My second-playthrough sword-and-shield warrior in Skyrim is nowhere near as powerful as he should be. My Sith Sorcerer is only level 31. Everything I've built in Minecraft is a work-in-progress. 2012 doesn't care. It just shows up, right on schedule, gets drunk, pops off some colorful explosives, and teases me with yet another year of promising PC games. I need a break, damn it. I need some time to do things like, you know, eat dinner and sleep.

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2011 was an incredible year for gaming, and a great one for the PC crowd. Talented studios debuted titles built with all-new technology. New visual standards were set with seemingly every big release. The indie scene thrived. Even more studios flocked to free-to-play. With PCs, tablets, phones and Facebook, everyone had fun.In 2012 we'll likely get a lot of big news. This summer's E3 may be the biggest ever as Microsoft and Sony will likely unveil their next generation hardware. Nvidia and AMD will continue to take swings at each other. Razer is teasing some. OnLive might actually show up on iOS. Expect a lot of announcements about games for 2013, as well as plenty of indie surprises. We might even hear something about Blizzard's in-development MMO.It only took five days and already we have a big new game to drool over. XCOM: Enemy Unknown . It's, like the XCOM currently in development at 2K Marin , but a turn-based strategy game with real-time elements, meant to be in line with the original gameplay formula. Firaxis seems like the perfect fit for this project, and I imagine every PC gamer who fondly remembers getting mercilessly gunned down by vicious aliens in the mid-1990s will be excited. Nobody at IGN has seen it running yet, but it'll apparently be ready to ship this fall, and will be a multiplatform release.The MMO space is about to get a lot more crowded with The Secret World on the way from Funcom Tera from Bluehole Studio and En Masse Entertainment , and it's a good bet NCsoft and ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 might show up as well before the year is through. BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic still hasn't been out for a month yet and Electronic Arts claims it's the fastest-growing subscription-based MMO. Valve has two games scheduled to release in 2012. Blizzard might release three games, four if you count Blizzard DOTA. Compared to 2011 when Valve released one game and Blizzard delivered none, that's a pretty big difference.In terms of how traditional PC games are played and accessed, I don't see anything major changing in 2012. Steam, Valve's digital download service that recently cracked five million concurrent users, will continue to grow, and I don't see the current online distribution hierarchy really shifting too much. While Steam is the preferred choice, there's also Battle.net and Origin and then everything else. Maybe OnLive can make more of an impact this year with its mobile app that lets you access games on tablets, which could tap into the audience entranced by the App Store and increasingly sophisticated gaming experiences on Facebook.As with any online destination, exclusive content brings in customers, and Valve's competitive games appear to be forever popular. Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source continue to rank in the top three for most played games on Steam. The Dota 2 beta continues to inch upward as well, carving out a spot in the lower portion of the top 10. When Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, both currently in beta testing, are ready for launch, the effect could be significant.Not only will a large portion of Counter-Strike's huge community at least check out GO on PC, if only out of curiosity, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions could help expand awareness. I know most PC gamers will toss up their arms and exclaim "How could anyone not have heard of Counter-Strike?," but that audience exists; a younger crowd that thinks Call of Duty started with Modern Warfare and Gears of War is the only franchise Epic ever made. Counter-Strike's unforgiving gameplay style, where any success is based almost exclusively on your personal skill, may not be the easiest sell to new customers, but thelessen the sting of Counter-Strike's wicked learning curve.