Five Awesome Ideas From 2016

There's been no shortage of great games to play in 2016, some of which introduced or improved on some even greater ideas. Here are five awesome ideas from 2016 that make me excited for the future of gaming.

#5: No Man's Sky's Procedurally Generated Worlds
Don't throw your rotten tomatoes at me just yet! I totally get that No Man's Sky failed to live up to many gamers' expectations, and that Hello Games' ongoing lack of updates or even basic communication with its player base is a huge disappointment. However, No Man's Sky's core premise – exploring a procedurally generated universe full of massive, procedurally generated planets – is still pretty damn awesome, and unlike anything I've ever experienced in a video game.

Stepping out onto a new planet that no one has ever seen before is a huge thrill, and being free to travel for hours in any direction on a planet's surface makes me feel more like an intergalactic explorer than any Mass Effect and Halo game ever has before. I'd love to see more sci-fi titles incorporate procedurally generated worlds into their gameplay – albeit with more variety, activities, and player progression. Oh yeah, and co-op multiplayer. Thanks!

#4: Doom's SnapMap Editor
Games like LittleBigPlanet have been encouraging players to create and share content on consoles for years, but when it comes to triple-A shooters, most developers reserve their editing tools for the PC crowd. Series like Halo and Far Cry have made admirable attempts to buck this trend, but Doom's SnapMap editor gives me renewed hope.

The editing suite allows you to piece together your own levels, place objects and enemies as you see fit, and even create custom game logic and scripting. Talented players have used the tools to create survival-horror experiences, puzzle games, and even farming sims. More importantly, SnapMap goes the extra mile by providing an infrastructure to share and surface new user-made content. It's still not the full-fledged editor old-school Doom fans might've been hoping for, but it's a step in the right direction, and a successful proof of concept that console gamers are just as creatively inclined as their PC brethren.

#3: The Vignette Format Of Battlefield 1's Story Campaign
First-person shooters have always had trouble telling cohesive stories thanks to jack-of-all-trades protagonists and flimsy plots that rush players to every corner of the globe. There's a practical reason for this: Developers want to provide players with as many interesting environments, set-piece moments, and gameplay experiences as possible, and it falls on the story to tie it all together. Traditionally, the solution has been a Master Chief-style super protagonist that is tasked with going everywhere and doing everything himself. Call of Duty occasionally offers a little more nuance by jumping between a handful of characters within its globetrotting adventures, but most installments still suffer from pacing issues, incoherent plot threads, and excessive handholding ("Don't worry about the logistics, just follow this guy and push the button on the big computer when he tells you to!").

Battlefield 1 offers a simple, elegant solution to tying everything together: Don't. Instead, the campaign tells six distinct stories, in six distinct locations, with distinct characters and mechanics for each one. Storm of Steel is a series of fight-to-death standoffs as randomized characters defending the line against the Imperial German Army. Through Mud and Blood shows off Battlefield 1's tank mechanics and destructibility by putting you in the shoes of British recruit with a lot to prove. Friends In High Places takes to the skies with an American pilot who may or may not be a terrible person. DICE uses the vignettes to experiment with different tones and techniques, and while they aren't perfect, they do a better job of conveying the scale of a war that was comprised of millions of people across half the globe. The shorter format also opens the door to more gameplay possibilities as well, like permadeath, objectives that you can actually fail, and even impromptu multiplayer – imagine an Enemy at the Gates-style sniper duel, where your opponent ends up being another player! I hope more FPS developers experiment with this approach in the future, serving up collections of stories, instead of more bloated, nonsensical narratives.

#2: Mod Support For Fallout 4/Skyrim Special Edition
While gamers can quibble about specs, ease-of-use, and control methods until they're blue in the face, PC owners have always had one indisputable advantage over console gamers: mods. The ability for players to tweak a game's content, or create and share entirely new content from scratch, is a huge bonus that boosts replayability and strengthens the communities built around specific franchises.

That's why Bethesda's mod support for Fallout 4 was so enticing – for the first time console owners were being brought into the fold. Granted, mod support hasn't exactly gone smoothly for PS4 users, but Bethesda's insistence on working through Sony's issues is admirable (but seriously, Sony, get with the program!). Fallout 4 proves that not only is mod support possible on consoles, but that console owners are extremely interested in it. More importantly, nobody's system has burst into flames! Hopefully Bethesda's fledgling success with game mods on consoles encourages Microsoft and Sony to give developers more leeway, and motivates other studios to add mod support to their own games.

#1: The Continually Changing Overwatch
Here's the thing: The games-as-a-service development model isn't new. In fact, Blizzard's entire damn business is built on it – the studio has been honing its development style for years on games like WoW, Diablo, and (more recently) Hearthstone. However, Overwatch feels like the culmination of those efforts, and is my go-to example of why the games-as-a-service development model is awesome.

I fell in love with Blizzard's competitive shooter on launch day (actually before that, thanks to the open beta), and the game has only gotten better since. Constant updates have tweaked the delicate balance between Overwatch's massive roster of characters, improved modes, introduced the season-based competitive mode, and added more characters and maps, along with fun bonuses for holidays and events like the Rio Olympics. The Halloween update introduced Overwatch's first co-op PvE event, and the new arcade offers up a host of additional modes and gameplay variations. Blizzard's prompt and continued support is remarkable, but just as important is the developer's transparency – the team frequently discusses updates, concerns, and upcoming content in its developer video series. Oh, did I mention all of this additional content is completely free?

At launch, lots of gamers questioned whether Overwatch's cosmetics-only loot boxes would be enough of an incentive to keep players invested in the game. Turns out, the in-game swag doesn't have to – Blizzard has provided plenty of other great reasons to keep coming back, and shows no signs of slowing down. I hope other developers take note of how effective frequent updates can be for growing a game and its community (as opposed to paid content that divides the community between the haves and have-nots). More than anything, however, I'm just excited to see what 2017 brings to my favorite shooter.