December 2025 PCG Article Discussion

[Zloth]

Theres been some pretty good ones, I guess if the universe doesnt appeal you might not look closely but theres quite a few worth a look even if you dont care for the setting IMO.

It does have some appeal - it just doesn't ever seem to be used in games I want to play! The franchise seems to end up in RTS'ish games most of the time. The turn-based Chaos Gate has been in my wish list for years, but I haven't triggered on it yet. Retirement (or at least semi-retirement) is coming soon, so maybe....

 

[Johnway]

Not sure how different this is going to be from the fantasy, generally I understood that 40K would be harder to do in TW because the scale of the tabletop game is smaller with less units on board. I dont know the TT game just what I heard and Jody I think mentions it in the article. Hope its as good as it looks from the trailer.

Honestly it baffles me how GW can mess up making decent Warhammer games. it seems like they just get lazy and go for the lowest hanging fruit all in the name of making money. They seem more interested making rubbish mobile games for a quick buck. The IP is very strong and with the resources and devs, could make it really good. We do have some winners like Dawn of war, Chaos gate, space hulk, dark tidem space marine (1 and 2) and i suppose gladius, but for the most part they fall in the mediocre to shocking lazy.

I would have loved to see a BF or COD SP campaign based in the WH40k universe. But we know that isn't going to happen any time soon.

 

[BeardyHat]

Honestly it baffles me how GW can mess up making decent Warhammer games. it seems like they just get lazy and go for the lowest hanging fruit all in the name of making money. They seem more interested making rubbish mobile games for a quick buck. The IP is very strong and with the resources and devs, could make it really good. We do have some winners like Dawn of war, Chaos gate, space hulk, dark tidem space marine (1 and 2) and i suppose gladius, but for the most part they fall in the mediocre to shocking lazy.

I would have loved to see a BF or COD SP campaign based in the WH40k universe. But we know that isn't going to happen any time soon.

It's cause people will buy it on name alone. People are ravenous for Warhammer and the people who like the tabletop game are generally rabid.

@Kaamos_Llama as far as the model count goes, it's fairly similar between 40k and Age of Sigmar and I do believe it's somewhat similar with Old World. I actually haven't played that one yet, but based on the army I have partially built, it'll be pretty close.

For 40k, I've had armies consisting of well over 100-models, probably close to 130-150 (Orks) and for AoS, both my Armies are over 100-models as well. With all the games, you can choose armies and models that have lesser or more. A friend of mine has a 6-model AoS army due to being giants and you can definitely run bigger and more point intensive models in pretty much any army.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

It's cause people will buy it on name alone. People are ravenous for Warhammer and the people who like the tabletop game are generally rabid.

@Kaamos_Llama as far as the model count goes, it's fairly similar between 40k and Age of Sigmar and I do believe it's somewhat similar with Old World. I actually haven't played that one yet, but based on the army I have partially built, it'll be pretty close.

For 40k, I've had armies consisting of well over 100-models, probably close to 130-150 (Orks) and for AoS, both my Armies are over 100-models as well. With all the games, you can choose armies and models that have lesser or more. A friend of mine has a 6-model AoS army due to being giants and you can definitely run bigger and more point intensive models in pretty much any army.

Ahh, I'd read some chatter that 40K armies generally had less models than fantasy. Ive only really admired it from afar.

Honestly it baffles me how GW can mess up making decent Warhammer games. it seems like they just get lazy and go for the lowest hanging fruit all in the name of making money. They seem more interested making rubbish mobile games for a quick buck. The IP is very strong and with the resources and devs, could make it really good. We do have some winners like Dawn of war, Chaos gate, space hulk, dark tidem space marine (1 and 2) and i suppose gladius, but for the most part they fall in the mediocre to shocking lazy.

Yea they are pretty fast and loose with the license, I didnt think about mobile but I bet theres a lot of trash there. I do think theyve had quite a lot of medium to good quality in the last few years, I cant think of too many complete failures? I dont conciously follow them, but I do seem to like the setting somehow.

As well as the ones you mentioned I played some Battlesector and thought it was pretty good, Also Boltgun although I dont generally play many retro shooters so not much to compare it to. I also remember people quite liking the Battleship Gothic Armada games, at least I was curious about them at one point, also Blood Bowl 2 looked like fun and I meant to try.

I would have loved to see a BF or COD SP campaign based in the WH40k universe. But we know that isn't going to happen any time soon.

Yea definitely, I'd love to see more high fidelity fantasy/science fiction FPS campaigns in general. I liked Fire Warrior a long time ago, although Id bet that doesnt hold up at all. There was also Necromunda: Hired Gun which I played a few hours of and always meant to go back to.

 

[Johnway]

Yea they are pretty fast and loose with the license, I didnt think about mobile but I bet theres a lot of trash there. I do think theyve had quite a lot of medium to good quality in the last few years, I cant think of too many complete failures? I dont conciously follow them, but I do seem to like the setting somehow.

i think what infuriates me is that Warhammer is just an easy win lore/design wise it just annoys me that many don't fulfils its potential. often scoring in the 5-7 range range whereas i expect more in the 80%-90%. Plus some of the devs just don't make the most of the material. i mean if warhammer quest was like say, pathfinder it would have been onto a winner. many of them seem want to go the strategy route with mixed results.

That said, rogue trader came out and thats promising, whats stopping them porting the other rule based games like Only war, dark crusade, dark heresy et al. plus its true that the recent offerings have been good on the PC So theres hope.

I do wonder whether GW themselves limit the potential of games as to avoid encroaching on its plastic crack business. I mean, why buy the models when the pc game has more units, interactive, come with a unit painter and less then the battle sets?

Yea definitely, I'd love to see more high fidelity fantasy/science fiction FPS campaigns in general. I liked Fire Warrior a long time ago, although Id bet that doesnt hold up at all. There was also Necromunda: Hired Gun which I played a few hours of and always meant to go back to.

Fire warrior aged very poorly. i personally think it came out the gate dated, even for a ps2 game. visually and design wise it was primative and had lacking production values. Voice acting was especially dire despite brian blessed onboard. I played it on the pc and i found it... not great. Not played necromunda

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

i think what infuriates me is that Warhammer is just an easy win lore/design wise it just annoys me that many don't fulfils its potential. often scoring in the 5-7 range range whereas i expect more in the 80%-90%. Plus some of the devs just don't make the most of the material. i mean if warhammer quest was like say, pathfinder it would have been onto a winner. many of them seem want to go the strategy route with mixed results.

That said, rogue trader came out and thats promising, whats stopping them porting the other rule based games like Only war, dark crusade, dark heresy et al. plus its true that the recent offerings have been good on the PC So theres hope.

I do wonder whether GW themselves limit the potential of games as to avoid encroaching on its plastic crack business. I mean, why buy the models when the pc game has more units, interactive, come with a unit painter and less then the battle sets?

I'd like to play Rogue Trader one day, heard good things especially after its had a few patches. I didnt know it was based on the tabletop rule set, guess I just didnt really think about it, makes sense. I guess with how many license games have come out whats stopping them is that they havent been approached, theres always time.

As someone who wasnt that excited by Total War pre Warhammer games, those games are really special and worth a go if you have any interest in strategy games at all, turn based or RTS. It would be one of my desert island games, theres enough factions, sub factions and legendary lords all with different bespoke campaigns and mechanics that it would be a very long time before someone could play them each once let alone fully understand them all. Yes they milked the DLC, but honestly you dont need to buy any of it to get hundreds of hours of fun out of it, and a fair amount is FLC too. I have really high hopes for the 40K version, although it being a new engine is both exciting and worrying.

Fire warrior aged very poorly. i personally think it came out the gate dated, even for a ps2 game. visually and design wise it was primative and had lacking production values. Voice acting was especially dire despite brian blessed onboard. I played it on the pc and i found it... not great. Not played necromunda

Necromunda was pretty fast paced with some RPG elements. I wanted to play more but wasnt feeling shooty at that time so I fell off it. Reviews look mixed now so not sure.

Not surprised Fire Warrior doesnt hold up, but I didnt remember that Brian Blessed was in it!

 

[neogunhero]

Nvidia might be seriously cutting GeForce GPU supply because of the VRAM shortage

But don't panic just yet.

www.pcgamer.com

The best time to upgrade your rig's storage was yesterday. The next best time according to Kingston? 'Do it now'

The company also warns that AI's hunger for memory may cause yet another turn in the market.

www.pcgamer.com

Swen Vincke says the price of RAM and SSDs means Larian will be doing lots of optimisation in Divinity's early access 'that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point in time'

Maybe that big flesh pillar's the result of trying to download more?

www.pcgamer.com

Back to back to back articles. It's getting a bit depressing reading about our favorite hobby. This memory shortage is going to have a slow effect, but it will hurt nearly every aspect of any type of technology out there. Consumer RAM and SSDs, laptops, tablets, phones, TVs, cars, everything relies on some form of memory that could be affected by this shortage if it hasn't already.

With Larian saying they will be doing lots of optimization early in development, I wonder if that sort of thing will be more prevalent across the industry. Less innovation on graphics technologies, more focus on optimizing the hardware we already have. In a way it's a double-edged sword, it's good for gamers, but stifling innovation is never ideal. It doesn't matter if you like games with the most life-like realistic graphics or not, innovation is good almost all of the time, and with that innovation has come some truly game changing features like upscaling and more.

It's just getting crazy out here. Hold on to your stuff, upgrade if you can and it's reasonable, we just got to be happy with the stuff we got before it becomes too expensive. I hate to be such a doomer, because I still have hope that things can turn around.

 

[Johnway]

Not surprised Fire Warrior doesnt hold up, but I didnt remember that Brian Blessed was in it!

yeah he was the admiral who becomes demon spawn and you fought it as a boss. it was rubbish.

The funny thing recently is that i said that someone should make the WH40K role playing game Dark heresy similar to pathfinder/roguetrader. Guess what? its happening:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3710600/Warhammer_40000_Dark_Heresy/

 

[Pifanjr]

You know, now that I think about it, Abiotic Factor really is an immersive sim. Users actually got one right.

Relevant article:

Nobody can agree what an 'immersive sim' is, but OG Fallout lead Tim Cain has his own definition: 'The very elements that make something an immsim are the ones that I also think make good RPGs'

Lots of games are immersive, lots of games are simulations, but which ones nail both qualities a la Deus Ex?

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Zed Clampet]

Relevant article:

Nobody can agree what an 'immersive sim' is, but OG Fallout lead Tim Cain has his own definition: 'The very elements that make something an immsim are the ones that I also think make good RPGs'

Lots of games are immersive, lots of games are simulations, but which ones nail both qualities a la Deus Ex?

www.pcgamer.com

Yeah, it basically fits his definition as well as anything I've played with one major exception; however, his definition seems to be aspirational as much as anything because I've never seen nor heard about a game where "those rules interact with each other to create a large number of emergent systems". Seriously, what game actually has a large number of emergent systems? In Prey, the only emergent system anyone has ever mentioned is the foam gun. So are there tons of things like the foam gun in Prey? Because immsim players all agree that it's an immsim. Then you have physics and box stacking. So if I put a foam gun and box stacking in my game, is that a "large" number of emergent systems? It just seems to me that the way he describes it has not been achieved yet unless it is Minecraft, which would probably cause immsim players to freak out. But is there anything within reason that you can't do in Minecraft? Is there anything you can't do with redstone and a command block? Throw in pistons and other things. None of it was designed to do anything in particular, but just to be tools for the player's emergent creativity. While a Prey player is congratulating himself for making a foam ramp, the Minecraft player has created a 300 meter long machine that automates all the farming. etc.

 

[Zed Clampet]

@Pifanjr I have a huge weakspot in this area, though. I've never played Deus Ex.

 

[Pifanjr]

@Pifanjr I have a huge weakspot in this area, though. I've never played Deus Ex.

Neither have I, but it does feel like a lot of games labelled as "immersive sim" are just games that are similar to Deus Ex and System Shock. Whereas the definition given in that article makes me think more of Dwarf Fortress or even finding unintended solutions in The Incredible Machine.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Neither have I, but it does feel like a lot of games labelled as "immersive sim" are just games that are similar to Deus Ex and System Shock. Whereas the definition given in that article makes me think more of Dwarf Fortress or even finding unintended solutions in The Incredible Machine.

EXACTLY! They are describing games that they don't even recognize because they are only concerned with shooters, which are the least immersive sim like games I can think of.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Neither have I, but it does feel like a lot of games labelled as "immersive sim" are just games that are similar to Deus Ex and System Shock. Whereas the definition given in that article makes me think more of Dwarf Fortress or even finding unintended solutions in The Incredible Machine.

So the real definition is that an Immersive Sim is a shooter that tries to emulate genres that have emergent gameplay?

 

[Pifanjr]

So the real definition is that an Immersive Sim is a shooter that tries to emulate genres that have emergent gameplay?

It doesn't even have to be a shooter. It's a first person action game that relies on players using the rules of simulated systems to solve their problems instead of only/mostly relying on specific scripted interactions.

But I feel like we've gotten slightly off topic. Maybe one of the mods can move this to a separate thread (@Frindis ?)

 

[Zed Clampet]

It doesn't even have to be a shooter. It's a first person action game that relies on players using the rules of simulated systems to solve their problems instead of only/mostly relying on specific scripted interactions.

But I feel like we've gotten slightly off topic. Maybe one of the mods can move this to a separate thread (@Frindis ?)

What is one more post to move?

No, it actually does have to be a shooter. Because the people who made this up are shooter people who apparently don't realize that emergent systems exist in greater number and complexity in other genres. They are like an isolated, Amazonian tribe. And it would be rude for more advanced people, like me and, to a lessor degree, you, to come in here and dazzle them with our learning and make them lose faith in the things that give them purpose, like bananas and immersive sims.



No, I don't have any idea what I am talking about, but that's never stopped me before...When you get as advanced as I am, sent me DM!

 

[Frindis]

@Pifanjr @Zed Clampet I come with gifts, posts moved 🎁

 

[Zloth]

I like Tim Cain's definition. Remember, it's an aspirational thing. Just like no computer game will let you play a role exactly how you want, a game would have to emulate the entirety of physics to be able to be a "true" immersive sim, so that's not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone you know.

And yeah, it could put Minecraft into that category. The big thing I see pushing it away are the block graphics, which are really not even trying to immerse you. Same thing for Factoria, but Satisfatory would fit without me contesting at all.

The genre seemed to grow out of the "RPG Shooter Hybrid" category, hence the tendency to only put RPGs and Shooters in the genre.

P.S. We talked about this just the other day year!

 

[BeardyHat]

Im Sim needs to be first person to be an Im Sim, quite frankly. Any other perspective other than First isn't Immersive and therefore can't be qualified as an Im Sim.

I've seen many third person games or isometric games described as such and I just can't get into them, because the perspective doesn't work for me on that level. I will happily play those styles of games, but I 100% don't consider them to be Immersive in the same way a first person game is.

If it's First Person I'm there, not Agent 47 or Geralt or my Half-Orc Barbarian or whatever.

 

[Pifanjr]

Im Sim needs to be first person to be an Im Sim, quite frankly. Any other perspective other than First isn't Immersive and therefore can't be qualified as an Im Sim.

I've seen many third person games or isometric games described as such and I just can't get into them, because the perspective doesn't work for me on that level. I will happily play those styles of games, but I 100% don't consider them to be Immersive in the same way a first person game is.

If it's First Person I'm there, not Agent 47 or Geralt or my Half-Orc Barbarian or whatever.

I think that's true for most people, but for me there is no real difference between first person and third person in how immersive a game can be. I also dream in third person and still feel like those things are happening to me.

 

[Johnway]

Vince Zampella, the co-founder of Infinity Ward and head of Battlefield, dies in car crash

Zampella was reportedly killed in a car crash over the weekend.

www.pcgamer.com

Sad news. Condolences to the family for their loss. Its comes just days before Christmas as well which is a real kick in the teeth.