Five Big Surprise Announcements In 2015

Looking back at 2015, we received many of the awesome gaming experiences we were promised.

Looking back at 2015, we received many of the awesome gaming experiences we were promised. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt turned out every bit as awesome as expected, the team at From Software pushed us to our limits once more with Bloodborne, and Nintendo enabled us to bring our imagination to life with the intuitive creation tools found in Super Mario Maker. Each of those releases was anticipated heading into 2015, and while they helped define the year in gaming, 2015 will always be a year when several dream-come-true announcements were made.

With 2016 knocking at the door, we wanted to look back at some of the most exciting announcements that caught us by surprise over the past 12 months.

The Return Of Music Games

The year of surprises began with Harmonix’s announcement of Rock Band 4, a franchise that hadn’t seen a new retail entry since 2010. Even the series’ trailblazing downloadable content release schedule had lapsed since mid-2013 as the interest in the genre plummeted. Many figured the franchise was dead and buried, which is why Harmonix’s announcement that it was bringing the series back this year was shocking.

Right off the bat, the team said that it didn’t plan on rewriting the formula of the franchise. Instead, Harmonix focused on delivering a refined version of that same core gameplay and the idea of building upon the massive collection of tracks in its fans’ music libraries.

Shortly after the announcement of Rock Band 4, Activision and FreeStyle Games revealed that they were releasing a new Guitar Hero game in 2015. Instead of following suit with Harmonix and relying on the familiar gameplay, FreeStyle changed up the entire experience. Gone were the CG graphics and the five-button gameplay of the previous entries. Now, players use a guitar controller with two rows of three buttons as they play along with a live-action band in a first-person view.

Nintendo Goes Mobile

After previously developing strictly for its own platforms and without major microtransactions, Nintendo announced a partnership with mobile development juggernaut DeNA. The partnership is set to yield multiple original mobile games using Nintendo’s properties.

Miitomo is a social interaction game that uses Nintendo’s iconic Mii characters as player avatars. This first-announced game demonstrates Nintendo’s desire to use its properties to deliver unique experiences rather than simply porting the company’s many existing games to mobile platforms as other developers have done.

While Miitomo isn’t the exact kind of experience Nintendo fans were expecting to see, it’s significant for showing Nintendo’s embracing of free-to-play model on a third-party platform. It is possible that Nintendo’s expansion to mobile could hint at the direction of its upcoming system, the Nintendo NX, but it’s far too early at this point to tell.

On the next page, three beloved franchises make their highly anticipated returns.