RISE OF THE MACHINES
The world of PC GAMING is more alive than ever – with plenty to look forward to.
THE LONG ERA OF CONSOLE EXCLUSIVES IS ENDING
In September 2011 I moved 2,500 miles from one side of the country to the other, leaving behind friends and family for a city where I knew almost no one. For some of those relationships the move meant a huge change: I went from seeing friends weekly to just once or twice a year. But for others it was an easy transition, because we already spent most of our social time playing games together online.
In 2011 if we were conscious and not stuck at work, we were mainlining League of Legends like droogs with our eyes wired open. We later had trysts with Battlefield 3, Terraria, Smite and Dungeon Defenders, all games we could pay just enough attention to, to keep our main focus on why we were ultimately playing together: to chat about day-to-day life on our homespun Mumble server.
We never lost touch or stopped playing games, but it became harder and harder to line up our schedules, especially with two time zones in between us. Then 2020 hit, and for the first time in almost a decade my PC gaming group was essentially my entire social life again. It’s been a hard two years in so many ways, but our Discord server has been a daily comfort – a place to vent, cope, and pass the time with videogames. The pandemic has certainly taken a toll on PC gaming, delaying countless games and smashing hardware supply chains to pieces. But it’s also reinforced for me what an incredible place PC gaming is in now compared to ten years ago.
THE NUCLEUS
Sony and Microsoft might still be slugging it out for a spot in the entertainment centre, but both have admitted the PC is too big to ignore. The long era of console exclusives is ending, with virtually everything now arriving on PC – and usually in finer form. We can play Halo on Steam without being tortured by Games For Windows Live, and Sony’s crown jewels like God of War are getting PC ports with luxurious ultrawide and DLSS support for added shine.
Nowhere but the bizarre melting pot that is the PC could games like Among Us or Project Zomboid lurk for years before suddenly surging in popularity. The PC is now the nucleus of gaming culture, ground zero for new trends, home to Discord and Twitch and every esport outside of the fighting game community (maybe with Street Fighter VI they’ll
find the allure of 240Hz monitors irresistible). And the future looks brighter still.
2022 is poised to give us the Steam Deck, an affordable entry point to PC gaming that has the potential to open up our hobby to millions more people. We’re still grappling with those hardware shortages, but they haven’t slowed down PC tech’s current hot streak, with Intel pushing a groundbreaking new desktop architecture, AMD killing it on performance with each new generation, and Nvidia pairing its graphics cards with irresistible software features like AI super sampling. Even if you can’t get your hands on new gear, the most exciting innovations in the PC space right now are helping games run better on the hardware you’ve already got.
PLAY THE HITS
When I think back to what kinds of games I could play on PC in 2011, 2022 feels like an outright fantasy. Elden Ring, quite possibly the biggest game of the year, launches on PC day one, while a decade ago Japanese PC ports were rare, late and usually terrible to boot. For years console players lamented how 3D platformers had died off in the third-person shooter era, but there are a wealth of them on PC, like last year’s beloved Psychonauts 2 and even a reverseengineered PC port of Super Mario 64 (seriously, is there anything diehard PC modders can’t do?).
For most of the last decade it also felt like the quintessential PC genre – real-time strategy – was on life support, but 2022 bodes well there too. We ended last year with Age of Empires IV and now wait impatiently for Company of Heroes 3, which feels
like the kind of one-two punch that could wake up everyone who’s slept on the RTS for far too long.
Hell, even STALKER is getting a sequel we never thought we’d see this year (it was supposed to be out in April, but slipped to a hopefully final December 8). 2022 is going to be a tsunami of a year, with waves of pent-up games delayed in 2020 and 2021 finally making it out. It’s going to be a marathon from Elden Ring in February to Starfield in November, assuming Bethesda sticks to its release date. And if Team Cherry hasn’t finished Hollow Knight: Silksong by the end of 2022 I’m moving house again and standing outside their window with a boombox until they let me play it.
The stacked calendar we’re looking at now at the year’s beginning is still an incomplete picture, admittedly, with little indication of what will blow up, what will fizzle, and what isn’t even a blip on our radar. It’s hard to keep perspective on how sprawling PC gaming is now: back in 2011, roughly 300 games came out on Steam in the whole year. In 2021, there were around 12,000. A pile that big is bound to contain a few big and exciting surprises.
BETTING’S OPEN
BioWare has been playing coy about its next Mass Effect and Dragon Age, but it seems certain both are coming. The long-awaited BioShock successor will likely come up for air this year. Rockstar, meanwhile, is almost surely working on Grand Theft Auto VI, and 2023 will mark a decade since the release of GTA V. I’d put $10 down in a Miami casino that Vice City’s coming back next year.
Those multimillion dollar productions live side-by-side on Steam with indie games, and today’s indie development scene is so absurdly flush with talent that even a quiet week for games hides something tantalising. What are our favourite indie teams working on right now? Zachtronics bends our brains with a new puzzle game virtually every year. Our 2018 Game of the Year Into the Breach, from indie developer Subset Games, is now four years old, while Supergiant Games’ acclaimed Hades will turn two before 2022 is over. The next year or so seems like the time for both to unveil something new.
And with Sony now gung-ho about PC ports and Sega slowly coaxing its RPG studio Atlus into embracing the PC, we may even cross some more names off the list of holy grail ports. If we all do our Hail Marys before bed every night, dare we hope for a Bloodborne or Persona 5-shaped miracle? If I were truly honest I’d tell you that the port I want to see most is a remaster of Capcom’s God Hand, but some dreams are just too outrageous to commit to print.
LET’S JAM
I hope 2022 sees Covid-19 wane and gives me the chance to step away from my PC more, but for now I’m content playing through Gloomhaven with the same friends I rolled into League with. Our reflexes and schedules couldn’t survive in a MOBA these days, but the digital version of a phenomenal board game? That we can handle.
BIOWARE HAS BEEN PLAYING COY ABOUT ITS NEXT MASS EFFECT