I haven’t played myself in about a month since it’s been the holiday period, but it looks to be in a bit of a lurch. Many streamers jumped ship to Marvel Rivals (at least for the moment). Marvel Rivals is also an inherently more accessible game since it’s not a MOBA. I think the initial hype has died down and closed beta testing will now resume in a more normal way. I wouldn’t expect another big player surge until open beta begins - possibly even full release.

Though Unity will always have my favorite game play(…)

I love seeing another Unity enjoyer around here. That game is severely underrated and had it not had that disastrously buggy launch the AC franchise could have gone in a completely different direction than the open world RPG flavour we ended up with. Plus, revolutionary Paris is one of the best realized video game cities of all time, it’s just beautiful.

I thought Infinite was fairly well liked? That’s a bummer to hear, it’s in my backlog docket. I just played Bioshock 2 a few months ago however and while solid I probably do agree it’s got nothing on the original.

Shame. I quite enjoyed F1 Manager 23 despite it being somewhat simplistic and had hoped the series would continue to develop.

How powerful is the PC? Is the question more about games optimised for mouse+keyboard, or is it about demanding recent games that allows his new machine to flex its muscles?

Since you say he likes Souls-likes Black Myth Wukong probably checks both boxes - I never ended up playing it (my backlog is too long) but it looked great with stunning visuals and I heard good things about the gameplay.

Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there and a pretty damn good game too after the patches and expansions.

Finally, something like Fallout: London could be an interesting suggestion as mods of that nature are out of reach of the console crowd. Could give him a whiff of what he’s been missing out on.

It’s been a while since I last played but the over-streamlining and continued simplification and homogenisation of the classes in combat was definitely part of the reason I stopped playing.

Casey even shows up in the dark place wearing the Max Payne tie and leather jacket! I was geeking out.

I grew up in the nineties and PC gaming certainly felt like a niche hobby then, at least where I grew up. “Normal” kids were doing sports, maybe some families had a Playstation, Dreamcast or Nintendo console in the living room. But there weren’t many others who played PC games and us who did were the nerds who got more or less bullied.

What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)

Gacha games have been taking over the world ever since Genshin Impact and those are pure gambling. Going even further back, Ultimate Team on FIFA (EA FC now) is probably the worst true “selling gambling to kids” product I can remember.

Jesse didn’t really do it for me as a protagonist, not sure if it’s due to writing or the performance (I suspect both). Which is really a shame because the game itself is really fucking cool. I still recommend it to anyone, the gameplay is slick and the SCP/world building aspect makes it engaging and interesting enough by itself.

Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there. And I also think - in its post 2.0 state - that it’s just a very good game too. I recommend the Ultra+ mod to squeeze out even more performance and visual fidelity from the engine.

I still haven’t worked my way through the deals I got during last year’s sales, and despite that I bought another dozen games on GOG this black week. So I’m trying to stay away from the Steam winter sale this year lest my backlog becomes such a behemoth it gives me uncontrollable anxiety.

I really like GOG so it would be highly unfortunate to see them go under. I guess we really can’t have nice things in this day and age.

Much needed. I finished the game before this latest huge patch dropped and had to use console commands three times just to fix progression locking bugs in the main story.

It’s still a must play for fans of the franchise I would say, but if you can wait it’s probably a good idea to do so. They still haven’t gotten A-life working.

If Warren Spector is actually involved I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt but I’m not thrilled about the competitive multiplayer aspect and the trailer presentation made me think “hero shooter” more than Deus Ex/Thief spiritual successor. Also Spector’s track record over the 20 post-Eidos years isn’t exactly glowing.

I never understood the “don’t nerf things, buff other things!” argument. Power creep is a very real issue and much more tough to deal with than players getting upset briefly.

Ragebound sounds about right. I had Ninja Gaiden on my original Xbox back in the day and while I loved it and played the shit out of it I never beat it. These games were fucking hard.

I’m starting to really despise this franchise, studio and/or publisher. Fuck off with these remaster cash crabs two years after a game is released. Are we due a The Last of Us: Part 1 Remastered - Remake too soon? Get out of here.

Didn’t the remake rip out all the amazing period songs from the original OST? I remember vibing to Django Reinhardt as you’re driving was a huge part of it for me.

I was praying for Letho even though we all knew it was going to be Ciri (for better or worse, we’ll see).

Leaning into the moral grey of the Witcher world with Letho would have been awesome, he says (in one of the endings to his story) he’ll head out east over the mountains so we could have gotten some all-new environments and it would have been 100% CDPR IP so they could have done whatever they wanted without trampling over lore too much. Plus Letho is just an amazing character with huge protagonist energy. Oh well.