Long-running series are often bolstered by a very loyal fan base that can be relied on to carry a game through new iterations year after year and generation after generation. Monster Hunter is a perfect example of that. For around a decade, it existed as niche series that gave a certain subset of gamers a reliable experience at the cost of that experience being pretty difficult to get into for newcomers. As far as attempting to insert a level of accessibility is concerned, Capcom was slow on the draw for Monster Hunter. But in 2018, Monster Hunter: World came as a breath of fresh air to the series, and a reintroduction to a mass audience. Capcom was rewarded for their efforts in reinventing the beloved action game by becoming the mega company's best selling game of all time.

Everreach: Project Eden is a sci-fi, action-RPG in the vein of Mass Effect. The eight hour campaign, written by ex-Mass Effect writer Michelle Clough, will have you guiding Norah through corporate and political intrigue, as well as discovering the remnants of an ancient alien civilization on the first inhabitable planet humans find in our galaxy. 

Hearthstone's so-called Year of the Dragon wasn't just a promise to fill the popular card game with more scaly beasts. Blizzard also hoped to deliver a more rich story experience, while also bringing the game play more inline with a more focused narrative core. Enter the League of Explorers and their ongoing quest to stop the League of E.V.I.L. This last set in this year-long story, Descent of Dragons, looks to cap this tale with a final battle between the two foes.

Julian Gollop is somewhat of a legend in the business. His most popular contribution to games is X-COM: UFO Defense, one of the most influential tactical RPGs of all time. Firaxis Games revived the old franchise with XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2008, but we've seen nothing from this lineage of games since XCOM 2 in 2016. That isn't to say that their haven't been "XCOM-like" games since - there's almost too many of those to count. But when Gollop opens a studio to throw his hat back into the ring that he made famous, it's hard to to get excited about the prospect of a new game in the subgenre. Considering all we've seen of Phoenix Point thus far, we have a lot to be excited about.

Almost two years ago, we tried to piece together what the heck Death Stranding was based on trailers and conversations Hideo Kojima was having with the press at the time. The end result of our efforts left us with more questions than answers. It's been so long since then and even though we've been exposed to way more information, we're still left scratching our heads.

Call of Duty is one of those games that really doesn't need much of an introduction. For over a decade, the Call of Duty franchise has been a literal household name. It's easy to forget, in this modern Fortnite-ruled world, that Activision's annual military shooter is regularly a top selling title each year. Is it even possible to recreate a game that had the streets talking like Black Ops 2 did back in 2012? Infinity Ward is going to try with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

PC RPGs have lived in a space that have allow them to grow in a wide range of nuanced and variant direction since the old Ultima days. There's a CRPG for just about everyone out there, if you're willing to look. It's hard to make one in 2019 that looks and feels so wholly original that it can't be considered am "[insert old video game here]-like", but it seems ZA/UM has both stepped up to that challenge, and has possibly knocked it out of the park with Disco Elysium.

In its third year, you'd expect any game to ease off of the gas pedal and start slowing down post-launch production. No one told Bungie this, who is about to round the corner of year three of their signature space shooter, Destiny 2, by celebrating the release of a brand new expansion, Shadowkeep.

Cosmic Horror is a popular sub-genre to set games in these days. And why not? Is there a more classically Very Bad Thing than the things that go bump in the dark night of deep space (and possibly other dimensions)? Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones, a new horror RPG from Cultic Games, answers that with a resounding "no."

It's been almost seven years since Borderlands 2 and an enormous amount has changed about video games since then. One of the big questions that popped up after Borderlands 3 was officially revealed at PAX East 2019, was how the Borderlands formula will hold up in a post-Destiny world. It's impossible to know right out of the gate, but one thing is for certain: a huge amount of fans are going to play and find out as soon as it releases today.

Monster Hunter: World outperformed maybe every existing expectation for it when it launched in early 2018. Monster Hunter fans knew the charm of this incredibly niche sort of action game, but often admit that the game, as it was before, was hard to wrangle. Now that the rough edges have been smoothed, there are no barriers between new fans, and the best kept secret in video games in Iceborne.

PAX has grown into an all year affair since its humble beginnings. Now, across multiple countries and days, now there's a PAX for every occasion! But PAX West is the OG event, and stands out thanks to it's timelessness and its location.

It's approaching fast, so here's a round up of what you need to know about the popular event.

Remnant: From the Ashes is a third-person survival action shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by monstrous creatures. You are one of the last remaining humans in the world, and it's your charge to fight back against the ancient, extra-dimensional hordes in order to set humanity away from its current course of extinction.

It never feels like it from our perspective here in North America, but gamescom is the world's biggest gaming convention. Attendance averages in the few hundred thousands yearly, dwarfing E3 by multiple times. It's Euro-centricity tends to motivate publishers and developers from the surrounding area to make bigger splashes there. Between August 20th and 24th of this year, we will have out eyes and ears open for the oncoming deluge of game info pouring out of Cologne, Germany.

The long-running, Dungeons and Dragons-themed MMO, Neverwinter, has been basking in the success of what has been its biggest expansion launch ever. Earlier this year, players got to explore one of the most iconic locations in the Forgotten Realms: Undermountain. Besides the new area, the game got a tons of other quality of life updates and re-balances that has really changed the tempo of the game in a good way. Now, Arc Games expands on this framework with their next expansion: Uprising.