i bet only 1 of the 3 announcements will be a surprise to gamers. the world surprise in this instance is used to build hype. think about how Apple does it. before the launch of the ipod nano most people pretty much knew what they were going to annouce because people read the blogs and did a little research. same with the iphone and now the ipad. none of these are surprises but rather logical conclusions. so don't be disappointed when you are not surprised by the announcements.
I guess that I need to be surprised, tbh. I don't remember the last time that I was pleasantly surprised, but maybe was in 2005-2006. Tbh I have not seen anything original since around 2004-2005 and after that the only thing that I used to expect from newer games was improved tech, mostly graphics. I can say that my only expectations lied there until late 2008 when it became clear to me that Crysis would probably remain the best looking game until the next gen consoles are released.
So if nothing else, I want a new Source engine that trully takes advantage of the hardware released in the last 3 years, an engine that trully stands pout from the rest, like the ones we were used to get in the past (Quake's, Unreals, Source...). Valve is the best positioned developer for that task, since they have a huge PC user base and because they must have tons of money (48% of games sold last year were digital DL and Steam is said to represent 70% of digital DL, so do the math, they might be richer than EA, Ubi or even Activision by now, go figure).
