May 2025 PC Gamer Article Discussion

[neogunhero]

The games are so good vanilla anyway. I've played hundreds of hours of the series at this point, all of it unmodded and it's one of my favorite series. There's definitely an allure to mods, but they do often tend to do more harm than good.

I agree, my experience has been that vanilla Stalker is typically better and doesn't require any mods to have a good time. Perhaps it's because I've played them so much, but I can't play a TES or Fallout game without mods, I need at least a few QoL improvements and such. With all the bug fixes and graphical upgrades coming to the Stalker trilogy next week, vanilla will be better than ever.

 

[Zloth]

Hideo Kojima says most Death Stranding playtesters told him 'it was a terrible game,' and he's a little bummed Death Stranding 2 is testing way better

"I'm not interested in appealing to the mass market, or selling millions of copies."

www.pcgamer.com

Big shock to me: most AAA games strive for 80% approval. EIGHTY!? Honestly, with all the genres out there, I didn't think that was possible even with the best games ever made. I would have guessed 50%.

Maybe there's some self-selection, where they don't have EVERY gamer try the game. I mean, setting a guy who plays Call of Duty exclusively in front of a chess game (or a chess player in front of Call of Duty) isn't likely to go well.

 

[neogunhero]

The first ever third-party game to come to Steam probably doesn't get the respect it deserves—mostly because no one remembers it

Rag Doll Kung Fu has a unique and important place in PC gaming history.

www.pcgamer.com

I was just looking at the Steam page maybe 20 minutes ago when I saw this article. You can now look at Steam's monthly top sellers dating all the way back to when HL2 came out in November 2004, and the very next release on Steam was Ragdoll Kung Fu in October 2005. Out of curiosity, I went to look up the developer, Mark Healy, who at the time was employed at Lions Head. Later in his career, he went on to co-found Media Molecule, creators of the Little Big Planet games, where he worked on them as a designer. Pretty awesome little tidbit of gaming history! The article goes more in-depth on the history around that.

 

[Johnway]

You've got to play my dark horse GOTY candidate if you too are a sicko for one of the ultimate RPG gimmicks: a trash level 1 sword that can be forged into a god slayer

Labyrinth of the Demon King players: Save that katana hilt.

www.pcgamer.com

i played it during nextfest and honestly i came out of it feeling greatly disappointed. It felt clunky, imbalanced and lacking in places. it does capture the horror vibe but i'm not exactly interested to get it unless there was some updates etc.

 

[Pifanjr]

Fortnite added an AI-powered Darth Vader and—surprise—players immediately tricked him into saying slurs

Update: Epic has deployed a hotfix to address Vader's profanity.

www.pcgamer.com

You'd think someone at Epic would have thought to add a filter before putting this in front of a bunch of teenagers.

 

[neogunhero]

Who's gonna tell them?

 

[Johnway]

Nvidia RTX 5060 review live: looks like the 8 GB of VRAM isn't the biggest issue the new card has to face

You're going to learn how the new Nvidia GPU performs alongside me, isn't that exciting? No? Just me then.

www.pcgamer.com

i'm kinda surprised that Nvidia would blacklist PCG and a lot of other people from reviewing the 5060. From what i've watched from gamers nexus and hardware unboxed, its not a pretty look. its greasy or they're hiding something.

Oh well, no matter, the true will come out as it is now. If PCG wants to stick it to the man, please donate the graphics card to me.

 

[BeardyHat]

Nvidia RTX 5060 review live: looks like the 8 GB of VRAM isn't the biggest issue the new card has to face

You're going to learn how the new Nvidia GPU performs alongside me, isn't that exciting? No? Just me then.

www.pcgamer.com

i'm kinda surprised that Nvidia would blacklist PCG and a lot of other people from reviewing the 5060. From what i've watched from gamers nexus and hardware unboxed, its not a pretty look. its greasy or they're hiding something.

Oh well, no matter, the true will come out as it is now. If PCG wants to stick it to the man, please donate the graphics card to me.

Really doesn't seem too relevant to blacklist, as people seem to just default to buying Nvidia GPU's anyway.

 

[Colif]

The problem is Nvidia had basically blocked anyone from reviewing that card as they knew what the reaction to an 8gb non TI model would have been. They wanted it to be impossible to find any reviews that said Don't buy this card.

I feel audience for cards like this is mostly people who just want a display adapter, not to play games.

They are making the people who did get the drivers (which they withheld from release) and the cards test them against early RTX cards like the 20 series and showing the increase Multi Frame Generation can have over those cards. Oddly (not really) they aren't allowed to test against the 40 series that did have MFG... so really, how much increase do they give?

 

[neogunhero]

Corsair made a see-through PSU because everything looks better when you can see its innards... welp, that came out weird

I just mean translucent tech is cool, leave me alone.

www.pcgamer.com

Absolutely love this clear plastic look. Would be awesome if we could have see through GPUs and fans and make a full see through build, I think that would come out looking cool with an industrial style.

 

[BeardyHat]

I feel audience for cards like this is mostly people who just want a display adapter, not to play games.

That seems like a bit of hyperbole; looking at PCGamers own testing, even without framegen, the 5060 seems to be outperforming the 4060 by a good margin at 1080p.

Of course, I wouldn't pay the price they're asking.

Why we're still playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 10 years later

Revisiting the Bloody Baron, Gwent, and everything else that kept us coming back.

www.pcgamer.com

I gotta say, after playing The Witcher 3 for like 100 hours and Cyberpunk for 72 hours, I don't think I particularly care for CD Projekt games. Not that they're bad, the writing and stories they tell are good, but I've never felt invested in their worlds. Coming away from each game kind of feeling just... Meh?

Like I don't regret my time in either game, but I also don't really understand the hype, given everything that surrounds the story stuff is pretty bland and mediocre. Gwent was pretty fun, at least.

 

[Colif]

Absolutely love this clear plastic look. Would be awesome if we could have see through GPUs and fans and make a full see through build, I think that would come out looking cool with an industrial style.

Well, Lian LI worked out how to have fans in glass and have a case that has 3 glass sides now.
So why not have a see through PSU. Other parts like the GPU with its fin array might not be so easy. See though water cooler pump would be cool.

The fans might be a tough one. Can probably get translucent ones. run fans fast enough and you don't see them now... easy. Oh, you want to not see them when they standing still...
They already having fun with materials, now you add an extra element.

see through ram?

See through motherboard? Realistically there will always be something you can't see through. Some parts have to be fairly solid.

 

[neogunhero]

Well, Lian LI worked out how to have fans in glass and have a case that has 3 glass sides now.
So why not have a see through PSU. Other parts like the GPU with its fin array might not be so easy. See though water cooler pump would be cool.

The fans might be a tough one. Can probably get translucent ones. run fans fast enough and you don't see them now... easy. Oh, you want to not see them when they standing still...
They already having fun with materials, now you add an extra element.

see through ram?

See through motherboard? Realistically there will always be something you can't see through. Some parts have to be fairly solid.

See through GPU shroud holding all the components inside could be easy, but most cards these days have metal backplates which would need to stay, so you're really only seeing a small portion of the card facing you that would be see through. Maybe not practical at all.

See through plastic case? Or more transparent like a Gameboy Advance, with a clear glass side panel, could be awesome.

 

[Colif]

This is mostly see through... I forgot about waterblocks

You might want to mute music

 

[neogunhero]

Stalker remaster reviews crater to 'Mostly Negative' as players lament deleted Soviet monuments, yanked Russian language, and blurry graphics that I didn't notice in 23 hours playing

Such is life in the Zone.

www.pcgamer.com

I was scared when I saw the Mostly Negative ratings on Steam, but after closer examination it's just a lot of angry gamers angry about various stuff that I personally don't care about. Without getting into the politics of it all, they removed a lot of references to anything Russian, introduced blurry AMD FSR upscaling that you can easily turn off, and maybe a few bugs here and there, that's all enough to make peoples head explode, I guess. As this article puts it, these reviews are really blowing things out of proportion. Everyone has their right to their own political opinion so take that part how you want, but I never played Stalker because there are Russian symbols throughout the world, or because I wanted to hear people speak in Russian, I play the games because they are great survival action RPG games and that part is still entirely intact in the new releases.

 

[BeardyHat]

Stalker remaster reviews crater to 'Mostly Negative' as players lament deleted Soviet monuments, yanked Russian language, and blurry graphics that I didn't notice in 23 hours playing

Such is life in the Zone.

www.pcgamer.com

I was scared when I saw the Mostly Negative ratings on Steam, but after closer examination it's just a lot of angry gamers angry about various stuff that I personally don't care about. Without getting into the politics of it all, they removed a lot of references to anything Russian, introduced blurry AMD FSR upscaling that you can easily turn off, and maybe a few bugs here and there, that's all enough to make peoples head explode, I guess. As this article puts it, these reviews are really blowing things out of proportion. Everyone has their right to their own political opinion so take that part how you want, but I never played Stalker because there are Russian symbols throughout the world, or because I wanted to hear people speak in Russian, I play the games because they are great survival action RPG games and that part is still entirely intact in the new releases.

The CHUDS, as always, are out in force.

I'm installing it right now, as there's no reason not to, since I've owned all the games since...forever. I don't think I'll be able to pull myself away from Abiotic Factor yet though.

 

[Zloth]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says 'PC gaming is now 30 years old,' and I'm here to say 'um, actually'

Huang definitely doesn't need the history lesson—but here I am with one anyway.

www.pcgamer.com

You're probably already groaning, but allow me to explain a little more: I'm dating myself here, but you wanna know which massively influential game I share a birth year with? Doom. That's right, I'm as old as the first-person shooter genre as well as this here fine publication—but PC gaming is even older than that.

Ummm, actually Jess, 1st Person Shooter was already going strong thanks to games like Wolfenstein 3D and Marathon. I swear, kids.... errr... the middle-aged adults these days....