Avant même qu’on ait le temps de réagir, 2017 sera bientôt là et une nouvelle vague de smartphones Android aura déjà pointé le bout de son nez. On a déjà une vague idée desquels sont les plus attendus et certains commencent même déjà à faire parler d’eux, notamment le Samsung Galaxy S8 pour lequel les fuites sont nombreuses. Et vous, lequel attendez-vous le plus ?
En dehors du fait que Samsung sera plus que jamais attendu au tournant l’an prochain à cause du fiasco du Galaxy Note 7, le Galaxy S8 devrait marquer le début d’une nouvelle ère. Il proposerait un nouveau design ultra borderless avec un écran qui recouvrirait plus de 90% de la surface du téléphone et on sait déjà qu’avec lui, Samsung voit les choses en grand.
Au programme des festivités, on attend un écran 4K, un nouveau processeur Exynos 8895 ultra puissant (en alternance avec le Snapdragon 830 de Qualcomm), un double capteur photo, jusqu’à 8 Go de RAM, de la réalité virtuelle et de l’intelligence artificielle. Son annonce officielle serait prévue pour le MWC de Barcelone en février. Autant dire que ce sera vite là !
Google Pixel 2
Les Nexus sont désormais morts et enterrés et les successeurs des Google Pixel et Pixel XL sont déjà en cours de développement. D’après les derniers bruits de couloir, ils seraient certifiés IP68 et résisteraient donc à l’eau et à la poussière alors que les modèles actuels proposent seulement une certification IP53 par manque de temps.
On parle également d’une construction 100% Google, ce qui signifie donc que le géant américain ferait tout lui même sans faire appel à un constructeur tiers comme il l’a fait cette année avec HTC. Il faudra néanmoins attendre l’automne 2017 pour en avoir le cœur net.
OnePlus 4
Bien que sa présentation soit attendue seulement pour juillet 2017, les premières rumeurs sur le OnePlus 4 commencent déjà à faire surface. Il serait notamment question qu’il s’équipe d’un processeur Snapdragon 830. Jusque là, rien de surprenant puisque les smartphones OnePlus s’équipent toujours du dernier processeur haut de gamme de Qualcomm.
Notez tout de même que la puce serait accompagnée de 8 Go de RAM (rien que ça !) et qu’on retrouverait un capteur photo de 23 mégapixels au dos du téléphone. Espérons tout de même que son prix restera contenu puisque le prix des smartphones OnePlus augmente d’année en année.
LG G6
Après avoir voulu innover avec un LG G5 modulaire qui a malheureusement été un véritable flop, le constructeur coréen semble avoir décidé d’abandonner les modules, d’ailleurs, il sont déjà absent sur le LG V20 et on peut déjà affirmer sans se tromper que ce système ne sera pas présent sur son prochain smartphone.
En revanche, le LG G6 devrait intégrer un scanner d’iris, une alternative au traditionnel lecteur d’empreintes digitales qui s’avère également plus sûre car quasiment impossible à pirater. Espérons que la recette de l’an prochain fonctionnera mieux que celle employée cette année.
Xiaomi Mi 6
Si pour l’instant, on ne sait pas encore ce que Xiaomi nous réserve avec son Mi6, on sait néanmoins que le constructeur chinois envisage plusieurs configurations différentes. Il vient, en effet, de mettre en place un grand sondage visant à mieux cerner les priorités de l’utilisateur et on sait déjà qu’il hésite en double capteur photo et capteur photo simple, design en verre ou en métal et 4 ou 6 Go de RAM. Dans tous les cas, on a le temps de voir venir.
Huawei P10
Cette année, le constructeur chinois a placé la barre très haut en intégrant un double capteur photo co-signé par Leica à son Huawei P9. Un système qu’on imagine déjà retrouver à bord du P10 même si, pour l’instant, aucune information n’a encore fuité sur le prochain modèle.
On sait néanmoins que, comme chaque année, le constructeur proposera un processeur Kirin de sa fabrication et un design premium. Une année qui sera aussi peut-être celle de l’écran Quad HD mais ça, il est encore trop tôt pour le dire. A moins d’un changement radical dans son calendrier habituel, Huawei devrait présenter son P10 en avril.
Honor 9
Après des débuts tonitruants en 2015 avec son Honor 7, le constructeur a confirmé sa bonne copie avec le Honor 8 en 2016. Le dernier flagship de la filiale de Huawei a relevé le niveau d’un sacré cran. Avec son design très travaillé qui n’a rien à envier aux meilleurs et son double capteur photo, le Honor 8 a su une fois encore s’imposer sur le marché grâce à un rapport qualité-prix remarquable.
En 2017, la marque sera donc encore attendue au tournant. Tous les observateurs et fans de high-tech vont attendre avec impatience ce que réserve Honor pour cette année 2017. Nous avons déjà eu un aperçu des projets de l’entreprise avec l’annonce du Honor Magic, un smartphone doté d’un écran presque borderless. Honor suit les tendances tout en mettant cette petite touche qui lui est propre. Il ne fait aucun doute que le Honor 9 fera partie des modèles les plus attendus de 2017.
Last year saw an incredible number of games release on Steam and elsewhere. Welcome to 2017, where a new game will probably come out every time you blink. To map out what to look forward to this year, we've collected a giant list of games coming out this year. Buckle in, there's a lot to cover.
Release date: March 7, 2017 Developer: Ubisoft Paris Link:Official site
Take a big open world, stuff it with 100 Far Cry-type outpost missions, and jump in with some co-op partners—Tom Senior did just that back in June and found Ubisoft’s upcoming third-person tactical shooter full of enjoyable and emergent chaos. Ghost Recon: Wildlands takes place in a Bolivian landmass where four players comprise a military taskforce sent to disrupt a drug cartel and the government it’s aligned with. While players may have a specific missions—whether it’s to steal some intel or kidnap an informant—how they choose to tackle it is up to them. Guns blazing? Stealth? Or, as often happens, failed stealth that leads to guns blazing?
The open world—the first in Ghost Recon’s ten-game history—promises diverse environments like mountains, forests, and deserts, explorable by ground vehicles, helicopters, and parachutes. The setting is close to modern day, so weapons and gear aren’t as futuristic as they have been in earlier Recon games. Ubisoft is also promising that player choice will affect the world, and that non-violent interactions with NPCs like rebels and civilians can have an impact on missions and goals. And, if your pals aren’t around, you’ll be able to play solo using AI teammates in place of real ones.
Prey
Release date: 2017 Developer: Arkane Link:Official site
New Prey has nothing to do with the old Prey, or Prey 2, which was cancelled back in 2014. Now in the hands of Arkane’s Austin studio, Prey is only familiar in name. Set in an alternate history where President Kennedy was never assassinated, the Soviets and the States continued their rivalry, until one took control of the Kletka Program, a space installation meant to control an alien threat. The project is eventually abandoned, and a corporation takes over (uh-oh), turning the station into “a cutting edge innovation center” called Talos 1. Big surprise, things don’t go well.
You play as Morgan Yu (with a gender of your choice), who happens to be on board when the alien threat gets particularly threatening. From there, it’s a matter of survival and getting to the bottom of what went wrong. Expect plenty of shooting and exploration, and most interestingly, shape-shifting. You and the alien threat can take on nearly any form. An inconspicuous mug or trash bin might be an alien in wait, or if they’re hunting you down, try the mug life for yourself.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Release date: Fall 2017 Developer: Rockstar Studios Link:Official site
Rockstar has done it again: announced a highly-anticipated game without mentioning whether or not it will come to PC. The original Red Dead Redemption never came to PC, but this feels more like a repeat of GTA V than that.
Assuming we’re right, we seem to be looking at a Magnificent Seven approach to the western—or at least, there are seven riders conspicuously featured in the debut teaser. Rockstar is also touting multiplayer, which will presumably look something like GTA Online, but with people running you over with trains instead of cars.
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam
Release date: 2017 Developer: Tripwire Link:Official site
We loved the asymmetry of Rising Storm, the authenticity-focused WWII shooter we named our Multiplayer Game of the Year in 2013, and it's even more dramatic in the Vietnam-set sequel. The Americans are loud and fast, skimming the treetops with helicopters, while the Viet Cong spawn in squad tunnels, appearing behind capture points and ambushing LZs. More than being a good shot, strictly managed teamwork remains the key to success. Tyler tried his hand at both piloting helicopters and manning their guns, and found it nigh on impossible to hit anything without spotters and direction over comms.
The addition of modern, automatic weapons might be an even bigger shift for the series than helicopters, though, as part of the Red Orchestra and Rising Storm identity has been their demand for precision aiming with bolt-action and semi-auto weapons. But the quest for authenticity hasn’t changed here. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam’s guns aren’t easy to handle by any means, and scoring kills still sometimes means picking out specks on the horizon and taking cautious, well-planned shots. Read more about Vietnam’s helicopters, guns, and new mode in our hands-on preview from August.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
Release date: January 24, 2017 Developer: Capcom Link: Steam page
The spooks come early in 2017, with a first-person Resident Evil that, so far as we can tell from our recent hands-on, reclaims some of the series’ older staples, namely backtracking and secret hunting, and takes the words ‘survival’ and ‘horror’ much more seriously. The shiny blockbuster action of recent Resident Evils turns grimy and decayed here, with an axe-wielding murderer chasing a bloodied protagonist around a car. There’s also some fun-sounding time play, with VHS tapes that suck us into new perspectives and then spit us back out where we were, but not necessarily when we were.
Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition
Release date: April 7, 2017 Developer: People Can Fly Link:Steam page
A remaster of a wildly over-the-top, inventive FPS that asks you to electro-whip enemies into spike traps and explosions and your big-ass boot as often as you shoot them. It's still a blast if you missed it the first time around. The old version's cheap on Steam, while the new Full Clip edition includes remastered graphics and audio, a campaign mode that gives you every weapon from the start, and more levels for the score attack Echo mode. Oh, and you can play the whole campaign as Duke Nukem, with new dialogue that probably includes a lot of cuss words.
Sea of Thieves
Release date: 2017 Developer: Rare Link:Official site
Rare's ambitious pirating MMO adventure (or, more accurately, massively co-op adventure) aims to let you do whatever you'd expect from the pirate life alongside a crew of your best mateys. That means searching for treasure, drinking grog, sailing, and fighting ship battles against other pirate crews, but Rare still seems to be working out the exact scope of your activities and how this living pirate world will work. The most interesting choice is the bold lack of UI. You'll find almost no sign of reticles or health bars or maps or any of the usual clutter in Sea of Thieves.
Friday the 13th: The Game
Release date: Spring 2017 Developer: Gun Media Link: Official site
Delayed a few months so the devs could include a single-player mode with bots, this asymmetrical multiplayer game pits one player—as the unstoppable movie slasher Jason Voorhees—against the rest, who play as campers at Crystal Lake, the one place everyone should know by now is not a great place to camp. Jason will enjoy all manner of brutal means to dispatch his prey, be it smashing their faces into a tree, impaling them on spikes, or just going hog-wild with a machete. Campers won’t be entirely helpless, however, and we’re promised that by working together it is in fact possible not to simply elude and survive, but to actually take Jason down.
Sniper Elite 4
Release date: February 2017 Developer: Rebellion Developments Link: Official Site
If you don’t have a date for Valentine’s Day, no worries: you can spend your the romantic holiday shooting Nazis in the nuts. We got a look at Sniper Elite 4 during 2016’s GDC, and the World War II third-person sandbox shooter featured stealth, melee kills, and a whole lot of disturbingly graphic slow-motion x-ray sniper shots the series is famous for. The maps look impressively large this time around, with its smallest still three times bigger than any map from the previous game.
Strafe
Release date: Early2017 Developer: Pixel Titans Link: Official site
Strafe is a deliberately antiquated FPS, borrowing from the bread and butter simplicity of Quake’s breakneck template. It’s not just a nostalgia trip, though: Strafe is also pulls from Rogue. That genre’s interminable revival is starting to grate on a lot of people, but if Pixel Titans manages to achieve the fluidity of the ye olde shooters, playing this over and over again will be a joy. Plus, it’s genuinely funny and, with its rough 1990s aesthetic, quite beautiful too, if you came up during that era.
Dusk
Release date: 2017 Developer: David Szymanski Link: Steam
An ode to southern gothic horror and Quake-era FPS design, Dusk is aiming for the low-poly scares and hectic precision shooter action a good chunk of PC gamers grew up on. So far, it’s pitch perfect, throwing chainsaw-wielding maniacs, witches, and all sorts of occult enemies your way in massive levels hiding secrets rooms, weapons, and bosses in every corner.
Metal Gear Survive
Release date: 2017 Developer: Konami Link:Official site
A four-player co-op stealth game with zombies that is also Metal Gear? Well, OK. We expected things would change at Konami post-Kojima, and this is certainly a change. After being sucked out of Mother Base by a rogue wormhole, you wake up in an alien landscape that looks suspiciously like the Middle East, and must battle hordes of the undead with your fellow grunts. There’s plenty of MGS 5-style stealth, fulton devices, and both base infiltration and defense in the 15 minutes of gameplay you can see below.
Desync
Release date: Early 2017 Developer: The Foregone Syndicate Link: Steam page
Coated in the neon colour schemes of 1980s cyberpunk, Desync is among the most visually striking shooters you’re likely to see in 2017. Developed by Melbourne studio The Foregone Syndicate, Desync is a precision-oriented twitch shooter with a focus on performative gameplay: basically, it rewards you for pulling off kills in the most spectacular ways possible. The studio is also working on a bafflingly granular leaderboard system, incentivising stylish play. If you can imagine a strange meeting of Hotline Miami, Lovely Planet, and Quake, you’re close to how Desync plays out.
