xbox E3 press conference, with series creator Dave Jones working on the project.

We got a glimpse of how the destruction mechanics will work via an early tech demo showing of Microsoft’s cloud-based tech, where it was able to maintain a consistent framerate even while an entire building was collapsing in real time.

If this is possible in Crackdown, we can expect to see some pretty spectacular mayhem. Hopefully your internet connection doesn’t drop during the fireworks, though.

Premature Ejudgeulation

With a bit of help from the cloud, this could be tremendous.

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The Last Guardian

Sorry.

Premature Ejudgeulation

Possibly the most anticipated game on this list. Will it ever be released?

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Phantom Dust

A successor to the original Xbox title, Dust came somewhat out of the blue when it was announced at E3 2014.

Considered a cult classic when it originally launched back in 2005, the original featured card-based battling mechanics where players collect skills to complete missions and take on opponents. How exactly the remake will play is not yet known, as we only have the reveal trailer footage to go on thus far.

Presumably we’ll see a lot more in 2015.

Premature Ejudgeulation

Microsoft surprised us with this announcement and it would be a waste to do the series a disservice.

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Tekken 7

With Tekken x Street Fighter being swiftly swept under the carpet, Bandai Namco announced Tekken 7, which is set for a release in Japanese arcades in early 2015. It marks the 20th anniversary for the series, and serves as the conclusion to the Mishima saga. Heihachi’s wife, Kazumi, was revealed in one of the early announcement trailers, in which she also appears to take devil form.

A large number of fighters have already been revealed, but if Tekken 6 is anything to go by, that number is only going to continue to swell as the game comes closer to release for consoles.

Premature Ejudgeulation

It’s Tekken.

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Final Fantasy XV

The latest trailer for Final Fantasy XV showed off the English voice actors, which were iffy at best. But on the bright side, the visuals still remain as impressive as they were in the Japanese version.

Gameplay looks to show an all new approach to combat in the latest entry, with all party members free to roam the battlefield and attacking when an opportunity arises, rather than the classic turn-based mechanic. But, with XV seemingly still a long way from launch, there’s still plenty of time to find out the intricacies of its systems.

Hopefully there’s some time in that dev cycle to fix that English voice acting, too.

Premature Ejudgeulation

That English language TGS trailer was awful, but surely the series has to return to its former glory at some point.

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Need for Speed

Ghost Games is currently working on a new Need for Speed, due out in 2015. What form it will take however, we don’t yet know.

According to Marcus Nilsson, executive producer and general manager of Ghost, the developer is “going to give you the game you’ve been asking for. It will be the game you deserve”. No pressure, then.

With no Need for Speed out in 2014, the team has allowed itself extra time to produce something special. We’ll find out if the gamble paid off in the new year.

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A longer dev cycle should mean we’ll get a solid improvement over Rivals. Please don’t be Pro Street 2.

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Persona 5

Persona 4 Golden is still one of the best games on the Vita, and now fans are finally getting a sequel with Persona 5 set to launch next year on PS3 and PS4. Sadly, a release outside of Japan is still yet to be confirmed: hopefully it’s not too long afterwards.

Little is known about Atlus’ latest turn-based RPG, although the developer did recently tease the latest protagonist in an image on the official teaser site showing the main characters of the previous two games stood either side of a mysterious figure.

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Brett thinks this is exciting.