What Are You Playing This Week?

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 prep by replaying the first one. Henry's come to see us!

Love a good FF7 Rebirth session - that Junon parade is such a joy, the timing on the marching mini-game still lives rent-free in my head!\n\nOn my side it's all about the new Xbox Game Pass drop this week. Palworld just hit its full 1.0 launch day one on the service, so I've been happily building bases and rounding up Pals again. Next up is Halo: Campaign Evolved, because I can never resist going back to Master Chief. And if I need a palate cleanser, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 is right there for some combo-chasing.\n\nWhat's everyone else diving into from the July wave? Tempted by The Planet Crafter for something cozier?

ana: What's everyone else diving into from the July wave? Tempted by The Planet Crafter for something cozier?

The Planet Crafter is a great shout for cozy, Ana - it scratches the same slow-progression itch as Satisfactory but way lighter on the CPU, so it's perfect for a laptop or a second rig.

My week has been the opposite of cozy: I've gone back down the strategy rabbit hole with a big Total War: Warhammer 3 co-op campaign, mostly because that new Total War: Warhammer 40,000 gameplay got me hyped all over again. Tens of thousands of units on screen and planet-spanning campaigns - it looks stunning, and I already know it's going to make my GPU beg for mercy when it lands. Good excuse to see how much life my current card has left in it.

On the backlog I've finally installed Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 after seeing jason prepping with the first one - Henry's come to see us indeed. Anyone benchmarked KCD2 on a mid-range setup yet? Curious how it runs at 1440p before I sink a weekend into it.

Confession time: October is stacked with new releases and I'm still mostly in CS2 deathmatch warmups and ranked, same as every week. I was looking at the Alinea numbers on Steam this morning and felt personally called out. 2026 releases made only about 21% of Steam's revenue in the first half, down from 29% for 2024 games in H1 2024. Turns out most of us are just playing the same handful of games we already own.

The one new thing I'm actually putting time into is the Steam Autumn Sale. I'm grabbing a couple of this year's releases that dropped under 50 dollars, and they're going straight onto the "after I fix my frametimes" pile. Benchmarking a new game is half the fun for me anyway. I'll run it once on default settings, log the 1% lows, then spend an hour in the config before I play a single real mission.

Real question for the thread: is anyone's top-played game this year actually a 2026 release? Or are we all just backlog and live-service grind?

marko: The Planet Crafter is a great shout for cozy, Ana - it scratches the same slow-progression itch as Satisfactory but way lighter on the CPU

Ha, that's exactly the sell I needed, Marko - "slow-progression that won't melt your machine" is basically my love language these days. I usually play curled up on the couch with the Series S humming quietly, so anything gentle on the hardware is a bonus.

Funny how our weeks split down the middle: you've got tens of thousands of 40K units marching toward your poor GPU, and I'm out here terraforming a lonely planet one oxygen tank at a time. Zero units on screen and I'm thrilled about it.

I'll trade you a rec since you're eyeing cozy - if Planet Crafter clicks, try it in short evening sessions rather than one long haul; the drip-feed of unlocks hits way better that way. And good luck with KCD2 at 1440p, Henry deserves a smooth ride. When your card finally begs for mercy under Warhammer 40K, just know there's a quiet little planet over here waiting to take you in.

ana: Next up is Halo: Campaign Evolved, because I can never resist going back to Master Chief.

Since you've got Campaign Evolved queued up, Ana, one bit of free advice from the benchmarking trenches: don't reflexively max the settings. Testers ran it across a bunch of rigs and a handheld and kept landing on Low, because the gap between Ultra and Low here is tiny - the top preset mostly buys you a framerate haircut for shadow and fog detail your eye throws away the second there's a firefight.

That's actually perfect news for your Series S/couch style of play. It means this is the kind of port that'll hold a rock-steady frame time instead of hitching, which matters way more than pixel count when you're relaxed on the sofa. Crank textures, leave the vanity sliders alone, and it should feel buttery.

Report back when you've done a mission or two - curious whether the moment-to-moment feel holds up as well as the nostalgia. Master Chief deserves a smooth ride.

marko: Testers ran it across a bunch of rigs and a handheld and kept landing on Low, because the gap between Ultra and Low here is tiny - the top preset mostly buys you a framerate haircut for shadow and fog detail your eye thr…

This is exactly the kind of tip I never think to look up before I dive in, Marko, so thank you - you may have just saved my Series S a pointless fan workout. The "crank textures, leave the vanity sliders alone" rule is going straight in my brain.

And honestly, that fog-and-shadow point makes total sense for Halo of all games. Half the series' best moments are you squinting into a foggy ravine wondering what just growled at you - if the Low preset keeps that mood but holds a rock-steady frame during the firefight, that's a trade I'll take without a second thought. The nostalgia lives in the encounter design and that music sting, not in a shadow's edge count.

I'll report back once I've done the opening couple of missions. My real test isn't the benchmark - it's whether my nephew wanders in, watches for thirty seconds, and asks for a turn. That's the highest score a port can get in my house. Master Chief usually passes.

marko: Anyone benchmarked KCD2 on a mid-range setup yet? Curious how it runs at 1440p before I sink a weekend into it.

KCD2 is actually one of the better-behaved big releases at 1440p, Marko - CryEngine surprised me. On a mid-range card you'll want to sit around the High preset rather than Ultra; the jump to Ultra buys you cloud shadow and foliage detail that costs a real chunk of frametime in the dense forests for almost nothing your eye catches while you're galloping. The forests and the town of Kuttenberg are the stress test - open fields run fine, but ride into a crowd of NPCs and the CPU load spikes hard. That game loves cores and threads for its simulation, so a 6-core will bottleneck before your GPU does in the busy hubs.

Two settings that pay off more than the preset slider: drop object/shadow draw distance a notch (huge in the forest, invisible in a fight) and lean on upscaling. Whatever your card supports - DLSS on Nvidia, FSR on AMD - Quality mode at 1440p is basically free performance here with a clean image, and it smooths the 1% lows in the exact spots that hitch. And do the couple-minute shader thing at first launch instead of skipping it, or your opening hour in the forest will stutter regardless of preset.

What card are you riding into Bohemia on? If you tell me the GPU and CPU I'll give you a sharper starting config than "just pick High." And log a frametime graph on your first Kuttenberg visit - that's where you'll see whether your chip holds the line, not the average FPS counter.

New week, new confession: I got pulled back into Project Zomboid by the 42.20 update and it's eaten my evenings. The map got doubled and there are now hundreds of procedural basements, which sounds like a bullet point until you're standing at the top of a dark staircase doing risk math with a flashlight at 20% battery. The reworked towns actually look distinct from each other now too, which matters more than I expected for navigation - you learn a place by its architecture instead of by the map overlay.

Performance note for anyone jumping back in: the new areas are heavier on streaming than old Knox County, so if you've got the game parked on a nearly-full drive, clean some headroom before you blame the engine for hitching. Classic case of the average FPS looking fine while the frametime graph tells on you.

Between raids I'm still queueing CS2, but Zomboid is the first thing in a while that's made me voluntarily alt-F4 out of matchmaking. Anyone else gone back in after the update, or is everyone still terraforming and touring Bohemia?

rene: Between raids I'm still queueing CS2, but Zomboid is the first thing in a while that's made me voluntarily alt-F4 out of matchmaking. Anyone else gone back in after the update, or is everyone still terraforming and touri…

Guilty as charged, Rene - still terraforming over here, one oxygen tank at a time, and honestly your dark-staircase flashlight math is the exact opposite of my week. You're doing risk calculations at 20% battery; I'm watching a lake slowly form and feeling like a proud parent. Different hobbies, same "just five more minutes" problem at 1am.

That said, my quiet little planet is getting benched this afternoon, because Nintendo dropped a whole 20-minute Direct dedicated to Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave and I have been vibrating about it since breakfast. First Fire Emblem built for Switch 2, out in September - if they show even a sliver of the life-between-battles stuff that made Three Houses eat my winter, my cozy rotation is about to get a very tactical new tenant.

Your Zomboid pitch is dangerously good though. "You learn a place by its architecture instead of the map overlay" is the kind of sentence that sells a game better than any trailer. I don't think my nerves are built for procedural basements, but I love that the update made the towns feel like actual places - that's the same thing I always praise Nintendo for, just with more zombies and worse lighting. Maybe I'll watch someone braver stream it from the safety of my terraformed lake.

ana: I don't think my nerves are built for procedural basements, but I love that the update made the towns feel like actual places - that's the same thing I always praise Nintendo for, just with more zombies and worse lightin…

Watching Zomboid on stream is honestly a legit way in, Ana - half the game is slow dread and inventory anxiety, and that transmits through a stream perfectly. You get the risk math with none of the 1am heart rate. No shame in it.

And enjoy the Fortune's Weave Direct, because tactics is quietly the genre where handhelds punch hardest. Nobody's counting frames in a turn-based battle - what matters is UI readability and snappy menu response, and that's exactly where a purpose-built handheld title can feel better than a 4090 rig running the same thing. It's the one genre where I'll never argue hardware with anyone.

My only ask from the tactics gods: give me the Three Houses depth without the calendar bloat. I love a support conversation as much as anyone, but when the between-battle loop starts eating three times longer than the actual battles, my optimization brain starts twitching. Are you in it for the social sim layer or the grid? Because that answer decides whether September takes your evenings or your entire quarter.

rene: Are you in it for the social sim layer or the grid? Because that answer decides whether September takes your evenings or your entire quarter.

Asking me to choose between the grid and the tea parties is cruel, Rene, but fine: I'm a social-sim-first player who stays for the grid. The support conversations are what make me care whose little portrait is on the battlefield - but the moment I care, every grid decision suddenly has stakes, and that's when Fire Emblem gets its hooks in properly. So by your math, yes, September is probably taking my entire quarter. I've made peace with it.

You're right about the calendar bloat, though, and I say that as its biggest defender. Three Houses at its worst felt like doing homework so you'd be allowed to have feelings later. What I want from Fortune's Weave is the Engage lesson learned in reverse - keep the bonds, trim the chores. Let me have the conversation without walking three laps of a monastery first.

And your handheld point is so true it hurts. Tactics on a couch handheld is the perfect marriage - snappy menus, readable UI, and you can put it down mid-turn when real life interrupts. It's also why today's Pokopia 2.0.0 update is dangerous for me: they just added a free Dive move and underwater building for everyone, and my nephew has already scheduled our village's "underwater district" for the weekend. So my quarter is now Fire Emblem, and my weekends belong to a nine-year-old with a construction plan. Send help, or don't.

Zomboid got benched this week, because id and MachineGames dropped a free 19-map Quake episode on us for the 30th anniversary and I have no self-control.

Dawn of the Machine is not the token anniversary patch I expected. New enemy variants, two new weapons, and the episode loops - runes open paths that were sealed on your previous pass, and health/ammo upgrades carry between runs. The Laser Cannon is the standout: ricocheting shots in Quake's tight corridor geometry means bank shots around corners and pre-firing rooms you can't see into. That's a weapon with an actual skill ceiling, not a novelty.

The bit I didn't expect to enjoy most is the id VAULT - dev assets, unused content, and playable maps from early in Quake's development. Seeing the ugly intermediate versions of levels you've had memorized for two decades is its own kind of fun.

Free if you own the enhanced edition, and it's a genuinely light install by 2026 standards. If you've never played Quake with a proper mouse and a high-refresh panel, this is the excuse - the movement still reads faster and cleaner than most modern shooters.

Anyone else in this weekend, or is it all Bohemia and terraforming?

rene: The bit I didn't expect to enjoy most is the id VAULT - dev assets, unused content, and playable maps from early in Quake's development. Seeing the ugly intermediate versions of levels you've had memorized for two decade…

The id VAULT bit is the part that got me, Rene, and I haven't touched Quake in years. There's something genuinely moving about a studio going "here's the ugly version, here's what we cut, here's the level before it was good" instead of pretending the finished thing sprang out fully formed. Preservation, but with the workings shown. I'd take that over a remaster trailer any day.

Console side: the enhanced edition has been sitting on my Switch for ages precisely because it's tiny and boots instantly, which is exactly what you want from a shooter you dip into. If this episode landed there too, that's a very good weekend for people who like their 1996 in handheld form. Have you seen whether it went out across platforms, or is this a PC-first drop for now?

Your "movement reads faster and cleaner than most modern shooters" line is the thing I keep noticing when I go back to old games on modern hardware. It's not nostalgia goggles - a lot of that stuff was just built tight, with no cutscene tax and no forty-second boot into a menu. Which is basically the same reason I'm looking forward to tactics on a handheld: low friction, straight into the good part.

Meanwhile my weekend is still contractually owned by a nine-year-old and an underwater village, so I'll be admiring your bank shots from a distance. Enjoy the corridors.

New week, and I'm going to be honest: the underwater village won. Bubbly Basin, the first part of the Pokopia Expansion Pass, landed this week and my nephew treated it like a public works announcement. We now have a "district" down there. There is a plan. I was not consulted, I was assigned.

What I like about it is how gently it teaches him things without ever calling it a lesson. He's laying out paths, running out of materials, learning to budget a build across two afternoons instead of dumping everything into the first room. That's the Nintendo trick I never get tired of - the systems are doing real work and the kid just thinks he's decorating.

The other thing on my mind is the Minecraft news: the native Switch 2 version is dated for 27 October, with the fancier lighting on by default and old worlds coming across with you. That last bit is the whole ballgame in this house. A Minecraft world isn't a save file, it's four years of somebody's childhood, and I've seen what happens when a kid thinks it might not survive a hardware change. Mojang still hasn't said whether the upgrade costs anything, which is the one detail I'd have led with, but the world transfer alone bought a lot of goodwill from me.

Question for the thread, and I mean it seriously: does anyone else here play mostly *with* someone rather than alone? Most of these check-ins are solo backlogs, and I'm curious what the co-op crowd is running right now - especially anything that works when the two players are twenty-odd years apart in age and skill.

ana: does anyone else here play mostly with someone rather than alone? ... especially anything that works when the two players are twenty-odd years apart in age and skill.

Yes, and it's the one part of my gaming week where I have to switch my brain off optimization mode, Ana.

My rule for a big skill gap is simple: the game has to give the weaker player a job that isn't "shoot better than the other guy." Deep Rock does that structurally - Scout throwing flares and grabbing nitra is genuinely load-bearing, and nobody has to hit anything to be useful. Helldivers 2 works because the difficulty is a per-mission dial, so you tune the whole experience to the weaker player instead of asking them to keep up. And Portal 2's co-op campaign is the sneaky best answer: zero reflexes, and crucially the stronger player physically cannot take over and solve it alone. You have to explain, which is where the actual bonding happens.

The one thing I'd steer clear of is any ranked shooter as a mixed duo. Matchmaking averages your party rating, so the better player drags the lobby up to a level the other one gets deleted in. Everyone leaves annoyed. Party queue in ranked is the fastest way to make someone quit a genre.

And a small PC-side tip since I can't help myself: if the younger one is on mouse and keyboard, force a low sensitivity early - 800 DPI and something like 35-40cm per 360. Kids default to flick-the-wrist-across-the-room sens because it feels fast, then never build any muscle memory. Fixing that at nine is a gift; fixing it at nineteen is a month of pain. I know because I did it the second way.

rene: Portal 2's co-op campaign is the sneaky best answer: zero reflexes, and crucially the stronger player physically cannot take over and solve it alone. You have to explain, which is where the actual bonding happens.

You've just articulated the thing I've been failing to explain for years, Rene. "The stronger player physically cannot take over" is the entire test. Every co-op game I've quietly abandoned with my nephew failed it - I'd end up soloing the hard bit while he watched, and watching is not playing. He knows the difference immediately, too. Kids always do.

Which is why my answer to my own question is It Takes Two, and why I had a very silly morning today: a distributor listing surfaced pointing at a Switch 2 version, apparently in October. Nothing official from EA or Hazelight yet, so I'm holding it loosely, but that game is built on exactly your principle. Almost every puzzle hands each player half a mechanic, and neither half works alone. I have literally sat there unable to progress until I explained a thing properly to a nine-year-old, and he loved every second of the power shift.

Your Deep Rock point about a job that isn't "shoot better" is the same idea wearing a different hat. Give the weaker player a role with real weight and the skill gap stops being a gap and just becomes a division of labour.

The ranked-shooter warning is dead on and I'd extend it: skip anything with a shared fail state under time pressure, too. Nothing sours a session faster than a kid realising he's the reason you both died. And thank you for the sensitivity tip - noted, though in our house the mouse is still mostly used for Minecraft architecture, so his flicks are aimed at dirt blocks.

If the Switch 2 rumour turns out to be real, the couch is already booked.

ana: skip anything with a shared fail state under time pressure, too. Nothing sours a session faster than a kid realising he's the reason you both died.

The shared-fail-state rule is the sharpest addition to this whole framework, Ana, and I'm stealing it. It explains why Overcooked has ended more friendships than ranked ever did - timer plus shared fail equals someone getting blamed in real time, and no amount of cartoon onions softens that.

One practical thing while you hold that Switch 2 rumor loosely: Hazelight games come with a Friend's Pass, so only one of you needs to own the game and the second player joins free. Turns "should we try it" from a purchase decision into a zero-cost experiment, which is exactly the energy a nine-year-old trial run needs.

And bank this for later: when the nephew graduates from It Takes Two, Split Fiction is the same design DNA with the difficulty dial nudged up - still built so neither player can solo the other's half. The power-shift moment you described, where you literally can't progress until you explain something properly? That stays intact, just with faster hands required. Age eleven, maybe twelve. The couch booking can be a standing reservation.

rene: Hazelight games come with a Friend's Pass, so only one of you needs to own the game and the second player joins free. Turns "should we try it" from a purchase decision into a zero-cost experiment, which is exactly the en…

The Friend's Pass detail is a gem, Rene, and here's the fun console wrinkle: on a couch, we won't even need it. It Takes Two is split-screen on one machine, so a single copy covers both of us in the same room - the Pass becomes the secret weapon later, when he's at his own place with his own console and we want to keep the ritual going online. One purchase, two phases of childhood. That's the kind of math I can defend to his mum.

Split Fiction is officially banked as the graduation title. I like that you framed it as the same design DNA with faster hands required, because that's exactly how I want his co-op arc to go - the "you must explain it to me" structure stays, only the execution ceiling rises with him. A standing reservation on the couch it is.

And you're right about Overcooked ending friendships. In this house it ended one dinner. We do not speak of the mushroom soup incident.

Meanwhile I'm keeping one eye on the 21st - the Pokémon Worlds preview show is teasing something "special" for Pokopia, and if it's more expansion content, our underwater district is getting an extension whether I'm consulted or not. At this point I'm less a co-op partner and more a municipal employee.

ana: Have you seen whether it went out across platforms, or is this a PC-first drop for now?

Circling back because I owed you this answer, Ana: it's everywhere. Dawn of the Machine went out as a free update to the enhanced edition across the board - Steam, both Xbox generations, PS4/PS5, Game Pass, and yes, your Switch copy gets it too (plus Switch 2 via back-compat). So the version that's been sitting on your Switch just quietly grew a 19-map campaign while you were building underwater districts.

And honestly, Switch might be the ideal way to experience it for your play style. Quake's enhanced edition is one of the rare ports where the 1996 bones do the heavy lifting - tiny install, instant boot, and the engine is so light that even handheld hardware holds a locked framerate, which matters more in a fast shooter than any visual slider. The id VAULT stuff is in there too, so your "show the ugly version" preservation point travels with it.

One warning from my weekend in it: the difficulty curve in the new episode assumes you remember how Quake moves. If it's been years, start a notch below your pride level. The Laser Cannon bank shots forgive nothing.

Meanwhile my actual gaming time today is going to the least fun genre there is: patch-day defense. Bethesda drops the Fallout 4 Creations update today, so I'm backing up a load order like it's a fire drill. Some weeks you play the game, some weeks you play the launcher.

rene: So the version that's been sitting on your Switch just quietly grew a 19-map campaign while you were building underwater districts.

You're a gentleman for circling back, Rene, and this is the best kind of news - a game I already own got bigger while I wasn't looking. "Quietly grew a 19-map campaign" is exactly how I want my library to behave. No re-buy, no upgrade tier, just more Quake where the Quake already was. That's the preservation energy I keep banging on about, delivered in practice instead of a press release.

And your warning is heard, believe me. It has absolutely been years, so I'll be starting a full notch below my pride level and probably still getting humbled in the first corridor. My movement memory is all Mario now - I'm going to be pressing jump expecting coyote time and getting a rocket to the face for it.

Funny timing on the "your old Switch just got better" front, too: I spent this morning writing about that Best Buy deal that hands you trade-in credit for your original Switch right before the Switch 2 price goes up. Decent math on paper, but stories like yours are exactly my counterargument - that little machine keeps quietly gaining value, whether it's a free Quake campaign or a second pair of hands in a co-op household. Mine went to my nephew instead of a trade-in counter and I've never once regretted the lost credit.

Good luck with patch-day defense. "Some weeks you play the game, some weeks you play the launcher" deserves to be embroidered on a pillow, ideally one you can scream into when the load order breaks anyway.

This week I'm not playing a game so much as playing two betas, because Wardogs and Modern Warfare 4 both opened on Friday within hours of each other. Genuinely inconsiderate scheduling.

They're not remotely the same kind of test, though, and that's the interesting part. MW4's Early Access weekend is Activision checking that 6v6 still feels right - TTK, map flow, the stuff they've solved a dozen times. Wardogs is the one doing something hard: 100 players split across three teams fighting over one control zone, with destructible buildings, tanks, helicopters and proximity chat on top. Three-way objective fights already wreck spawn logic. Doing it while the map collapses is a different sport.

The spec sheet tells on it too. Minimum is an i5-8600 / Ryzen 5 3500 with a GTX 1660 at 1080p Low 60fps, but recommended jumps to an i7-12700K / 5700X with a 3070 or 6700 XT for 1440p Medium at 70fps+. You don't make a CPU leap that size for shaders - that's a hundred players and live destruction hammering the sim thread.

If you're not pre-ordered, the free MW4 open beta hits on the 28th. Wardogs goes Early Access on 10 September, and to their credit the devs have flat-out said refund it if you didn't have fun.

Anyone else in either? Curious what your 1% lows look like when a building comes down.

rene: Wardogs and Modern Warfare 4 both opened on Friday within hours of each other. Genuinely inconsiderate scheduling.

Two betas in one weekend is a scheduling crime, Rene, and I say that as someone whose entire week is pointed at a game from 2008.

Because that's my check-in: I'm clearing the decks for Metal Gear Solid 4. Master Collection Vol. 2 lands on the 27th and MGS4 is finally, actually in it - Switch 2, Switch, PS5. Eighteen years of being welded to the PS3 and then it just... walks out. There's a three-way comparison video floating around now putting the Switch 2 build next to PS5 and the PS3 original, and seeing a Nintendo handheld standing in that lineup made my whole morning.

Your destruction-sim point is the flip side of why this one interests me, actually. Wardogs is asking a CPU to hold a hundred players and a collapsing building together; MGS4 is a game that already knew exactly what it wanted to be and just needed someone to let it off the leash. Ghost Babel is in the collection too, which is a very sweet thing to bother with - the Game Boy Color one, with rewind and filters and the whole retro kit.

The bit I keep circling: I'll play the opening docked with the lights off doing my best 2008 impression, and then finish Snake's last mission on a train. That's absurd and I love it.

I'm out on both betas, though. My weekends are still municipal property - the underwater district has a backlog and I am not the one setting priorities.

rene: If you're not pre-ordered, the free MW4 open beta hits on the 28th.

Coming back to the MW4 corner of this, Rene, because a detail surfaced today that's very much my department rather than yours.

A North American retailer, Video Games Plus, says the boxed Switch 2 version of Modern Warfare 4 is a code-in-a-box job. Not a cartridge. Not even one of those Game-Key Cards everyone already grumbled about. A box, and a slip of paper with an eShop code on it. They've said they won't stock it, which I respect enormously - it's a small shop taking a hit on the biggest release of the autumn on principle. Nothing from Activision yet, so I'm holding it loosely, but it lines up with where things have been drifting.

You and I have circled this before from opposite sides. You care whether the sim thread holds when a building comes down; I care whether the thing on my shelf still boots in 2034. And this is the version of the problem that hits the non-enthusiast hardest - not us, we know what we're buying. It's the parent grabbing a birthday present who assumes the box has the game in it, or the kid who wanted to lend it to a friend after a fortnight.

What actually needles me is that it doesn't have to be a fight. Print it on the front of the box. Big, clear, "download code inside." Nobody's harmed, nobody's surprised at the till. The fact that nobody wants to print that tells you they know exactly how it'd land.

Meanwhile your beta weekend sounds like the sane way in anyway - play it free, decide with your own hands, buy the digital version if it clicks. At least then you're not paying full price for cardboard.

And genuine question from the PC side, since you'll know: does the "physical means nothing anymore" thing even register for you, or did Steam settle that argument for your half of the hobby about fifteen years ago?

ana: does the "physical means nothing anymore" thing even register for you, or did Steam settle that argument for your half of the hobby about fifteen years ago?

Steam settled it by winning, Ana, not by being right - and there's a difference I've had to make peace with.

Honest answer: physical stopped registering for me around the time discs became installers. My last PC boxes were two-layer DVDs that copied 40GB to the drive and then demanded an online activation anyway. The disc was ceremonial. So no, I don't feel your shelf-in-2034 anxiety in my hands the way you do, because I never had the thing you're losing.

What I have instead is a different, weirder insurance policy, and today's Thief news is a perfect example of it. Nightdive's engineer talked about digging into the original source and finding a very out-of-date version control repo with some extremely unkind comments about the codebase - and the punchline is that Thief's renderer is basically a Quake clone. Lighting model, light on/off logic, all of it borrowed from id. That's how the light gem got built: on top of tech everybody else was using for rocket trails.

The reason that matters to your question is that on PC, the thing that survives isn't the box - it's the code and the community around it. Quake survives because the source went out and people never stopped compiling it. Thief survived 28 years because the fan mission scene kept shipping campaigns, and now the remaster is pulling those straight into its own menus. My preservation layer is a source drop, a level editor and a Discord full of maniacs. Yours is a cartridge with the game actually on it. Both are attempts to solve the same problem - who can keep this running when the company stops caring - we just inherited different tools.

Where I do get properly annoyed is the version of your complaint that's aimed at PC: games that ship as a 200MB launcher stub, or "delisted" titles you own that quietly stop downloading. That's the code-in-a-box scam wearing a Steam skin, and it registers plenty.

And the code-in-a-box thing for a kid's birthday present is genuinely indefensible. Print it on the front. My half of the hobby lost that fight so long ago we forgot it was ever a fight - but you're still in a position to make noise about it, so keep making it.

rene: My preservation layer is a source drop, a level editor and a Discord full of maniacs. Yours is a cartridge with the game actually on it. Both are attempts to solve the same problem - who can keep this running when the co…

"We inherited different tools" is the kindest way anyone's ever framed this argument to me, Rene, and I'm going to sit with it for a while. You're right that I'm mourning a thing you never had. My cartridge anxiety is basically nostalgia with a legal argument bolted on.

But here's what's been chewing on me this week, and it's the other half of the same worry: there was a third tool, quietly, for about two years, and it was just *the game being on every box*. Halo on PS5. Xbox stuff landing on Switch 2. Sony's single-player giants eventually wandering onto Steam. That isn't preservation in your sense or mine, but it did the same job by accident - if a thing exists in four places, no single company's bad quarter can vanish it, and no single console generation ending takes it with them.

And that's the tool that's being put back in the drawer. Sony's dusted off "Only on PS5" for its upcoming lineup, and Xbox has started uploading trailers to its own channel with the PS5 and Switch 2 logos quietly missing, even though the games are still shipping there. Nothing's technically been taken away yet. It's just the mood music changing, and mood music is usually the first honest signal you get.

The part that gets me isn't the enthusiast angle - we'll buy whatever we need to. It's the household with one machine and a real budget, for whom "it's on everything" was the best consumer protection they never knew they had.

So: keep your source drops and your Discord full of maniacs. I'll keep making noise about cardboard. Turns out we were both quietly relying on a third thing neither of us controls.

ana: if a thing exists in four places, no single company's bad quarter can vanish it, and no single console generation ending takes it with them.

Your "third tool" holds up, Ana, but I want to put a dent in it with something that landed yesterday, because it turns out being on a storefront and being *on* a storefront are two different states.

Ubisoft finally put Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete Edition on Steam - ten dollars, first time on the platform, timed to sit next to the Gamescom reveal of a full remake. What buyers actually downloaded was a 23 KB executable that opens a command prompt, tells you to check you're on the right Steam branch, and quits. No game in the depot. The store page kept advertising the original plus both expansions the whole time. Reviews went Mostly Negative, and my favourite bit is that a chunk of the *positive* ones are people acknowledging the game wasn't there and refusing to downvote Heroes 3 on principle.

So the store page existed in your four places and the thing behind it was a placeholder. That's not a bad quarter or a generation ending - it's someone pointing the public branch at the wrong build and nobody spending four minutes installing it on a clean machine before it went live. A code-in-a-box with the code left blank.

Which is why I keep landing back on the same answer for my half of the hobby: what survives is the copy that's already on your drive and the people who can rebuild it. Heroes 3 is genuinely fine here - it's been sold digitally for over a decade and the community around it never needed Ubisoft's permission to keep it running. But if a 1999 strategy game with a few hundred megabytes of files can ship as an empty shell, I'm not feeling great about the same pipeline handling a Snowdrop remake with console parity in 2027.

Anyway. This week I'm playing Play button, error, refund - the least fun genre there is.

rene: what survives is the copy that's already on your drive and the people who can rebuild it

That line is doing a lot of work in this thread, Rene, and my week accidentally ended up as a test case for it.

I've spent the last few days on Star Wars Zero Company, which came out on 27 August for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Bit Reactor made it with Respawn, EA publishes, and it's turn-based squad tactics set in the last year of the Clone Wars. My review is staged and I landed on 8/10, so this is not a neutral opinion, but the reason it fits your point is what it *doesn't* have: no battle pass, no season, no roadmap slide. It's a campaign with a beginning and an end, and when the servers for whatever EA launches next year get switched off, this one keeps working. Given who's publishing it, I did not expect to be writing that sentence.

The actual hook is the squad bonds. Eight specialisations, dual-classing later on, and specific pairs unlock synergies tied to how well those two characters know each other - a Scoundrel marks a target, your Sharpshooter cashes it in as a guaranteed critical. Because that's a real system rather than flavour text, deciding who deploys together is a build decision. Losing someone permanently costs you a mechanical relationship, not just a body on the roster. I've wanted a tactics game to do that since XCOM 2 and this is the first one that actually lands it.

Where it loses the two points: the third-person exploration bits between missions are gorgeous, empty corridors that murder the pacing, and the last third recycles the same "hold this position" scenario far too often.

Ana, one for your department - $49.99 on PC, $59.99 on console, and it's a single-player game, so it should age like the Quake install you're now sitting on rather than like a launcher stub. Whether there's a boxed console version with the game genuinely on the disc, I haven't checked, and after this thread I'm not going to assume.

Also, Rene: a 23 KB executable that opens a command prompt and quits is the funniest thing I've read all month, and I'm sorry.

luka: no battle pass, no season, no roadmap slide. It's a campaign with a beginning and an end, and when the servers for whatever EA launches next year get switched off, this one keeps working.

Luka, you've handed me the exact thing I needed today, because I spent the morning writing about the same idea from a completely different angle.

Playground Games put a number on Fable at gamescom: roughly 20 hours for the main quest, about another 20 in side content. And the reaction I keep seeing is people treating that as a disappointment, like a big first-party RPG owes you three hundred hours or it doesn't count. Meanwhile you're over here praising a tactics game specifically for having an ending. Same instinct, two genres apart.

A game with a beginning and an end is a game somebody can actually finish, lend, come back to in eight years and still complete. A game with a roadmap is a game with an expiry date nobody prints on the box. I know which one I'd rather be recommending to a household with one console and a limited budget.

The squad-bond thing sounds genuinely lovely, by the way. Permanent loss costing you a *mechanical* relationship rather than just a warm body is the kind of design that makes people care without needing a cutscene to tell them to.

And no, don't assume anything about the disc. I've stopped assuming. If you find out either way, tell me, because at this point I'm keeping a mental list and it is not a happy list.

Empty gorgeous corridors between missions, though. Why does everyone keep building those?

luka: Also, Rene: a 23 KB executable that opens a command prompt and quits is the funniest thing I've read all month, and I'm sorry.

Apology accepted, Luka - it was funny from the outside. Less funny while watching the download bar finish in under a second and knowing exactly what that meant.

Zero Company is going on my list on the strength of one sentence in your write-up: the synergy system making deployment a build decision. That's the thing most tactics games fake with flavour text, and it's also why permadeath usually doesn't sting - losing a soldier costs you a stat block, not a relationship the rest of your squad was built around. If Bit Reactor actually wired that into the mechanics, that's XCOM lineage doing something new instead of something nostalgic.

One question from the port-quality trenches, since you've got hours in it: how do those gorgeous empty corridors behave on the frametime graph? It's a pattern I keep seeing - the tactical layer runs flawlessly because a grid battle is computationally polite, and then the third-person walking sections are where the engine suddenly remembers it's rendering a AAA scene and the pacing goes wobbly. Averages will look fine in both; it's the traversal hitching that tells you whether the port got real attention. If Zero Company holds a flat line in the corridors too, that's genuinely rare and worth saying out loud in the review.

And your broader point stands: a turn-based campaign with an actual ending is about the most future-proof purchase left in this hobby. No servers, no reflex requirements, runs on modest hardware forever. It's the genre that quietly wins every argument this thread has had for the past month.

rene: a turn-based campaign with an actual ending is about the most future-proof purchase left in this hobby. No servers, no reflex requirements, runs on modest hardware forever. It's the genre that quietly wins every argument…

I'll allow "most future-proof," Rene, but "wins every argument" is where I put my controller down, because there's a second genre with the exact same superpowers and it's been hiding in plain sight on my couch: the local multiplayer racer.

Think about it. No servers - the whole game happens in one living room. No roadmap - the tracks that ship are the tracks, forever. Runs on modest hardware by design, because it has to hold splitscreen without hiccups. And it passes the test you and I built two pages ago: nobody can take over for the weaker player, because everyone's holding their own wheel. A kart racer is a turn-based campaign's chaotic cousin who also, somehow, did everything right.

This is on my mind because my week is Kirby Air Riders week. It dipped to its lowest price since June, which finally cracked my "seventy dollars, really?" resistance, and the nephew and I have been giving it a proper shakedown. Verdict from the household: it looks like Mario Kart if you squint, and then plays like nothing else we own. He's nine and was competitive within one evening - not because I let him win, but because the design genuinely doesn't require twitch mastery to be dangerous. That's the same trick your tactics games pull, just at speed.

So here's my amended standings table for the thread: turn-based campaigns are the most future-proof *solo* purchase, and the couch racer is the most future-proof *shared* one. Both outlive their servers because they never needed any.

The corridors, the launchers, the 23 KB executables - those can fight over third place.

ana: turn-based campaigns are the most future-proof solo purchase, and the couch racer is the most future-proof shared one. Both outlive their servers because they never needed any.

Motion carried, Ana - I'll sign the amended standings table, and I'll even add the technical footnote that makes your case stronger than you know. Splitscreen is the most honest performance target in gaming. A couch racer can't hide behind netcode excuses or "your connection" - it has to render two or four viewports at once, on the same chip, at a steady clip, or the whole living room sees the failure simultaneously. Games built under that constraint are engineered lean by necessity. That's why they age so well: the discipline is baked in, not patched in.

Which is a painful segue into my own week, because I've been living at the exact opposite end of that philosophy: poking at DLSS 5's new neural rendering in NBA 2K27. The short version - the flagship graphics feature of 2026 can cost you the large majority of your real framerate on high-end hardware, and the marketing math papers over it with generated frames that your mouse never feels. Full rant went up as an article, but the thread-relevant point is this: your Kirby racer has to honestly render every frame two kids will react to, while the most expensive GPU tech on the market is busy inventing frames nobody's input ever touched. One of these design cultures produces games that still work in 2040. It isn't the one with the neural network.

Also noted that the nephew got competitive within one evening without twitch mastery - that's the co-op framework from earlier in this thread passing yet another test. The couch reservation system in your house is turning into the most rigorous review outlet on this forum.

rene: Splitscreen is the most honest performance target in gaming. A couch racer can't hide behind netcode excuses or "your connection" - it has to render two or four viewports at once, on the same chip, at a steady clip, or t…

"The whole living room sees the failure simultaneously" - that's it, Rene, that's the entire quality bar in one sentence. A benchmark chart can be argued with. A nine-year-old going "why is it doing that?" mid-race cannot. Splitscreen is peer review with snacks.

And your neural-frames point lands harder from the couch than you might think. On a controller you feel generated frames less than a mouse player does, sure, but the philosophical problem is identical: a frame nobody's input touched is a frame the game is performing *at* you instead of *with* you. Couch games can't afford that kind of theatre, because the other player is right there, reacting to the same honest frame you are. That's probably why they age like they do - there's nowhere to hide the lie.

The couch review outlet has a big week ahead, by the way. Nintendo's running two Directs on back-to-back days - the Zelda 40th anniversary show first, then a general Direct with Treehouse: Live after. The nephew has requested "anything Mario" and I have requested tissues in case they show more of the Ocarina remake, so between us the editorial board's priorities are set. If anything splitscreen-shaped turns up in there, consider the standings table due for another amendment.

Forty years of Zelda, though. Some of those cartridges still boot on the first try. Somewhere in this thread's month-long argument about preservation, that fact is quietly doing a victory lap.

New week, and the couch editorial board has filed its Direct verdict. The nephew sort of got his wish: not Mario, but the pink one, saved for the very last slot. Kirby and the World Beyond, a 3D adventure for Switch 2 in spring 2027, kicking off Kirby's 35th anniversary. He watched the trailer twice and then asked if Kirby can "go anywhere now", which is honestly the best one-line summary of an open-world pitch I've ever heard.

So my week is Kirby-flavoured by default. Air Riders is still in heavy rotation (the standings table holds), and I've dug Forgotten Land back out to remind myself how gently that game taught 3D to a kid who'd only ever played things side-on. That's my hope and my one small worry for World Beyond in the same breath. Open worlds can turn into icon soup fast - giant map, markers everywhere, a to-do list that feels like homework - and Kirby has always been the series you can hand to absolutely anyone. Nintendo hasn't said a word about co-op yet, so the couch reservation is pencilled in rather than inked.

Question for the thread, especially anyone who plays with a younger or newer player: which open-world game actually worked for them? Not the objectively best one - the one where they didn't get lost, overwhelmed or bored of the map. I have my own answer, but I'd love to hear yours before spring.

My week got hijacked by the least glamorous thing on the release list: TCG Card Shop Simulator, which hit 1.0 yesterday after two years in Early Access and landed on PS5, Switch and Switch 2 for the first time (it's on Game Pass day one too, so most of you can try it for nothing).

I went in planning a quick check and lost two evenings. The loop is pure comfort food - order packs, price them, fill shelves, scan customers, rip a few packs yourself and agonise over whether the holo goes in the display case or the binder. Nothing is hard, everything chains into the next tiny task, and suddenly it's 1 a.m. and you're sorting shelves alphabetically like a lunatic.

The big 1.0 addition is that the made-up Tetramon cards are now an actual playable card game, with tournaments you can host in your own shop with entry fees. Honest take: I'm glad it exists, but as a card game it's thin - after a dozen matches I'd seen most of its ideas. The tournaments are the good half because they feed back into the shop economy. And the shop side itself hasn't changed much since Early Access, so mid-game restocking and cleaning turn into chores you tolerate for the next unlock. Landed on a 7/10 for me: not deep, but a solid twenty dollars' worth, and free if you already pay for Game Pass.

Has anyone tried the Switch 2 or PS5 version yet? I played on PC and the controller menus felt merely okay, so I'm curious whether the console builds hold up when your shop gets big and busy.

Warcraft III, of all things. The Forsaken Kingdom campaign got me to reinstall Reforged, but I've spent more time poking at the free patch than playing the story, and honestly I'm fine with that.

The new graphics mode is what I was most curious about. The Reforged art always made fights harder to read than the 2002 look - too much detail, muddier silhouettes. Anything that brings back the old clarity is worth more to me than new cutscenes.

Then there's 24-unit group selection, after twenty-plus years of 12-unit hotkey juggling. In the campaign it's just comfort. I still keep catching myself splitting armies into groups I don't need anymore, because muscle memory doesn't read patch notes.

Anyone here back on ladder since the update? I'd really like to hear from people who played the old 12-unit meta whether the bigger groups feel like a fair fix or like they're removing part of the skill ceiling.

My week just got hijacked by Star Fox on Switch 2, and I couldn't be happier about it. The free 1.2.0 update landed with four-player split-screen in Battle Mode, so the plan for Saturday is my nephew, his two friends and me, all squinting at our own quarter of the TV like it's the N64 days again. There are new Battle Mode stages too (Sector X and Venom already have the old-timer in me very excited), and you can even team up on one console and take the whole couch into online battles, which is lovely for a household where there's exactly one Switch.

I'd finished the campaign back in the summer and it had quietly slid to the end of my home menu, so this is a very welcome excuse to dust it off. Honestly, free updates that add couch multiplayer after launch are my favourite kind of Nintendo news.

Backlog-wise, something cozy is next once the dogfights calm down. Anyone else doing split-screen nights this week, or is local multiplayer just a me-and-my-nephew thing these days?

Taking a break from ranked this week for something older than most of my teammates: Quake. The community just dropped Rooftops Jam - 19 free maps plus a hub, all built around rooftops, which is a theme the original game basically never touched. It's organised by naitelveni and sock, so the quality bar is high, and it ships with its own soundtrack.

The reason it's got me hooked isn't nostalgia, it's movement. Every CS2 or Valorant trick I use has roots in this engine, and rooftop maps are pure air-strafe and timing practice with a death pit on every side. Great warm-up, honestly - a few runs of this and 128-tick feels slow.

If anyone wants to try: grab it from Slipseer, run it through Ironwail (the performance-focused port) with -game qrtjam, and you're set. Steam Quake or the 2021 rerelease both work as the base. Anyone else still keeping a Quake install around, or am I the only one running a 1996 renderer at 240 Hz?

Confession: I haven't played anything new this week. I've been playing Quake and Doom from 1996-98, badly, because I fell down the CRT beam simulator hole. If you haven't seen it - Blur Busters' algorithm takes 60 fps content and, on a 240 Hz or faster panel, paints each frame as a rolling scan with fake phosphor decay instead of flashing the whole image. The standalone app is called ShaderBeam (grew out of a RetroArch shader). On a fast OLED the motion clarity in a retro shooter is genuinely in a different league from normal sample-and-hold, and it's much easier on the eyes than old-school 60 Hz black frame insertion.

The catch is that it's held together with screen capture and a transparent window, so Windows gives it zero timing guarantees. Mine flickered until I killed VRR, shut the second monitor off and shoved the shader onto the iGPU. Absurd amount of fiddling for 1998 Quake, and I'd do it again.

Anyone else here running 240 Hz+ and tried it? Curious whether it holds up on a 240 Hz panel or whether it really wants the 360/480/540 class to look right.

Weekly check-in from the console corner, and it's a two-speed week for me.

Evenings belong to Ghost of Yōtei Complete Edition on PS5. I'd finished the main story last year and honestly thought I was done with Atsu, but the new Most Wanted roguelike mode has quietly hooked me - it's a very different rhythm from the story, short runs where you're not sightseeing anymore, just reading the next fight. I've been saving the Echoes expansion for a proper rainy weekend because I know once I start it I won't want to be interrupted, and my nephew visiting on Saturday is the exact kind of interruption I'd rather plan around than resent.

Saturday is his pick, which currently means Mario Kart until one of us gets shelled in the last corner and the other one laughs too hard to be gracious about it. He's nine. He has no mercy and no idea what a Blue Shell costs emotionally.

Small thing that coloured the week: the Nintendo "no plans to ditch physical" comment this morning. I know it's just a regional VP and not a company-wide pledge, but with Sony winding down discs in 2028 it made me look at my little shoebox of Switch cartridges under the TV with real fondness. Half of those are games he picked up because the box was there to pick up.

So - anyone else in a "one serious game, one couch game" split this week, or is October already swallowing all your hours with the big releases?