Practically inventing loot boxes.

Killing ownership of videogames.

The usual.

Yeah, PS5 games are made with the assumption that they’ll have access to a 5GB/s drive. It makes sense that they might actually benefit from that. I saw a test of Ratchet and Clank running on a HDD and the main difference was the portals that mask the load times were comically long.

And it’s true the difference in price isn’t that great any more. Personally I’ve got an older SATA in my PC and a NVME. I try to install to the faster drive where I can, but since my PC actually has a worse CPU than my Legion Go S, I’m not likely to see a lot of benefit from it. I suppose you’ve got a better chance of picking up a used SATA drive on the cheap if you really need to save money.

And the worst thing is, they probably still won’t be as self-destructively greedy as they were before.

I know they are. For something like database work, they’re amazing. Now go an look at some game load time benchmarks.

Because I can guarantee you they’re nowhere near that much faster for 99% of games. Once you get off spinning rust, CPU speed remains the number one factor in load times. Because nearly everything is compressed and has to be unpacked and processed into the right formats by the system before it can be used.

Picking whatever comes up at the top from googling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8

Just scanning though that video I can see the biggest difference is like a second.

DirectStorage was supposed to be able to make game loading faster on faster SSDs, but as far as I can see that hasn’t really happened. The PS5 does actually get noticeably slower if you cobble a slower drive into it, although not really enough to break anything. The decompression units in that hardware are actually pretty good, and can keep up with the faster SSDs.

A 2TB Drive is just over £100, even with the crazy memory prices lately. I’ve got one in my PS5 ffs. A bog standard SATA drive will do practically the same load times as NVME. It’s all about the access time.

Devs should abandon HDD completely. Look how much space they saved here by not wasting it on duplicated resources.

If you’re still using HDD for games in 2025 then what the fuck are you even playing at?

Even the consoles abandoned that.

It’s an obscene price to pay for a GPU no matter how fast it is.

Yeah, the last batch never did either.

It’s going to be priced like a PC and most PC gamers unsurprisingly already have one. You can already stream that to another room in your house with zero lag.

Steam Deck does well because it adds portability into the mix. Something PCs have always struggled with.

Yeah, seems powerful enough for anything pre-HDMI at least. If it’s newer than that, I probably still have the actual hardware plugged in…

Plus surely the browser libraries like CEF are in danger of being unsupported in 32 bit land at some point, if they’re not already.

I’ve got to be honest, the price of a game is probably the least important factor on whether I make a full price purchase.

I’m not going to rush out and buy something I’ve no real interest in. I can count on one hand the number I’ve made this generation. On PS2 I’d be grabbing something every week or two, but now I just can’t get excited for the latest and greatest updates on old formulas. Half the time I buy just to encourage them to make more games like that, like I did with Talos Principle 2, Astro Bot and Split Fiction.

I might pick it up later if I feel inclined, or see it on a decent discount. Like Clair Obscur, that I picked up for £29 in a sale just because I remembered it existed and fancied something to play over the winter holiday.

A good APU solution like in the consoles would be a nice option though. Especially now with RAM prices through the roof again.

If it was going to be cheap, they’d have told us. They’ve prepared us for the worst, and we’ve still got people huffing the copium thinking the Steam Frame will be price-competitive with the Quest 3…

Agreed, the best selling dedicated gaming system of the last few years is the Switch, which has less power than many phones.

12GB seems to be the sweet spot for VRAM, but I suspect the real issue is PC devs not really giving a fuck how hit runs on less than their dev kit.

But then a lot of PC gamers seem to think a game should always run at ultra, no matter how good their rig is.

And I will die on this hill: raytracing has been a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money.

Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.

The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.

Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 completely dominated the spring and summer. Nobody would shut up about it. This year’s Baldur’s Gate.

Feels like it’s going to sweep most awards here just for that, and they’ve listed the other games just to be polite and pretend it’s a contest.

I should get around to playing it at some point.

Honestly didn’t think it was as good as the first one.

The truck is a hammer and every single problem is a nail.

Having played a fair bit of it, I can see why it isn’t.

Every award show ever: “Just give most of the prizes to whatever sold the most, with the odd curveball choice to make sure everyone comments to tell us that we are wrong to drive up those engagement metrics”

That intro section is fantastic.

Enemy design can be annoying though.

From the GPU specs in expecting a firmly mid range machine. Probably about the price of a PS5 Pro, but with the performance of a base PS5.

Impressive. This is like making a Star Trek replicator, but the only thing it can make is more garbage.

Yeah, at about £500 I’d have got one. I don’t need the full Steam OS or any of that crap. I just want wireless connection to my PC for streaming.

The use of a second wireless dongle could be a double edged sword as well. Right now I can use a Quest anywhere in the house on Wifi. Works better than wired, in fact. The dongle would limit where I can use it.

I hope there’s a giant archive of these guides we can download, should anything happen to that site. Any older games you might be stuck on, this is about the only place to go for help.

And I’ll tell you now, old games can be obscure as shit. They didn’t care if you finished them or not.

Depends how full it is, how interesting is it (note this is not the same as full), how fast you can travel, and how fun movement is.

There’s a lot of elements to open world and a lot of devs get the balance very wrong. You end up playing in a map rather than the world.

And the DLC is just as good as the base game.

Come on everybody, we need to make a…

Platform game

Doom clone

Command and Conquer clone

MMO

Open world game

MOBA

PUBG clone

Extraction Shooter

Coming soon: Fortnite Extractimum. Eleventy billion players in two days.

In fairness, I have never played any other game like Death Stranding.

I think game patches were even charged to the developers, which is why a lot of them were loath to patch minor bugs.

I canned Humble when it became apparent that I was just buying next months free Epic games.

Really, I think multiplayer should be free (it’s not like multiplayer games don’t nickel and dime you on top of that anyway) and the game subscription peeled out of it. I’m only interested in the “free” games anyway.

Well, it got you a better experience than whatever it was Sony were doing at the time, which was a weird ethernet adapter, and seemingly every game reinventing the idea of how online should work.

I don’t think it ever needed to be charged for, it just needed to be designed.

I only ever paid for it once they started giving away games with it. Multiplayer alone wasn’t worth it to me.

Yeah, if the Xbox Series S/X could have played my Steam library at that price, I’d have bought one in a heartbeat just to use as a gaming box.

But they’ve already hinted that the next one will be a lot more expensive, and at that point you might as well just buy a PC…

You wouldn’t. You’d buy Titanfall 2 for a whopping £2.49, and play a great (if short) single player campaign and then delete it.

If only for Effect and Cause, which is right up there with the best levels in any game.

Article next year: how 20 million unsold Switch 2 consoles finally killed the world oldest videogaming company.

Primal is a game that got a lot of hype at the time but nobody ever seems to talk about any more. No remaster, no sequel, nothing.

Those billion AI GPUs won’t pay for themselves you know.

They’ve been pretty underwhelming for a while now.

You used to get crazy deals on games only a few months old. Now it’s just the same 50% off a five year old game before being ramped back up to full price between sales.

There’s a few bargains of stuff you may have missed, but likely they’ve been an Epic freebie, or on PSPlus or in a Humble Bundle by now.

A game for everybody is a game for nobody.

I like the fact that everybody seemed to be expecting Grand Theft Horsey, and got a slow paced Wild West sim.

I actually played Assassin’s Creed Origins right after playing this for like two months straight, and it just felt so “gamey” in comparison.