The Most Anticipated Video Games Of 2025

2025 is shaping up to be an exciting year for the video game industry. On the hardware front, Nintendo is expected to not only announce but most likely release the successor to the Switch. Sony will continue to release games that are optimized for the PlayStation 5 Pro to justify its hefty price tag. And Microsoft will either answer the PS5 Pro with its own upgrade to the Xbox Series X, or go the opposite route and continue to de-emphasize Xbox consoles entirely in favor of cloud gaming and bringing Xbox titles to other platforms. All that to say nothing of the video game films coming next year (here's why we're worried about the "Minecraft" movie).

In terms of actual games, 2025 belongs to the sixth mainline installment in a certain massively popular franchise that will be the long-awaited successor to the most profitable entertainment product of all time, video game or otherwise. But there are plenty more game releases to look forward to next year as well, from promising new IP to long overdue sequels. There is also a full remake of one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, as well as the reboot of a once top-tier franchise that is nearly 15 years removed from its heyday. 2025 will be a crucial year for not only the current console generation, but the gaming industry as a whole. 

For the third main installment of the current "Doom" series — which began with the 2016 reboot, simply titled "Doom" — developer id Software is going down the prequel route. "Doom: The Dark Ages" is set to take franchise protagonist Doom Slayer all the way back to a version of the middle ages. The lore of the "Doom" franchise can be a bit impenetrable and we definitely can't even begin to scratch the surface of it here, but there is speculation that the reason Doom Slayer could've existed in both medieval times and the 21st century has to do with the way that time moves and behaves differently in Hell.

While "Doom: The Dark Ages" will be the first "Doom" release since Microsoft's acquisition of id Software parent company ZeniMax Media in 2020, it will not be an Xbox console exclusive — though it will be a day one Game Pass release. Its actual release date has yet to be revealed beyond the confirmation of it being a 2025 title, but whatever date that is will see a simultaneous release for Xbox Series X/S, PC, and PlayStation 5. 

Capcom's creature hunting-based action/RPG franchise "Monster Hunter" has been a major force in Japan since its PlayStation Portable installments, but it remained fairly niche outside of Japan for many years. It wouldn't be until 2018's "Monster Hunter: World," the first entry made from the ground up for consoles and PC rather than handheld systems — as well as streamlining things to be more welcoming to new players — that the series finally penetrated the international market in a big way. It even got popular enough to get a live-action movie adaptation, which left people wondering if "Monster Hunter 2" will ever happen.

The upcoming "Monster Hunter Wilds" is the first new "Monster Hunter" game since "World" made the series a global sensation. It's also the first "Monster Hunter" entry for current-gen consoles, set to hit the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S along with PC on February 28, 2025. It's definitely the first time a "Monster Hunter" game has so much to prove; it's no longer an underdog looking to expand its fanbase, but rather a proven AAA franchise with all the associated hype that comes with it. A limited beta, which launched in October 2024 to lukewarm reactions, had some people worried that the game won't be fully ready for primetime come February. Here's hoping that's not the case, and if it is, that Capcom gets any post-launch issues ironed out relatively quickly.

On the whole, video games based on Marvel properties have been pretty solid in recent times. We've had the excellent PlayStation "Spider-Man" games, the underrated "Midnight Suns," and the surprisingly great "Guardians of the Galaxy," which fixed most of the issues that people had with its "Avengers" predecessor. You have to go back pretty far to find the last example of a truly bad Marvel video game.

In March 2020, Marvel released a new trailer that was its best in years — and it wasn't for an MCU movie. It was actually for the long-teased Marvel video game written by Amy Hennig (best known for being a writer and director on the first three "Uncharted" games) that is set to hit as-of-yet unrevealed platforms in 2025. Called "Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra," it will be an action/adventure game set during the titular year and featuring four playable characters: Captain America, Black Panther, Gabe Jones, and the Wakandan spy Nanali. Despite the only footage shown thus far being cinematic and not featuring any actual gameplay, we've been told that we'll be playing this game before the end of next year. 

Though it has existed for almost as long as the "Super Mario Bros." and "The Legend of Zelda" franchises, Nintendo's output for the "Metroid" series has been inconsistent. There was a "Metroid" game for the NES, SNES, and Game Boy, only for the franchise to skip the Nintendo 64 entirely. In the 2000s, it came back in a big way with multiple releases for the GameCube, Game Boy Advance, Wii, and Nintendo DS, only to take yet another long break. 2021's "Metroid Dread" marked the first new mainline "Metroid" entry in eleven years. Fans of the franchise will be pleased to learn that a new entry is just around the corner.

Originally announced in 2017, "Metroid Prime 4" was set to be the first new entry in the "Prime" subseries since "Metroid Prime 3: Corruption" way back in 2007. The game then entered development hell, with long periods of zero updates punctuated with often disappointing news — including the 2019 reveal that development was starting over from scratch. Finally, June 2024 brought the game's first trailer, along with the full title of "Metroid Prime 4: Beyond" and a promised 2025 release. While Nintendo insists the game is still coming to Switch as has always been the plan, many speculate a dual-release for both the Switch and its successor. Either way, barring any more delays, we will soon finally be playing the first new "Prime" game since George W. Bush was still president. 

The "Sid Meier's Civilization" franchise — or simply "Civilization" — seems like it's been around a lot longer than its 1991 debut, and it also feels like its next game should be numbered a lot higher. And yet, 2025 brings "Civilization VII," only the seventh main entry in the pioneering strategy franchise that focuses on starting at the literal beginning of Earth's history and, hopefully, going all the way into the future. Along the way, you make the overarching cultural, technological, religious, and intellectual decisions that will guide your particular group through their history — choosing to either befriend or go to war with the other groups you encounter, controlled either by the CPU or by other human players.

Sid Meier, the creator of the series, has always had a rule of thirds for sequels to his games — a third of the design should be basically the same as previous entries, a third should be improved over previous entries, and a third should be entirely new. The developer's diary on the official "Civilization VII" website has confirmed that this philosophy has also been in place during development of the game. As such, fans can expect another entry in the long-running franchise that both feels like an improved version of classic "Civilization" while also introducing various elements to the series for the first time when it hits all current consoles (plus both PC and Mac) in February 2025. 

When legendary gaming auteur Hideo Kojima had a high profile falling out with Konami and struck out on his own, he was forced to leave the "Metal Gear" series behind. As sad as people were to know that the franchise was going to have to move forward without Kojima, there was also a lot of excitement over what Kojima and his team were going to do with their newfound creative freedom. The result was 2019's critically acclaimed "Death Stranding," where you play a courier named Sam Porter Bridges ("The Walking Dead's" Norman Reedus) who has to carry goods across a treacherous landscape while avoiding dangerous creatures as well as rival couriers.

Though Kojima Productions would subsequently announce multiple new projects as being in development, it turns out that the company's second release is going to be "Death Stranding 2: On The Beach." It makes sense, as it's far easier to make a sequel that already has an existing foundation than to start from scratch with a brand new IP. So while we wait for "OD," "Physint," and whatever else Kojima and the gang might have up their sleeves for the future, we can enjoy the next "Death Stranding" game, which will be released in 2025 for the PlayStation 5.

There was a time when the "Assassin's Creed" franchise not only saw annual releases, but sometimes multiple games within a single year. Fans eventually got burned out and quality started to suffer a bit, so somewhere around the mid-2010s the series started to take 2-3 years between mainline entries. The result was games that got a lot more creatively interesting and stopped feeling so samey. 2023's "Assassin's Creed Mirage" took a step back from how massive the series had grown in terms of both the size of the game worlds and the list of things to do, representing a more streamlined and focused adventured that hearkened back to the franchise's earlier entries. The next mainline entry, "Assassin's Creed Shadows," looks to shake things up yet again by being the first installment to take place in feudal Japan.

"Assassin's Creed Shadows" is among the most anticipated games of 2025, and it's also shaping up to be the most controversial — Ubisoft has faced criticism from a very vocal minority who unfortunately have an issue with the game only letting you pick between a female and a Black man as the playable characters, despite the latter being based on a real person. "In 'Assassin's Creed Shadows,' we highlight figures, both fictional like Naoe, a Japanese woman warrior, and historical, like Yasuke, the African born samurai," franchise boss Marc-Alexis Coté said at an event in London (via Eurogamer). "While the inclusion of a Black samurai in feudal Japan has sparked questions and even controversy, Naoe, as a fictional character, has also faced scrutiny for her gender. But just as Yasuke's presence in Japanese history is fact, so too are the stories of women who defied societal expectations and took up arms in times of conflict."

"Assassin's Creed Shadows" is due to hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Mac, and iPadOS in February 2025. 

The first post-Hideo Kojima "Metal Gear Solid" release was the disappointing "Metal Gear Survive," which turned the franchise into a post-apocalyptic resource gathering game with a heavy online component. It was met with almost universal disdain, and it made fans understandably worried about the series' future. Since then, Konami has smartly decided to focus on the past. First, it released "Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection," a compilation of every canonical mainline "Metal Gear Solid" game from the series' inception through "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater." Next up is a full remake of "Snake Eater."

Entitled "Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater," it is essentially a shot-for-shot redux of the original but with modern visuals and various other improvements. If it does well, it's assumed that more "Metal Gear Solid" games will receive the same treatment. While Konami has yet to officially give any sort of release window, it's widely assumed that "Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater" will drop in 2025 given that pre-orders are already being taken for various fancy special editions for both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game. It's also coming to PC. 

Whenever the calendar for upcoming game releases is full of major AAA franchises, it can be difficult for original IP — especially from a new developer — to get as much attention. So we're doing our part here in helping to get hype built for "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33," an extremely impressive-looking RPG coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in 2025 from rising publisher Kepler Interactive ("Sifu," "Pacific Drive") and brand new developer Sandfall Interactive. 

Though the development team only includes about 30 people, you would be forgiven for assuming that "Expedition 33" has a massive AAA game-sized team of hundreds behind it when you look at the gorgeous stills and trailers. The game's creative director said that the "Persona" and "Final Fantasy" franchises are the two biggest influences, and that the team is proud to wear those influences on their sleeves. If you're a fan of either of those series — and if you love RPGs, then of course you are — you should definitely be keeping an eye out for "Expedition 33" when it hits the above platforms sometime next year. 

Open world epics have been a dime a dozen in the video game industry for the past 15 years or so, but 2020's "Ghost of Tsushima" — originally a PlayStation 4 exclusive but eventually ported to both PlayStation 5 and PC — managed to stand out from a very crowded pack. While it had plenty of fighting and big action set pieces, not to mention all the usual side quests and hidden collectibles that are trademarks of the genre, "Ghost of Tsushima" was often a deliberately-paced, almost meditative experience that allowed players to spend countless hours doing nothing but riding a horse through stunning vistas for no other reason than just to enjoy the view and get lost in thought.

In September 2024, it was confirmed that not only is a sequel to "Ghost of Tsushima" in development, but that the game — titled "Ghost of Yōtei" — is so far along that it's already due out for PlayStation 5 sometime in 2025. As it takes place over 300 years after the events of the original, it of course features a brand new protagonist, though it'll still be within the same timeline and may feature references to the previous game. Developer Sucker Punch also promises a greater amount of player control over the narrative than "Tsushima" offered.

At one time, "Fable" was one of the biggest first-party franchises in the Xbox family, right up there with the likes of "Halo" and "Gears of War." But like so many other Xbox IPs, "Fable" struggled to maintain its relevance over the long haul. After 2010's "Fable III," the series has seen only gimmicky spin-offs in terms of new entries to the franchise. Even the 2013 remaster of the first game, "Fable Anniversary," was met with a tepid reception due to various performance issues.

During the July 2020 Xbox Games Showcase, it was revealed that "Fable" was finally getting a long-overdue reboot. As time went on, it was announced that writers who had worked on acclaimed games like "Horizon Forbidden West" had signed onto the project, which gave a justifiably skeptical audience a reason to be a little more optimistic about a "Fable" release for the first time in close to 15 years. That optimism got even higher in June 2024 with the reveal that, in addition to main developer Playground Games, Eidos-Montreal would also be pitching in on the "Fable" reboot — which is notable because they previously served a supporting role in the successful 2013 reboot of "Tomb Raider." 

Though more and more Xbox exclusives have been making their way to PlayStation as of late, "Fable" is currently only confirmed for Xbox Series X/S and PC and is set to release sometime in 2025. 

It's hard to overstate just how massive the hype is for "Grand Theft Auto VI." The previous entry, "Grand Theft Auto V," has been so absurdly successful that Rockstar Games hasn't even needed to make a new one since its original 2013 release — the company has been content to just keep re-releasing it for each new generation of hardware, not to mention making cash hand over fist via all the money players have spent in "Grand Theft Auto Online." 

And while people probably won't stop playing "GTA Online" anytime soon, there needed to eventually be a new story-focused, single-player entry in the franchise. That's where "Grand Theft Auto VI" comes in, which finally received its first official trailer in December 2023 — that unfortunate September 2022 illegal leak of very early footage of the game notwithstanding. It confirmed that the location of the game would be Vice City — the "GTA" universe's version of Miami that was most famously used in "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" — and seemed to feature dual protagonists that fans speculate are based on Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes. The partners in romance and in crime go by the names Lucia and Jason. Various context clues seem to suggest a present-day setting, which has been the trend of the last two mainline entries. 

Despite some buzz that the game is behind schedule and might slip into 2026, most outlets are choosing to take Rockstar at its word that "GTA VI" is still on track to be out by the end of 2025, with only PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions currently confirmed.