Last month felt like a big month in PC gaming as the surprise imminent launch of long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong had smaller games all announcing delays to dive out of its way. Hot on its heels was Borderlands 4, both of which were sitting high on the list of top wishlisted games on Steam ahead of launch. Gird your game libraries because October is a hell of a lot bigger than that.
There are five games near the top of Steam’s most-wishlisted chart all launching this month. October does tend to be a big month for game launches, and big games do tend to gain momentum to the top of the wishlist pile the month of release. Occasionally we’ll see months where two or three majorly anticipated games are all stumbling over each other but five? I’m calling uncle.
It’s the kind of month that really feels like the apex of a rollercoaster, or like the little adrenaline rush that makes ye olde loot boxes so addictive. Not quite like the gauntlet of summer 2023 where we got Diablo 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Starfield all in quick succession, but it could come close.
Here’s what’s coming this month:
Bloodlines 2 clocking in at spot #12 ruins the ability to cleanly call this “half the top ten” but it’s still quite the lineup.
Not pictured is The Outer Worlds 2, wallowing down in spot #70 in wishlists even though it’s a launch I would personally clock as one of the October PC releases we’re most excited about after Avowed went over so well back in February. I’ll include it in the conversation as an honorary member. Conversely I’m a little surprised to see Little Nightmares 3 coming in so high even though I know the spooky sidescroller series is quite well-liked.
It feels safe betting that Battlefield 6 and The Outer Worlds 2 will both be plenty popular this month. They’re marquee launches from major publishers so the people who play ’em will play ’em, right? Same goes for Little Nightmares 3, though I’m not sure it will have an explosive Silksong-style moment.
Everything else on the list is a little more uncertain, and that’s what could tip this month from a busy release calendar into total chaos.
Extraction shooter ARC Raiders is one we’ve got an eye on after enjoying free-to-play team shooter The Finals by Embark Studios at the end of 2023. We’re betting that it could convert a ton of new extraction shooter fans, but launching an online shooter is more of a Schrodinger’s cat situation than it’s ever been: impossible to know if the thing’s dead or alive until the lid comes off.
The Dynasty Warriors: PUBG-looking co-op shooter Kingmakers could be exactly the kind of weird PC release that takes over the entire month. It certainly looks fun in the trailers, which show players fending off enormous medieval armies with modern weapons, but looks can be decieving—just ask former most-wishlisted survival game The Day Before, which crumbled on launch day.
These two third-person shooters have just enough time between them that they could pass each other like ships in the night. But even if I were a betting woman I’d probably decline predicting whether one or both make a splash.
The biggest unknown of the month is Bloodlines 2. It’s the sequel to a notoriously buggy, cult hit RPG from 21 years ago that switched development studios, rebooted, and is finally launching after a comical number of delays.
The Chinese Room laid off employees this summer, is tempering expectations by warning players that it isn’t on the scale of Baldur’s Gate 3, and what our own Robin Valentine played of it he called “richly authentic, intriguingly written, dripping with brooding atmosphere, and… not very fun to play,” which may be about as true to the original as things get—though Fraser liked the combat more than Robin.
It could either land like a backflip on a bad knee or turn out to be the kind of ‘extremely on its own bullshit’ (in a good way) RPG that we got with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 earlier this year.
With this many highly-anticipated games all launching together, it’s impossible to say how this month is going to shake out, so savor the uncertainty.
