Snipers are notoriously hard to balance for the sniper and the sniped or even the unsniped as now they have to play completely differently due to existence of sniper sniping the sniped.

And many games often have a very uninteractive game design for snipers.

I understand, snipers in real life literally sit prone, watching a position, giving precise intel, and then take the kill shot alongside their spotter aiding them. I know this because I am a military fanatic and love milsims. But I'm going to exclude Milsims from this conversation because in milsims you are supposed to use actual military tactics to counter snipers. In games like Arma, for example, the Sniper would need to be hunted down or avoided if location unknown, we'd send a drone or even a damn helicopter on their ass, and the Sniper is also at the mercy of running out of munitions.

Outside of Milsims and hardcore realistic shooters (like Escape From Tarkov), snipers are just... mostly designed to fulfil the fantasy of a fast kill shot in 1 shot with good aim. But that's the thing, they kill in 1 shot, and the player often cannot react or counter them in many games.

Let's take games like Battlefield, Overwatch (Widowmaker), TF2, Rivals (pre-rework Black Widow) or Call of Duty, the most notoriously unbalanced and unfun snipers imo. The Sniper in those games can 1 shot headshot you, with Marvel Rivals' case being only possible with a dmg boost.

But fundamentally, this is the problem. Marvel Rivals knows Snipers are unfun to fight as they sit back in these games, take kill shots, and can easily reposition. So Black Widow in the sniper role was nerfed in 1 shot and was now a useless pick, which is worse to play than her being an OP sniper.

The thing with these games is that the Sniper doesn't have to really face serious limitations or counters other than the enemy jumping on them. But the sniper is being protected often and their job is to stop from being confronted upclose anyway, and most have tools to defend themselves like Claymores, Intel devices or traps. For TF2's case, the Spy would counter a sniper but some would wear the funny wooden shield on their back.

In general, this type of gameplay means that unless you play a SPECIFIC type of tool or role, the sniper will just dominate. Now, by law of game design this makes sense and is fair, but something that is already taught in game design is that just because it is fair, doesn't mean it is fun. And PVP games have a casual audience, they have to be fun.

I will name 2 games where sniping isn't really seen as a huge issue and, in my opinion, are quite fairly designed and promote fun interactive gameplay.

1. Titanfall 1 and 2.

In the Titanfall series, snipers are unique in that there is only 1 true traditional sniper rifle... the Kraber. The other 2 next to the Kraber in the sniper rifle catergory are DMRs. The Longbow DMR is a semi-auto and the Double Take (in Titanfall 2 only) is the same with a faster fire rate. These 2 DMRs are designed to purely be long range weapons with HORRIFIC hip fire meaning they are bad at close range. And you cannot really use them while doing fast movement. And due to every other pilot's fast movement, they can very easily flank the DMR user through engaging movement instead of hopping cover to cover and slowly advancing like in other games. And of course, we cannot forget the trump card, Titans. Titans will just kill the camping pilot anyway. And these DMRs, they CANNOT 1 shot to the body and landing a headshot is nearly impossible in Titanfall with guns like these.

Now, the KRABER is a bolt action with 1 shot pop anywhere. But you cannot use this 1 shot like a regular camping sniper rifle because it is insanely slow to aim down sights and has severely slow bullet travel. The best way to use the Kraber is with precise and fast movement and doing quick aims as best as possible and flicking. And it JUST WORKS. The Kraber becomes a high skill sniper rifle that promotes aggressive play instead of camping and rewards the player for using the mobility and gadget sandbox of Titanfall.

1. Halo

Halo is a weird one because not all Halo's do this mechanic that, so far, is unique to Halo's ranged gunplay. Halo's is less like Titanfall's role reversal of the Sniper being aggressive and reserves the Sniper in the sandbox as a long ranged power weapon like a traditional military sniper.

Now, I've just revealed the main aspect of it being fair in the previous paragraph, it's a power weapon. You have to FIND IT, FIGHT FOR IT, and LIVE WITH IT.

What else makes it fair? Well gameplay wise, it's very easy to understand the Sniper Rifle. It is PIN POINT ACCURATE from regular hip fire. The zoom doesn't increase mathematical accuracy, it's just a zoom, so the player also doesn't have to wrestle with RNG hipfire (a mechanic I also don't like at all). It's purely skill based weapon in CQC and long range.

But the biggest thing that makes this weapon fair for victims to fight against. DE-SCOPE.

I have not seen another game implement this mechanic but it JUST WORKS for arcade shooters and honestly I'd love to see it in more hardcore or realistic shooters as well.

For a high TTK game like Halo, having a sudden 1 shot kill to the head weapon that breaks the rules and 1 shots at range as well is very powerful. The de-scope works simply, if the Sniper Player is ZOOMED in any instance of DMG de-scopes them and now they must re-scope. It's Halo's version of Suppressive Fire.

This promotes the Sniper to not hard-scope so carelessly and to promote flicks and precise tracking as 1 stray bullet from the target hitting them will cause a de-scope. It allows players to aggress onto the Sniper but they are obviously still at the mercy of the Sniper no-scoping them if their skill allows it.

I just love this mechanic and would love to see it more. It would likely make a lot of other Snipers feel more balanced to fight.

I'm curious to see what other Snipers have been balanced in a way that promotes aggressive styles of sniping like these 2 games?

But it's also important to balance out with the Sniper Fantasy of the camper in the back and taking extreme shots which I think Halo allows for as well.

EDIT: A lot of good points for and against. I wanted to include other games that did sniping fairly I didn't think of. Also, keep in mind I said, something fair doesn't mean it is fun.

1. Counter Strike AWP - it's an economic risk, and can be countered with smokes, map design is good to encourage aggression on an AWPer, cannot be used while moving.

2. Gears of War - needs to hit the head, is a power weapon, reloads that fail will lead to death, most CQC weapons will beat it, Gears map arena promotes aggression which can screw the Sniper.

Hi everyone,

I am currently working on my Master's thesis and conducting a study on Artificial Intelligence in video games. As a gamer, I want to gather real feedback from the community on how AI behaviors impact our gaming experiences.

Purpose of the Survey & Abstract: The primary purpose of this research is to evaluate how players perceive and interact with Artificial Intelligence and Non-Player Character (NPC) behaviors in video games. While AI has become an integral component of modern game design, its presence is often most effective when it operates seamlessly in the background. This study aims to analyze the sociological and technological implications of this "invisible" AI integrated into digital entertainment. Specifically, the research explores how elements such as procedural content generation and complex NPC behavioral patterns affect player immersion, emotional engagement, and overall gameplay dynamics. By gathering quantitative and qualitative data directly from the gaming community, this thesis seeks to bridge the gap between technical AI development and the actual user experience, providing deeper insights into what players truly value in virtual interactions.

Research Institute: University of Catania — Master's Degree in International Cooperation.

Researcher Contact Data: Author: Mirko Moschella Email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

The survey is completely anonymous, consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, and will take about 3 to 5 minutes to complete.

https://forms.gle/aJUdtr4DzADiguheA

Have you recently played a game where an NPC's behavior completely broke your immersion, or conversely, made the world feel incredibly alive? What specific mechanics caused that reaction? I would love to read your thoughts in the comments!

Minor Spoilers for Elden Ring.

I have been playing Elden Ring exclusively for the past 3 months (late to the party, I know). True to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s ambitions, it is the natural evolution of The Dark Souls series. The brutal combat returns with more options, the enemies with more variety, and the game world larger and freer. Elden Rings also brings back and expands on another major feature of those games: their ambiguous approach to world building and story.

As much as Dark Souls inspired many future games with its combat, the obscure ways it told its story was also highly influential. Similar to how enemies demanded that players to study their move set and find openings, the story would only unfold its mysteries to those who were patient and observant.

I have to make a confession here. I was never a big fan of this approach, or to be more precise, of how From Soft implemented it in their games. While an enemy can be tried numerous times to learn its secrets, the player is not given the same courtesy when it comes to the story. Significant information about the story or characters could easily be missed, or are brought in a conversation only once. This is exasperated by my aversion to reading guides and wikis, as I would like discoveries to feel like my own accomplishment.

That being said, there are many players who are fans of FromSoftware’s story telling. I frame my own dissatisfaction with this style as mostly a personal preference. I am not arguing these games are flawed in their story telling. I am also grateful that the massive success of From Soft titles made way for more games to incorporate ambiguity in their own unique ways, some more aligned with my own preferences like Hollow Knight or the excellent Signalis.

Elden Ring, though, has a unique problem in my opinion. One that I cannot solely attribute to my personal taste. Ambiguity in previous games was not just a simple choice, it was masterfully justified in the world building. The Dark Souls games were a tale of crumbled empires, to the point that most of their history is forgotten. Few denizens are left, most of them unreliable sources not of sane mind. The player character itself is undead, basically a hollow body that moves through these worlds without the capability of fully grasping of what has happened.

Most of these factors of ambiguity are not present in Elden Ring. The empire is crumbling, yes, but sources of information are plenty. We come across many sane and informed NPCs along the journey. Some have ulterior motives and withhold or twist facts, but there are others who are quite helpful. The player character is not a zombie or an empty husk, but a normal human being with a previous life outside of these lands.

So why are we required again to rely on breadcrumbs to learn about the world and characters? Why do we advance the plot and shape the lives of many NPCs, barely knowing what is going one? Because the protagonist is incurious, with no real explanation as to why. They are silent, which means they are not voice-acted, but that should not inhibit them to ask questions from anybody. All they do is respond to their questions. If I were in the issues of the player character, I would speak with these NPCs for hours. The main hub of the game even features a library. Why not take advantage of it?

This is the main reason that I believe Elden Ring’s story does not work on a fundamental level. From Soft’s brand of story telling made perfect sense in the empty and obscure world of Dark Souls, but it fails to justify itself in the vast world of Elden Ring with its many NPCs, numerous sources of information, and the supposedly normal protagonist.

Hi everyone,

I've been running a Minecraft server where the reality is this: the total active player count rarely exceeds 10. Most of the time, it's completely empty, only getting slightly livelier during holidays. If you look at it as a traditional commercial game, it is undoubtedly a failure. However, I don't treat it as a traditional survival server, but rather as an independent game using Minecraft as its underlying engine.

Over the past two years of running it, I went from knowing almost nothing about servers to becoming a developer who writes my own code, patches the server software, and researches underlying mechanics and macro-architecture. Nowadays, "1-click server hosting" is incredibly convenient, but I chose the most tedious and difficult path. This in itself proves that what I want is not just "people to play," but something much deeper.

For the past two years, I’ve been exploring one question: What is the most important thing for a survival sandbox?

Initially, I thought it was "gameplay" (content). I kept adding new plugins and content, trying to keep things fresh for the players. But I quickly grew exhausted and realized the root of the problem: Minecraft is inherently a high-freedom sandbox, and the various "gameplay loops" I was forcing onto it were actually restricting player agency. Once players consumed this linear content, what was left was a sense of emptiness even worse than vanilla Minecraft.

I then realized that "mechanics" are more important than gameplay. The role of mechanics is to create the possibilities for gameplay to emerge, making the content purely emergent. However, after a while, I found the system becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Tweaking one mechanic would trigger an avalanche of unintended consequences across other mechanics.

That’s when I understood that having mechanics isn't enough. If there isn't a thin, universal interface connecting them, they will still restrict freedom. Therefore, what’s even more important than mechanics themselves is their composability and orthogonality.

Since this is a multiplayer online game, its essence is a collection of human relationships. I used to think the ultimate destination of the server must be a "community." But building a community is incredibly difficult: players' expectations are infinite, while content is finite. If we look at this through the lens of the Bartle taxonomy of player types:

• Achievers and Explorers naturally lose engagement when joining a server past its early-game phase because most content is already consumed.
• Killers aren't welcome in standard survival; they need anarchy environments like 2b2t.
• The only ones with long-term retention are Socializers, Builders, and Technical players, because their investment is open-ended. But these players are a minority, and they have massive sunk costs—once they find a server they belong to, they rarely leave, making them nearly impossible to actively recruit. A successful community server requires a massive amount of serendipity and luck; it's almost impossible to deliberately replicate.

I thought about this for a long time and finally realized I was being constrained by a default framework: the assumption that a server must have players. If no one plays, what's the point?

My final conclusion is this: Treat the server as an "Artwork" rather than a "Public Space."

A public space defaults to needing foot traffic, but an "artwork" doesn't need people to constantly observe it. As long as someone has viewed it, experienced it, and reflected on it, its purpose is fulfilled. Player interaction can even be entirely asynchronous. Once you make this perspective shift, "concurrent player count" is no longer the sole metric for success. It is no longer a dead commercial server; it is a closed-loop digital artwork.

However, I must confess that arriving at this "server as an artwork" conclusion comes with a degree of survivor's bias. A friend of mine generously provides the physical hardware for the server for free. This material liberation stripped away my "server bill anxiety."

But this brings up a much deeper question: When we do have to face the real-world cost of computing power, what exactly are we paying for?

The server bill is the cruelest lie detector for a creator's motives. If your dopamine comes from "having admin privileges," "looking down on others," or "being surrounded by players," then receiving a monthly bill for an empty server will mock your vanity. The cost becomes pure torture.

But if you are a pure systems designer, your joy comes from seeing an elegant architecture run smoothly. The cost of that machine is simply the "existence tax" you pay to maintain your independent universe. You aren't paying to buy an audience; you are paying for an undisturbed creator's sandbox.

I'm very curious how the folks here view this perspective of treating a multiplayer online system as an independent artistic expression. When designing indie games, can we truly strip away the obsession with "serving the masses" and build systems purely to explore the limits of mechanics?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

This year I got my first job, and thus began earning my own money, which I've started using to buy games to myself on Steam. This new layer made start having a new dimension of understanding on gaming consumption.

I do come from a perspective of someone who mainly buys indie and older (PS3 era or earlier) games, which luckily also tend to be cheaper and run in my not-state-of-the-art notebook, however, I feel that the discussion extends a bit beyond that.
I assume a lot of people have at least heard of stories of someone asking for a game or console from their parents when they were young and they buying something else entirely because the person of the store told them "it's pretty much the same thing" (It wasn't). Most recent examples I read where about how someone received "Evil Zone" when they wanted "Tekken 3", or when someone who wanted Mario received... Bubsy.
TBH, you can't really blame your parents, because when it came to things such as TVs, refrigerators, blenders or washing machines they didn't really have to worry a lot about which brand it was, so they likely thought that it was also fungible when it comes to gaming.

Nowadays we might see our parents view of such things as "silly" or even "absurd"... but was it really?
A few months ago a lot of people were complaining about the price of the newest Star Fox game, to which a certain Twitter user simply responded that people should "vote with their money" while listing four other rail shooters you could buy for way cheaper on Steam (One of which I ended up buying, Mirage Feathers.).
Let's just say that such user ended up receiving a lot of offenses directed at them, but that whole thing stuck with me for a few months, until now where I developed an habit of "window shopping" on Steam and found out that for almost every popular game released in the last decade, you do have a lot of indie games inspired by them that sell for cheaper.

Yet I don't think any person ever said something on the likes of "Stellar Blade is too expensive, I'm buying Mahou Arms instead" or "Hades 2 is a bit pricy, Ascend to ZERO it is, then".
That leaves me a bit confused, as it would imply that there's no real sense of a "free market" when it comes to gaming. People will, at most, complain about "games being expensive nowadays" in a very "in a vacuum" way, but the idea of buying similar, cheaper games, is at best something people don't tend to consider and, at worst, a downright offensive idea.
Perhaps due to living in a third-world country, I wasn't an enemy of the "we have ice-cream at home" mentality, hence I did play "Stumble Guys" before being able to play "Fall Guys" and "HoloCure" before being able to buy "Vampire Survivors".
While I do understand that "aesthetics" matter (e.g. I would prefer something like Wizordum over a lot of other Doom clones simply because I prefer fantasy settings over sci-fi ones), if gaming eventually boils down to product fetishism (e.g. A game having "Sonic" in the title being more important than it "playing like Sonic"), that not only makes discussions of "games-as-products" very difficult to have... it also makes very difficult to argue why companies shouldn't make their IPs as expensive as possible since, by this logic, every game is a monopoly on itself.

I still don't have any theory about this subject, so I wanted to hear what people have to say about it.
Is there more to the discussion of pricing in games beyond JUST the binary of "will buy/won't buy"?

I just finished Alan Wake 2 for a university essay (course was about media theory, remediation and the nature of television on a sociological level).

My main argument isn't that the game is "too cinematic" (I don't think cinematic games are inherently worse), but that the game repeatedly presents the appearance of player agency while maintaining a very tightly authored televisual structure. I'm specifically looking at how the game takes televisual forms and translates them into an interactive medium. My argument is more about what happens when a game deliberately reproduces another medium's language.

The main concept I'm looking at is remediation: the process through which one medium absorbs and reshapes the conventions of another medium. To me Alan Wake 2 is fascinating because it is extremely open about this. Everywhere you look, it's all Twin Peaks: The Return references, so much so that the plot overlaps at multiple points. Both take place a number of years after the original, in the meantime, both respective protagonists have been trapped in a dark place/black lodge, an evil doppelgänger has taken over their agency, control and consciousness (Mr. C and Mr. Scratch), both take place in Washington state, in a small town with a carbon copy diner, hotel, sheriff station and scary woods, the sheriff in both is a different sheriff from the original, a relative who takes over the job of their predecessor due to outside factors, both start off with the death of a missing agent (Nightingale and Major Briggs) with a missing body part that represents their humanity (their heart and head), the dark place and the black lodge are both (seemingly) entered through a circular portal in the woods.

And on a grander level: the live-action sequences, the FBI investigation structure, the episodic feeling, the musical numbers, the emphasis on auteurs and performances, it feels like a game trying to become aware of itself as a television object. Like wanting to be in this place of "prestige gaming", like how prestige television started, but it doesn't reach the thing that makes this medium stand out: the gameplay and player agency. At times it devolves into a walking simulator with the occasional gunfight that only happens while you're between point A and point B.

A few examples regarding the gameplay:

* Saga's Mind Place looks like detective work, but I often felt like I had already solved the mystery before the game allowed Saga to acknowledge it. I was formalizing conclusions I had already reached and am just waiting for her to catch up.

* The musical sequence (Herald of Darkness) is visually incredible, but as gameplay it felt almost entirely choreographed. The game constantly points you where to go, and if you move ahead of the intended rhythm you can literally end up waiting for the sequence to catch up. It felt more like being placed inside this carefully directed performance which doesn't take the player into account and I really felt that disonnance there.

* More generally, the game introduces ambiguity but also repeatedly explains itself through dialogue, manuscript pages, and repeats that exposition multiple times to the point of hammering it into your head.

So the contradiction I'm interested in is this:

The game is about authorship and control, but the player's relationship to the story is often closer to that of a viewer watching a prestige television series than a player actively creating meaning. Basically, my question is: Does Alan Wake II meaningfully transform televisual storytelling into something unique to games, or is its central framing the reproduction of television within a video game? If it's the latter, is gaming the right medium for this story?

I don't mean this as a "the game is bad" argument, I just personally had a really soured experience with it. I think the game is genuinely fascinating precisely because it is so committed to this idea. The shamelessness of it is what interests me, it almost feels like Remedy is saying "yes, this is a video game that wants to be a tv show". I'd especially like to hear arguments from people who think the game *does* use interactivity in a meaningful way, because that is the part I'm most interested in.

Hi everyone, I am currently conducting a survey for my MSc Computing and IT Management dissertation. The survey is intended to gather user requirements for a proposed web-based platform that allows users to rate and review video games based on their historical accuracy and their historical authenticity. It explores how players engage with historically themed video games, how important historical accuracy is to them, and what rating systems and website features they would find useful.

The survey should take an estimated 10-20 minutes to complete, depending on how much detail participants choose to provide. There will be up to 34 questions to answer, however, most questions are optional, so participants may skip any question that they do not wish to answer. Participation is voluntary and any responses given will be collected anonymously with no identifying information needed to be provided. Any responses received will be used solely for academic dissertation purposes.

Target Participants: people who play video games. Experience with historically themed video games and/or an interest in history would be particularly helpful, however is not required.

If you have any questions about this survey or have any issues please contact:

Researcher: Paige Thomas

Institution: Cardiff University

Contact: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

Survey Link: Historical Accuracy in Video Games – Fill in form

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to participate, I greatly appreciate it.

Discussion points:

To encourage discussion beyond the survey, I would also be interested in hearing the community's thoughts on:

• How important is historical accuracy in video games, and how should it be weighed against other qualities like gameplay and storytelling?
• What is more important: historical accuracy (how factually correct a game’s representation of history is), historical authenticity (how convincingly a game recreates the atmosphere, experiences, values and feeling of a historical period), or educational value when playing historically themed games?
• Whether a game be historically inaccurate whilst still providing an authentic experience of a historical period?
• If the role that history plays in a game affect how important historical accuracy should be treated? For example, should a game heavily focused on historical events be held to a different standard than a game that simply uses a historical setting?

When referring to attack magnetism, it means your character's attack will move them further when an enemy is on screen and they are softlocked to or hardlocked to. For example, Just hitting the attack button when there are no enemies and the attack moves them forward like 5 feet. Now, same attack but there's an enemy now and the attack now has extra range, maybe it adds like 2 more like ninja gaiden 4 or a lot to just lunge to the enemy like in insomniac spiderman. I haven't played ff16 in a while but clive has no attack magnetism out of his devil trigger but when in it he gets a huge amount of it.

I think for a bit more casual game like anything with the batman arkham combat system it doesn't really matter as much but for more "hardcore" combat systems i think it's a plague that invalidated the importance of spacing. Looking at nu gow and kratos behaves like he's on skiis, the other problem is enemies also having it so let's say you're gauging an attack range of an enemy on startup, its winding up to do an overhead and you the character thinks it will not hit you, but attack magnetism on the enemy's part will slide them towards you making spacing no longer important. Not having you to plan out how far your attacks go is bad enough now you cant outspace enemy moves and have to rely on dodge iframes or parrying.

It's a whole mix bag of which games will have it lately, if its character action, maybe, its it's an arkham type combat game it probably will, if its a fromsoft or arpg of the same type it will probably not have it but mortal shell 2 did have it to its detriment.

On the whole, i think removing the importance of spacing and positioning is a stepback for action games and replacing it with iframe dodges or parrying (i dont hate either) but i wished we had both or a good balance.

Okay, before you eat me alive, please read the post in full, thank you.

I am not a console gamer, neither I am a PC gamer. These are stupid labels. I own both multiple consoles (PS2/3/4/5 and XBOX360) and play on all of them. These days mainly on PS5 (its a home entertainment system), but my PS3 does not get too dusty either. I also own a pretty decent PC, a shitty Linux laptop (that nonetheless I can get some gaming from!), and my old uni Laptop, that acts as my home server. Hell, I even emulate PS1 and SNES games on my phone.

I just fucking love video games, regardless of their platform. So this is not another "hecking PC Master race comes to DESTROY console gamers" type of post.

That being said, I cannot shake off the feeling that A TON of console gamers (and plenty of PC folks as well...) are horribly misinformed, ignorant or just don't know anything about state of the PC gaming in the modern times. I've noticed this especially recently, after the recent terrible decisions by Sony. What I mostly see, whenever I go on Reddit, Twitter on any other social media platform is a lot of despair, that somehow things are as bad on PC (if not worse).

So here I come. As I've said earlier, I have zero interest in console/PC war - we are all losing that one. My goal with this post, is to make you more aware as a consumer, so you can make more informed chocies.

I'm going to bust some myths about PC gaming now, explain what's great about it... And what's not so great. Long story short - its not 2006 anymore.

A note - by PC I mean an x86-64 architecture running Windows or Linux OS. I have some experience with Macs - and with the M-series chips I see some serious gaming potential - but not enough to talk about them with any authority.

Let's go!

1. There is no physical media support on PCs

This is a big one for console gamers, and obviously a huge perk for (most of the) entertainment systems. However, its simply false, for many reasons.

First of all - you can get a cheap disc drive for your PC, which would enable a compatibility with THOUSANDS of games released on CD/DVD discs over the years, as well with DVD movies and audio CDs, and many other multimedia formats. The most popular ones are connected via USB, and its a plug-n-play setup. Literally connect one wire, and you can use it. No need to perform a handshake with any online service (like its the case on PS5).

A BlueRay drive will be slightly more expensive, sure. But... You don't really need one for gaming itself.

And I'm not really sure whether you need a DVD one as well, because...

2. The DRM on PC is as invasive as it is on the consoles

Here's the secret - a ton of games released on Steam, have no DRM whatsoever (aside from Steam integration itself). For example - a remake of System Shock from 2023, can be launched with no Steam services, out of the box - no modifications needed.

And the DRM there is, can be easily avoided. Many times, developers themselves remove it after the game reaches its sales target (or enough time passes). The only goal the DRM serves, is to stall the pirates for long enough, so the game actually sells.

There are also storefronts, that offer games with no DRM whatsoever - like GoG.

Okay, but what does that mean? Simple - you can put game files on an external storage, and put them on other machine. Want to share a copy of digital game you have with a friend? Just copy it on a pendrive and bring it to them. No need to do any authentication or shit like that!

This, with above mentioned point, not only means support for physical media is good on a PC - its literally as good as it gets. Recently, there was a trend of burning DVDs with GoG installers on them - something GoG gave their blessing to! Wouldn't it be cool if you could create a backup of your PS5 game on a blank blueray?

Also, the PCs have the single best form of customer protection - software piracy. As Gabe Newell said - its the service problem. Well, here is the solution to that problem. For obvious reason I will not elaborate, but you can surely find more info online.

3. You will constantly need to configure and setup everything

I've gotten my current PC in October of 2025. You know how much time I've spent installing drivers? 0 seconds. You know how much DirectX issues I've experienced? 0. You know how much controller troubleshooting I've had to do? None at all.

All I'm trying to say is this - its no longer 2006. The UX experience is truly amazing. EVEN ON LINUX (which - running Linux on a laptop is asking for troubles)!!!!! The updates happen automatically. I've had one instance where I had to update my graphic card drivers before I've played a new game, and all I've had to do is to click "Install" on a single dialogue popup.

It gotten to a point, where part of me misses messing up with drivers and troubleshooting Windows XP machines... But then again Linux exists.

Oh, and speaking of Linux...

4. Linux demands you to use terminal to install a browser!

A lot of people would happily jump to PCs, if not for Microsoft (which I will address later). Well, I'm happy to report that Windows is no longer the only real option. You can get a lot of Windows programs running using Wine, Lutris or Proton. In fact, the latest SteamMachine is running Linux out of the box.

Proton is genuinely a miracle. Personally, I see it as the most important project in the whole of gaming. Valve has a real shot at shaking up the Windows dominance.

But coming back to Linux itself - there are distributions focused on bringing clean and seamless desktop environment. Mint, Ubuntu, Bazzite, Pop_OS and many more are easy to install and have great software and hardware support. Granted, its a little bit more involved than Windows, but the experience gets better and better, and you can ignore terminal entirely (and leave it to the computer nerds like me)

5. The backwards compatibility is bad on PC

I honestly have no idea where this comes from. But the volume of lies regarding this subject is staggering. The PC is literally the single most backwards compatible computer standard on the market. For all of the flaws of Microsoft, they upkeep some truly ridiculous Windows features/functionalities, only for some 30 years old software to keep chugging around. Remember above mentioned Wine and Proton? You can easily run a lot of Windows software on Linux. Ever heard of DosBox? It keeps old DOS games running in the modern era. And its awesome.

But that's not all. RPCS3 (the PS3 emulator) can run 75% of PS3 games. Some of them have glitches and crash often, but the list of games you can play from beginning to an end grows every day.

How many PS3 discs can PS4 or PS5 run? The answer is ZERO.

The PC is backwards compatible with literally every gaming console released before 2007... And the emulation gods are making real progress with systems like PS4 as well.

The big irony is, unless some miracle happens, the PC users will have a 60FPS version of Bloodborne before any Playstation gamer.

You cannot argue this is not really cool.

6. Computers get viruses all the time

Again - its no longer 2006. On my home PC I don't use anything else than Windows Defender. It does its job, and I literally never think about it.

The real problem are scammers and phishing, but these are hardly a PC exclusive.

Now, since I've glazed PCs, and to make it fair, lets talk about some real problems of the paltform

1. The PC (or a laptop) still doesn't really fit in the living room

I think this is the only reason my PS5 gets even turned on these days. Some game genres do look really good on a big 4K TV. I cannot imagine Devil May Cry or Yakuza on a PC monitor, it just looks wrong. Sometimes I just like to lie on the coach with controller in hand and play.

Sure, you can bring your PC to the living room (and I sometimes do that!), but I need it by my desk, where its place is.

That being said.... SteamMachine exists, and it provides a proof of concept of a living room PC. Its a bit awkward, and really expensive, but it already found a market. And with SteamOS being open, it will get competitors.

2. The good gaming PCs are expensive

This is unfortunately true. And it doesn't seem like this trend will reverse anytime soon. At least console manufacturers can take a hit on device sale, and make it back with games (however, its up in the air whether they will do that for the next gen consoles).

I'm glad I've built my current PC, before AI companies fucked up the market

3. Microsoft still dominates

As great as SteamOS is, unless it gets a solid anticheat support, some of the biggest multiplayer games will not be available on any of the Linux distributions (I think Valve is working on that, but it will take some time).

And... Its Microsoft. I sure as hell have my set of problems with Windows 11.

4, The new physical releases of games are not really a thing

Its not a real problem for me (because I can make a physical version of a digital game if I want to), but I think there is something lost with no longer being able to buy a boxed copy of a PC game from a store.

Okay, I hope this will help you understand the state of PC platform a little bit more. Cheers!

Opinion: The PS6 does not need to release in at least the next Does anyone else hope the PS5 generation lasts a lot longer?

I genuinely hope Sony doesn’t rush releasing the PS6.

Specifically the PS5 Pro feels like it has a lot of life left. It has impressive hardware that should be more than capable of handling new games for years to come. It feels like we’re only now getting to the point where devs can really take advantage of what this generation offers.

Game visuals and performance are reaching a point of diminishing returns. Every generation used to bring massive leaps, but now the improvements are much more incremental.

Better ray tracing, higher resolutions, and more stable frame rates are nice, but they don’t feel like the kind of generational jump that makes entirely new hardware feel necessary yet.

Hardware aside, imo many of PlayStation’s biggest first party studios have released very few games this generation, and several major publishers are taking MUCH longer than ever between releases. Before we start talking about new hardware, I’d rather see more games that fully utilize the current hardware.

And then there’s prices… Consoles, GPUs, TVs, and accessories have all become more expensive. Asking people to invest in another console generation sooner rather than later seems like a slap in the face (Not off brand for Sony lately) to consumers, especially when the base PS5 and moreso PS5 Pro are still extremely capable. Think of how the Steam machine just released with much lower specs than the Pro.

Then there’s GTA VI, one of the biggest game launches ever, and I imagine at least a not insignificant number of people are going to buy a PS5 Pro specifically for that game, to release a new console not long after many players have just upgraded.

Honestly I’d much rather see Sony support the PS5 generation for several more years and focus on delivering more great games instead of introducing new hardware, and give devs more time to push these consoles to their limits before moving on.

What do you all think?

Personally as a Sony fan, I’m absolutely not buying the next generation until absolutely necessary (new games stop releasing on 5), or I decide to finally switch to PC.

Fun vs engaging was brought up a few times in conversations I've been having recently, and it's one of those topics that gets more and more complex the more I think it through.

Typically, people lump fun and engaging together as "hey this is fun and I want to see what else is new." It's the concept that everyone thinks, if they solve it, makes a good game (which to be fair it does, but you need to think through both). How do you have one without the other?

Well, fun is in the moment, while engaging is more of a mechanic, a way to create FOMO, wanting you to come back and keep "doing." In a way it seems like it could be used for pure evil (I'm looking at you Monopoly Go).

So, let's focus on why engaging is something you should consider. Daily rewards, streaks, limited time events. We see these as a reason to want to come back to a game. Don't want to lose that streak, or my last chance to get that skin. I've been stuck back in Fortnite and playing the quests is something I do, but at times it feels like a chore. However, Epic is really good at A/B testing mechanics and changing it up a lot while getting feedback constantly. Hate it or love it, Fortnite does a lot of things right.

What about fun with no engagement? Like a great HBO miniseries it's satisfying precisely because it ends. You finish it, you loved it, and then it's over and you move on. Some games are like that. I had a ton of fun with this one, but now it's done, and that's not a bad thing. Maybe some games should be allowed to just end. But if you want players to return, you need a hook to bring them back, and most games get to that point eventually. First Light (up to now) has been like that, I've beaten the game and feel very satisfied with my time and money invested. I also have no draw to go back. They have the TacSim, but that draw wasn't engaging enough to bring me back in.

The more I learn about the psychology side of gaming, the cooler it is to think through this. So, for people who design or think seriously about design: when you're building, are you chasing fun or engagement? Are they even separable in practice, or does one always end up serving the other? And is the industry's drift toward engagement mechanics making games stickier at the cost of making them worse?

Popularized by the Arkham games, the "free-flow" combat system as it's been called is one that I have never been able to gel with. I've been playing the Insomniac Spider-Man games which largely adapt the style of combat found in the Batman games with a few tweaks, and the shortcomings of the system have become all too clear to me during my playtime.

These games tend to use what is called "paired animation" as opposed to traditional hitboxes. These help to make animations during attacks more fluid and realistic, but it comes at a cost. The emphasis on animations makes it so that you are only allowed to hit one enemy at a time with melee. This hurts crowd control potential and needlessly limits your options when it comes to engaging the opponent. Games with traditional hitboxes aren't as tied down by animations and thus allow the player to hit multiple enemies at once, as seen in games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. It adds depth to the combat and expands your approach. Yet in a game like Spider-Man, your options for crowd control exist only with your gadgets, which are a limited resource, and a special move which operates on a cooldown that the player has no agency over.

In further simplifying the combat, these games like to incorporate what is known as "suck to target", in which simply pressing the attack button will have your character automatically fling themselves to an enemy. Consequently, this means positioning is practically a non-factor in combat. You no longer have to manage your proximity or angles when dealing with enemies, as the game does it for you. Once again, depth is sacrificed in favor of a system that promotes instant gratification and looking cool over making a deep and engaging combat system.

Other shortcomings exist as well, such as the lack of a manual lock-on which is inexcusable in a 3D action game, and the severe lack of true enemy variety (particularly in Spider-Man) which only further exacerbates the oversimplified combat. Coming from something like Devil May Cry, it's difficult to view this "free-flow" style of combat as anything more than overly simplified and shallow. While it makes for a more accessible combat system, there's ultimately not much room for experimentation and thus not much room for player expression.

Bald Man Begins

Hitman: Codename 47 (2000) begins with a tutorial section where Agent 47 is instructed to escape a facility by a mysterious figure. Here the player is taught the single game mechanic that is the core identity of all Hitman games: Agent 47 can take out another person, wear their clothes, and assume the identity associated with that outfit.

While genius, this approach to infiltration is incredibly silly if you think about it. Imagine you wear a police uniform, show up to a random police station, and everybody assumes you just belong. New guy, I guess. Now imagine you are completely bald, Caucasian, with deep blue eyes and a giant barcode tattooed at the back of your head. And that police station is located in like Mumbai or something.

The game takes itself quite seriously at other areas. The way Agent 47 strangles its victims is incredibly visceral, at least compared to standards of the 2000s. Agent 47 only gets the job done and cares about nothing else. The job always is to assassinate big-time criminals like gang leaders or corrupt officials. Although I have to mention that there are a handful of silly moments in the game. At times intentional like how one of his targets is a caricature of Tony Montana from the film Scarface (1983), who shoot bullets and profanities at you at equal speeds. Other times, probably unintentional.

Overall though, the story and presentation remains grounded throughout the game. The last mission where you go back to the tutorial mission area is basically a horror level. Turns out that facility is a sanitarium, run by a mad scientist - the very man who guided your escape in the beginning of the game. You learn that Agent 47 is cloned using the DNA of all his previous targets, in addition to the scientist himself professor Ort-Meyer. After falling out with the rest of his collaborators, the professor placed orders on their heads.

After unleashing an army of Agent 48's at you, who are supposed to the upgraded version of Agent 47, he overcomes them utilizing the well-earned real-world practice his "brothers" lack. Agent 47 then uses his super power one last time to kill his creator. He assumes the identity of an Agent 48, and fools the professor to get close to him. In his dying breath, the mad scientist laments his failure to recognize his own "son".

As you see, the first Hitman tried to tell a mature story. Of crime, betrayal and ethics of human cloning. The question is: Did it succeed? Probably not. None of these themes are explored on a deeper level; they are mostly there to set up a cool stealth-game.

The Early Sequels

The franchise would continue with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin in 2002 and Hitman: Contracts in 2004 (Remember when game companies were able to ship games every two years?). While the series still tried to maintain a serious story, like when Agent 47 tries to become a priest to repent for his sins in Hitman 2, the stealth gameplay saw the real progress.

And then agent 47 returned in 2006 with an absolute banger; Hitman: Blood Money. It built upon the franchise's formula to deliver the fantasy of what is like to be a cunning assassin with a thought-out plan. The missions were much larger and open-ended. You could approach your target via different disguises, whereas in the previous games, you basically were forced to wear the default solider/gang/bodyguard uniform to get close. Each target could be killed through a number of different methods. The most interesting category among these new ways to end a life was the introduction of "accident" kills.

As far as the story goes, the game tried to get even more serious by injecting politics in the story. A brilliant mission takes place in the White House, for example, and the target is the Vice President. The question is again, did it succeed? I would say yes, if your intention was to tell an entertaining story about espionage and shady politics with some cool action scenes.

The Sharp Turn and The Triumphant Return

Even Hitman was not safe from the impact Call of Duty had on the industry, so Hitman came back in 2012 with Hitman: Absolution. While some elements of the earlier games were still present, missions were much more linear and action-focused. As a result, it became a mishmash of genres, excelling at none. The plot tried to tell a more personal story of Agent 47, one focused on revenge and personal responsibility, but it was yet another mediocre aspect of the game.

When I got my hands on Hitman (2016), I knew very little about the game. After playing the first hour of the first mission, I arrived at what most long-time fans of the series did: Hitman has perfected its formula and finally evolved to the absolute pinnacle of what its premise allowed. Hitman (2016) is Hitman: Blood Money on roids. Hitman (2016) was followed with two direct squeals to form a trilogy. IO Interactive would later repackage them as a single game called Hitman: Word of Assassination

So Who We Are Killing Again?

So how the story was handled this time around? Who were the victims and why did they deserve to be at the end of Agent 47's Silverballer? I honestly cannot remember, and I have played the trilogy on and off for almost 10 years now. I cannot give a single detail about the plot, even if my life depended on it. Why is that you may ask? Is the story poorly written? Does in not make sense?

The real answer, in my opinion, is more complicated. First, it is a matter of quantity. I don't remember the story partly because it is minuscule compared to the size of the game. I see a cut-scene about a minute long before every mission, but play those missions for hours exploring all the details and challenges that were masterfully put in every location.

Then there is the tonal shift of the game. While other games were comedic on occasion, new Hitman games are just a couple of steps away of masquerading as a Loony Tunes cartoon. Many assassinations are down-right hilarious. Imagine the traps that Wile E. Coyote sets to catch Road-Runner, only that Wile E. is a bald man whose traps actually work. Agent 47 himself is a one-liner machine now. When he converses with his targets, he foreshadows their death or cleverly hints at his job as an assassin.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love everything about these instances of hilarity. And they blend masterfully with the core gameplay of the trilogy. I plan and execute the demise of the bad guys with a grin on my face.

But now we can see why I remember nothing about the plot. The story was never given the chance in the first place; it was doomed from the beginning. It seems the developers knew about this as well. Unlike some previous attempts, the story never really tries to engage with topics of crime, violence, ethics, politics, revenge and repentance. What it does is providing with enough rational excuses to hunt down targets in various exquisite settings and locations around the world.

A Necessary Sacrifice?

So we come to the main question this article presents. Has the modern Hitman succeeded because it freed itself from the burdens of story-telling and character work? Could another entry in the series deliver the highs of planning and executing the perfect assassination, while simultaneously engaging with the grim realities a real-life assassin would face? The morality, politics and tragedies behind it all?

I am firm believer that a game, or any media in general, should be critiqued based on what it is trying to achieve. Therefore, the Hitman trilogy is on the top of my all-time great games list, despite its forgettable story. Telling a memorable story was not the intention of the game.

But what if it was? Many of my other favorite games engage with seemingly conflicting themes. Disco Elysium follows the adventures of a bumbling fool of a detective, yet it is the perhaps the most political story told in this medium. Final Fantasy 7's colorfulness does not inhibit it from telling a gut-wrenching tale of personal loss. Even the Metal Gear Solid franchise, with its own brand of silly stealth, still challenges the player to reflect upon their political worldview.

I find it short-sighted to say Hitman needed to be silly to reach the heights it has, though it might have been a necessary stepping stone. The series is built upon the foundation of a silly game mechanic after at all. Why not go all the way?

What do you think?

This is something that's so omnipresent we don't even notice it anymore. We have these deeply ingrained expectations about what a game should look like based entirely on what genre it falls into, and most of the time developers just go with it. 

This isn’t a comprehensive list but it’s easiest for me if I just go off the genres I enjoy playing the most, and where I initially noticed this genre - visual look correlation. So in no particular order…

FPS games usually go for the high fidelity realistic look, at one point with sepia filters but we have moved past that (thank god). Probably because the first person just always felt like the natural perspective to showcase really fancy graphics, since you can easily look around and move the camera. Only exception being classical boomer shooters that go for a more stylized vintagey look.

Platformers are expected to be colorful and cartoonish and usually retro, especially if they are 2d. This feels like its due to the genre staying pretty true to its roots, with the games themselves feeling kind of nostalgic going for that look kind of makes sense. I’m thinking of games like Celeste with its pixel art or the upcoming Croak with its hand drawn visuals that are basically 1 to 1 translations of old school cartoons in gaming. It’s a tradition that Cuphead brought to perfection in modern gaming (and Croak is in my opinion the one that’s continuing it) but it’s clear that realism just would not work here. In fact, this is the one genre where the stylization and charm matter most simply because the games themselves have relatively basic (though oftentimes HARD) gameplay.

ARPGs are grimdark gothic fantasy to the point where if you showed someone a screenshot of any random ARPG they'd prolly guess the genre correctly just from the color palette and similar UI they all seem to have. It feels like the visuals for the whole genre were pretty much inspired by Diablo, I don’t know of another genre where one game had as much influence as that. 

Roguelites are a bit of a mixed bag, I would say the oldschool retro pixel art look is probably the most popular, but at this point I’ve played RLs with all sorts of different graphics. 

Visual novels are so tied to the anime aesthetic that a VN with realistic character portraits would feel like blasphemy, I’m not even sure I could viscerally even consider it the same genre if the characters were done in full realism. It’s such a culturally-bound product too (most being from Japan) that this does not seem at all possible, or needed.

And I go back and forth on why this happens and how specific stereotyped “looks” emerge. The cynic in me wants to say that developers just copy whatever the most successful game in the genre looked like, every FPS wanted to be the next Call of Duty so they went in a similar direction, every roguelite saw Binding of Isaac and Dead Cells succeed with pixel art and figured that's what the audience expects. But there might be a more interesting answer, which is that certain art styles actually complement certain gameplay loops in ways that aren't immediately obvious. Pixel art works for roguelites because you need to read enemy patterns instantly at a glance and clean pixel sprites make that easier than detailed 3D models. Photorealism works for shooters because the games are really immersive and the perspective lends itself to enjoying detailed visuals. The grimdark palette in ARPGs serves the loot loop because if the world looks muddy and muted then that one shiny drop with a golden glow actually pops visually.

The games that break these conventions are almost always the ones that stand out the most though (visually at least). Like Mouse P.I. with 1930s cartoon animation in an FPS and Titans Quest with its bright colorful look for an ARPG. Or Last Epoch with its different eras (there's a time travel mechanic), each era kind of has its own vibe and the environment design is pretty distinct between them. I’ve always been a fan of devs brave enough to do something different in that regard. 

I know it's really hard for devs to justify breaking the mold when they know a certain visual style is a “safe” choice for their game. But games with unique visuals, like Return of the Obra Dinn or Cuphead when it came out are just way more memorable for me.

Pokemon Black & White are heralded as having the best story in the franchise's history, with Team Plasma objecting to the series status quo of subjecting captured animals to magical dog fights. They advocate that people should release their Pokemon back into the wild to live freely. This is a very compelling premise for a Pokemon story, but many people were let down when at the 11th hour, the game turns around and reveals that none of it was true, all that philosophical navel gazing about the nature of Pokemon trainers was just a front for Ghetsis to claim power over the people. A lot of folks online lament how this makes their stories painfully two-dimensional, but I think I've found a reading that adds a bit more nuance into the game.

Firstly, we need to understand Ghetsis' claims about Pokemon being subjugated by humans has almost no basis in reality. Across all the mainline games, you very rarely see Pokemon being mistreated by people, and the only on-screen example we see of abuse are Team Plasma themselves kicking a Munna. Secondly, Pokemon trainers serve an important guardianship role in this universe. Not only are Pokemon friends and partners to people, but the player character routinely megalomaniacs from ruling the world thanks to their ability to catch and raise Pokemon. So with that preamble out of the way, tell me if this story sounds familiar.

A charismatic American political upstart spreads lies and misinformation to climb to power. They claim that completely normal, healthy, and necessary part's of the country's social makeup are actually deeply immoral. They decry the elites and those who horde power tell the average citizen they should empower his party to enact decisions that directly go against the common people's own interests. Over time, it becomes abundantly obvious they are guilty of the very same crimes they are accusing others of committing, and none of this was based in ideology- it was all a selfish bid for power.

Pokemon Black & White is not a meditation on the core gameplay conceit of the series, it's a rejection of populist thinking. They show the dangers of a group of bad actors using dishonest rhetoric to sow divisions between people, and that the real joy of life is instead bonding with others and creating a more nuanced picture of how the world works. In Japan, the name of the region the game takes place in is Issyu, and I think Bulbapedia captures the beauty of this name beautifully:

Unova's Japanese name, イッシュ Issyu, is derived from the Japanese word for "one variety", 一種 isshu, or １種類 isshurui. According to the game director Masuda, this is to express that although the region is diverse in species and race, they are all the same as living creatures when seen from a distance.

Anyone who looks at the great diversity of people and ways of living and tries to boil it down to 'Black and White' thinking if you'll pardon the pun, probably isn't capturing the whole picture.

At the end of the game, Team Plasma's evil machinations are brought to a halt when the gym leaders of the region come to aid you in the final battle. These gym leaders are also pillars of their communities, artists, custodians, pilots, people who have made it their life's work to integrate and serve those around them rallying together to prevent lies and half truths from tearing people apart from one another.

It's not shakespearean, you don't need to be familiar with the writings of Samuel P. Huntington to follow along with the story, but looking back, I feel there was a lot more happening in Pokemon Black and White than what people are willing to give it credit for.

Yesterday I was playing Metro Exodus and was wondering that isn't Artyom a terrifying villain for people who are just trying to survive. I understand in post apocalyptic scenarios where law doesn not exist people take up means to survive which is ethically and morally questionable, but it does not remove the fact that i need to kill others for my own selfish reasons.

It might be that Bandits in many Fps games ( like Last of Us) are just people who have thought that joining a gang is only way to avoid starvation. For them Artyom is the invader who want to take away their resources.
In last of Us, WLF soldiers are trying to defend community, Firefly trying to create vaccine, or Seraphites protecting what they believe is sacred. Joel is the terrifying Invader for them.

The same for genshin impact- killing hilichurls , fatui harbringers , slimes who have their own family- traveler just kills all because he feels it is righteous and to upgrade his own weapon.

But is it truly so?

Are we really the hero, or just another villain disguised in the name of the protagonist?

Hi everyone,

Eliscia Sinclair, Ph.D. Student and Dr. Andrew Kim from the Psychology Department at Toronto Metropolitan University are looking for volunteers who are aged 19+, play video games regularly, and have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress within the past 12 months. In appreciation of your time, you will receive a $40 Everything gift card.

The study aims to understand how trauma-related stress and problematic gaming behaviours are experienced by adults in Canada. It involves a brief questionnaire and a one-hour interview. The interview comprises structured clinical interviews for PTSD and gaming disorder and open-ended questions that will take place online (via Zoom) or in-person at Toronto Metropolitan University and will involve approximately 75-90 minutes of your time.

Please note: We have received an increased number of responses from individuals who indicate that they reside in Canada but are unable to confirm their eligibility. If you choose to provide an email address, using a university, institutional, or professional email address may assist the research team in verifying that responses are genuine. A personal email address remains acceptable and will not, by itself, affect your eligibility.

For the full details of the study, please click this link to complete the screening form or contact the researchers, Eliscia Sinclair, [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), Dr. Andrew (Hyounsoo) Kim, [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), 416-979-5000 ext. 556195. 

This research study has been reviewed and approved by the Toronto Metropolitan University Research Ethics Board (REB 2026-164) and is funded by CIHR.

To protect your privacy, please do not comment publicly on this post, tag others, or disclose your interest in participating. If you are interested in learning more or participating, please use the private screening link or contact the research team directly.

I've been thinking about stamina systems in games lately, and I'm starting to wonder whether they're often included simply because they're expected rather than because they improve the experience.

I'm currently playing Palworld, and the stamina mechanic is what prompted this thought. It feels like I'm constantly waiting for a bar to refill while doing things that don't become more interesting because of that limitation. Running across an open field isn't made more engaging because I have to stop every so often. It just takes longer.

I understand that stamina has legitimate design purposes. It can:

• Prevent players from endlessly sprinting past enemies.
• Force meaningful decisions during combat.
• Make resource management part of survival gameplay.
• Differentiate character builds or progression.

In those situations, stamina creates interesting choices. Spending stamina on one action means giving up another, and that's meaningful.

Where I struggle is when stamina exists outside of those contexts. If the only thing it accomplishes is making me periodically stop moving, or wait before climbing another hill, what gameplay is actually being added? If there's no decision to make and no skill expression involved, it feels less like a mechanic and more like a timer.

It also makes me wonder how many games include stamina because other games do. Once a mechanic becomes common in a genre, it can become part of the checklist, even if it doesn't meaningfully support the game's core loop.

A good example is games that eventually let you sprint indefinitely through upgrades or late-game equipment. If unlimited sprint doesn't break the game after 20 hours, was limiting it for the first 20 hours really serving a design purpose, or was it just slowing the player down until they'd "earned" the convenience?

I'm not arguing that stamina should disappear entirely. In combat-heavy games or some survival games, it often serves an important role because it creates trade-offs and tension. But I think many games could benefit from asking a simple question before adding it:

If this stamina system were removed tomorrow, would the game actually become worse, or would it just become less tedious?

I'm curious whether there are examples where a stamina system genuinely elevates the experience outside of combat, or whether many games are carrying around a mechanic that's become more of a convention than a thoughtful design choice.

I feel like the video game industry (talking maybe since 2019) seem to drag themselves down with the seemingly endless need to make the next game look better and run doubly as smooth as than the last one. Nowadays, we get maybe 1 amazing story game every 2-3 years at best (don’t even get me started on multiplayer games nowadays), and none really feel that amazing or memorable compared to the likes of those that came earlier. And unfortunately I feel like the reason this is the case is more due to studios simply producing games more slowly due to the increasing costs and difficulty in improving the image and performance qualities of their games than any other type of incompetence.

Personally, I would rather most of the industry use whatever is easiest, even Skyrim level graphics, and focus on amazing story telling and mission design instead. Leave the photo realistic games to the one off games where beauty is the goal.

V-rally made a bit of splash when it was released on PSX in 1997, but then mostly faded to obscurity, in favour of other racing games like Colin Mac Rae and its excellent sequel, and the juggernaut Gran Turismo that released the same year than V-rally (it's always weird to try to remember the timeline on old games, for me V-Rally was released way sooner).

But I think the few people who played this game would remember it as the one with cars made of soap, and would advice to just play the sequel, because it's the same thing but better.

And at first glance it sure does like it, V-rally 2 is really a good looking PS1 game with a convincing damage model, it's pleasant to play, you have a lot of content, including a cool level editor... But I think it's a game that not really interesting to play today, or frankly even back then, with again the vastly superior CMR2 released a few months later.

Whereas I think the first one has only become more interesting as time went by. If you just take a quick glance at it, it may look like your typical arcade racing game in the vein of Sega Rally, it doesn't even feature a real rally mode (one car at a time on point to point stages). Except time attack, every mode is played against 3 other rivals on looped circuits.

But V-rally was actually developed to be a somewhat realistic simulation, receiving advices from Ari Vatanen (yeah, I know, all racing games pretend some well known pilot was a technical advisors when I guess the guy was just invited to visit the studio for an afternoon). And I think this common critic of the cars being super twitchy and slippery comes from people expecting an easier to pick up experience, because again the package looks super arcady (and because they played with a non-analogue controller instead of a wheel or the amazing neGcon). Don't get me wrong, the game is far from being what you could seriously consider a simulation, but it does have a very specific spice you normally only taste in more "serious" games. Something I very rarely feel on a racing game, except on the most hardcore side (like Richard Burns Rally) is a sense of danger. Usually in most racing games, including in "simcades" that have a physic model 100 time more complex that V-rally, I just drive flat-out like a maniac, bumping into other cars and walls like I was at a funfair.

In V-rally, when there is a sharp corner, I clench my butt a little, because I know there is a serious chance my car might start barrel rolling uncontrollably at any moment. Same thing when I'm behind a competitor, I lift the throttle and wait for a very good opportunity to overtake and make sure to avoid ANY collision like I would... well in real life. What kind of lunatic would deliberately collide with another car at more than 100 km/h on a bumpy gravel road ? It's not really that the physic model is realistic, but more than the game is not afraid to punish with ANY mistake.

But at the same time, the penalty in itself is not THAT severe. There is no damage model and the circuits are enclosed by solid walls on both sides, so you can't roll down a cliff or get stuck on a tree. So even after spinning around or even rolling, you'll be back in the race in a few seconds. I quickly insert this here, but one of my biggest grip with the game is the co-pilot taken straight from Sega Rally, like all those old school rally games (basically easy/medium/hard - left/right and that’s it). It's usually more for flavour than anything else, because the circuits are easy to read and super smooth, but V-rally have some nasty turns that definitely begs for more elaborate pace-notes.

The AI have a nice balance, there is no rubber banding, but you always feel like you have a chance to catch up. They don't drive that fast, but they are fairly consistent (they do crash by themselves from time to time, so they don't feel like robots either), and that's the name of the game : avoiding mistakes more than driving aggressively. Oh, and the AI don't hesitate to ram you (to be frank I'm not even sure if they are programmed to avoid the player at all, but it works well) so you really feel the pressure when they are just behind you. Just like Halo 1 having enemies that put most modern shooters to shame, I think V-rally opponents are far more interesting in their simplicity than most other racing games.

So coming back to what make this game still unique today, it's this blending of a hardcore punishing driving model with a very straight-forward arcade framework. My biggest gripe with simulations is that they are often so focused on being realistic that they just ignore everything else that make a game interesting and fun to play. They often feel less than a game and more like... well a simulation, in the literal sense, a software just made to accurately simulate something. I don't give a crap about FIA rules, I don't want to spend 15 minutes tweaking my suspensions, hell, I don't even care about a carrier mode. Most of the time it's just some gimmicky macro-gameplay where you randomly chose a sponsor for some useless bonus or something similar.

And on the other end of the spectrum, simple arcade games often have a very shallow and unexciting driving model, where you don't feel the rush of being aboard a 1 ton cube of steel flying at 150 km/h on a twisty dirt road.

I feel like V-Rally is at a perfect middle point, and I frankly would struggle to find any other game like this.

Surprisingly, the closest example I could think of is V-rally 4, another overlooked game, but it's bogged-down by trying to be a Dirt 2 clone.

I love my gaming consoles, but I can't lie when I say each console generation is less exciting than the last. Rumors abound with when the PS6 and NextBox are releasing, but it's hard to drum up hype when you know it's just going to be the last thing but with extra tera flops? Nah, for me, the real excitement was what was happening in the Handheld scene.

With a handheld, you could never tell what you were getting. While the GameBoy to GameBoy Advance was pretty straightforward, boom, out of nowhere the next console has 2 screens and an input method never before seen in a gaming device. The PSP, which was a miniature PlayStation gets a follow up and this thing is as much a mobile phone as it is a gaming device. There was so much variability in the form factor that just seeing how the console looked was grounds for excitement.

The games were no exception to this rule. With lower power and often less inputs than a console controller had, game devs got really creative with what they could do. Games would use microphones, cameras, and touch controls to make whacky or surprisingly complex games. You could go from the chilled out life simulation of Nintendogs to the crazy combat of The World Ends with You that happened across both DS screens. Seriously, one boss in Phatom Hourglass genuinely has more sauce than 10 shrines in Breath of the Wild put together.

While less drastic these days, what few handhelds we have left are still the ones doing the most interesting things in gaming. The Steam Deck made portable PC gaming possible and the Switch 2's joycon are an interesting closing of the gap between console and PC inputs. It's fun, but I do miss the days where you could get a cheaper handheld and what you traded in power and performance, you more than made up for in unique gameplay experiences.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

Hi everyone,

Some of you might remember my Q1 2026 post (and the Q4 2025 one before that) where I shared my quarterly gaming patent analysis. Quick recap - I've been building a system to track and classify gaming patents from the USPTO, which publishes 3,000+ granted patents on Tuesdays and 5,000+ filed patents on Thursdays.

This time I'm zooming out a bit. Instead of another quarterly, this is the half-yearly wrap-up covering all of H1 2026 (January to June) - so it folds in the Q1 numbers some of you have already seen and stacks everything from Q2 on top. Bigger sample, longer view, hopefully a clearer picture of where the year is actually heading.

On AI and methodology transparency

Every week, the USPTO publishes thousands of patents. My system processes all of them - it uses a combination of keywords, studio names, game-related technology terms, and other signals to filter down to gaming-relevant patents. That classifier has gone through multiple iterations, particularly to filter out gambling, fantasy sports, and arcade machine patents that kept polluting the results. It's still being optimised weekly and I still get false positives, but it's getting a lot better.

Each identified patent gets an AI-generated analysis - that's the only way to handle this volume as a one-person project. I then go through every single analysis, decide which patents deserve a deeper dive, and that's what ends up in the reports. I also review a number of the actual patent filings themselves to cross-check. The technology breakdowns have been extremely accurate in most cases - where things get more speculative is in the interpretation of what could happen with a given technology, the timelines, the scale, the competitive impact. That's where assumptions creep in, and I try to be clear about that.

This is a hobby project that I run alongside my day job, and I'm not positioning any of this as definitive. There are unknowns - not just in the analysis itself, which I think is actually getting really good, but in what actually happens with these patents. Many get shelved, priorities shift, and a filed patent is still just a signal, not a roadmap. What I do think this provides is patent intelligence that wasn't previously accessible in this way - structured, categorised, and easy to explore. Since my last post, a few gaming publications actually picked up the research and did their own deep dives into some of the patents I'd uncovered, with their analysis largely aligning with what I'd initially proposed. That was a nice validation. But ultimately this is still exploratory work - I'm just trying to make it a lot easier for anyone who's curious to actually explore it.

On sources - every report now includes a Patent Sources section with official USPTO numbers and direct links to Google Patents and USPTO Patent Public Search. You can verify anything I'm referencing.

Keep in mind Google Patents is about 5 weeks delayed in indexing, so anything from June onwards will need to be searched for on USPTO.

On to H1 2026

For the first half of the year: 387 filed and 227 granted patents, spanning 118 companies (filed) and 79 (granted), across 14 technology categories. Same disclaimer as always: filing a patent doesn't mean you're building a product, and getting one granted doesn't mean you'll ever ship it. I'm interested in possibilities, not guarantees. And this isn't meant to be doom and gloom - it's just a look at what companies are pointing R&D at. What anyone makes of it is up to them.

Like last time, I'm focusing the deep dive below on the filed patents - they're the more forward-looking of the two, and they show where companies are placing bets right now rather than what they locked in 2-3 years ago. I'll link the full granted report at the bottom, and there's a quick note on the granted side further down.

What stood out

Sony absolutely dominated the half. 101 filed patents across 12 categories - that's more than one in four of every gaming patent filed in H1, and nearly three times Nintendo, the next closest filer. I've now watched Sony top every period I've tracked, but the sheer breadth this time is the thing. Nobody else came close to that combination of volume and spread.

Their biggest area was AI/ML again (41 patents), and the theme running through it is a game that watches you and reacts. LLM-powered in-game coaches, virtual teammates that monitor game state and offer advice, and - the one that stuck with me - systems that try to predict when you're struggling and about to quit, before you actually do. On top of that, a big audio push (17 patents): game audio that adjusts to an individual's hearing profile (audiogram-derived frequency adjustments), wireless speakers pulling two audio streams at once, and AI that nudges background music tempo to match how intense the action is moment to moment.

Across the board, Sony keeps betting on generating and adapting things on the fly rather than shipping everything pre-baked.

Cross-platform was the single largest platform segment of the half with 139 filed patents - bigger than any individual technology category, including AI/ML. Sony (39), Nintendo (14) and Tencent (13) led it, but the spread is the story: save syncing, unified accounts, matchmaking fairness, NPC consistency, and player assistance that all have to work the same whether you're on a phone, a PC or a console. A lot of companies are clearly pointing R&D at "it shouldn't matter what device you picked up".

Nintendo filed 34, concentrated in game engine (15) and hardware (7). On the engine side: voxel-based terrain that deforms in real time, weapon-fusion mechanics, and NPC pathfinding that automatically repositions ally characters onto moving objects. Their hardware filings read like a controller lab - a detachable controller that magnetically snaps to the console body, an optical D-pad using light sensors instead of mechanical switches, and a ring-shaped elastic accessory that detects bending and twisting.

Tencent filed 22, with UI/UX (9) and game engine (5) leading. The UI work is very mobile-first: zooming a running game into a floating sub-window, displaying multiple simultaneous fields of view for MOBA players, and drawing projectile trajectory curves with feedback tied to throw power. On the engine side - AI that checks whether a user-created level is actually completable before it goes live, plus a server that dynamically adjusts refresh rate based on how much is happening in a match.

Microsoft filed 13, mostly AI/ML (7), and almost all of it circles one problem: helping stuck players. Letting an expert temporarily take over a struggling player's session, using AI bots trained on expert play to step in automatically, and - sensibly - enforcing age-appropriate restrictions while that help is happening.

The clusters where nobody's coordinating but everybody's converging

This is the part I find interesting, because it's where you see multiple unrelated companies independently deciding the same problem is worth solving.

NPC behaviour and training showed up from at least five companies (Tencent, AMD, Adeia, Bandai Namco, EA). Different angles at the same gap - NPCs that behave too predictably and break immersion. Some are doing reinforcement-learning hierarchies where "leader" NPCs guide followers; others are building personality graphs that link behaviours across a scene. Last time someone commented that none of the AI patents ever translate into better NPC behaviour - the fact that this many companies are independently filing on it tells you they at least think it's worth the try.

LLM-powered player assistance was even broader (Sony, Microsoft, Google, Wizards of the Coast, GDM Holding, Acco Brands). Voice-activated coaches, teammates that watch the game state, assistants that remember your preferences across sessions. The shared bet: static tutorials don't catch the specific moment an individual gets stuck, and people quit when they're stuck.

Asynchronous and "ghost" multiplayer got interesting again (AviaGames, Nintendo, M-League). AviaGames filed systems that let you compete against an AI-driven replay of how a real person played, matched to your skill level with identical randomised conditions so it's fair. Nintendo filed ghost-data systems that make recorded player data react to what you're doing rather than just replaying blindly. The problem they're all chasing: you want to compete, but there's nobody online in your skill range or timezone right now.

And then the smaller, weirder pockets that I genuinely enjoy stumbling on:

In-vehicle gaming drew filings from Sony, Honda, Fca Us and BMW - parked cars actuating physical components as haptic feedback, an OBD dongle that flips on a "game mode" that disables the ignition, real driving data turning into game content.

A quick note on the granted side

227 patents were granted in H1 across 79 companies, and the shape mirrors the filed data - Sony out front again (50), then Tencent (17), Nintendo (16), EA (10) and NetEase (9). AI/ML was the biggest granted category (54), with a heavy cluster on player-facing assistance and personalisation - hint delivery, personalised soundtracks, difficulty adjustment, behaviour-based player clustering. If you want the full breakdown it's all in the granted report linked below, but the short version is: what companies were filing 2-3 years ago is landing now, and it rhymes with what they're filing today.

What's new on the site based on feedback

A few things people asked about last time that I've now built out:

The big one - I've opened up the full database to registered users (free to register). That means every single patent, all the analytics, and detail on every single patent - the abstract, the links, and a high-level overview. Previously you were relying on me to surface the interesting stuff in these posts; now you can just go and dig through the whole thing yourself, however deep you want to go.

Every company and technology category now gets its own monthly and quarterly report. June 2026 monthly is live covering 47 granted, 56 filed patents, and Q2 2026 quarterly covers 178 filed patents from 61 companies and 105 granted patents from 46 companies.

Last time someone asked specifically about VR patent activity - now you can just go to the VR/AR category page and see everything in one place instead of me trying to summarise it in a comment. Same goes for any company or technology area you're curious about.

There's a weekly digest that summarises all gaming patents processed that week, broken down by company and category. And a coverage dashboard showing the full database - total patents tracked, split by granted and filed, broken down by month, category, and company. You can see which categories are growing fastest and how the landscape shifts month over month.

Every report now includes a Patent Sources section listing each patent with its official USPTO number and a link to Google Patents for full text - so you can verify and dig into anything yourself.

One more thing, and this matters to me - after my last post, someone spotted an inconsistency in one of the monthly reports (right patent, wrong company attribution). They were right, it's now been fixed, and I'm genuinely grateful. This is exactly the kind of thing that's hard to catch as a one-person project, so if you ever see something that looks off, please do call it out - I'd much rather have it corrected than sitting there wrong.

All thoughts and feedback welcome. I'm still iterating on this and finding the patterns genuinely interesting - seeing where multiple companies independently converge on the same problems tells you something about where the industry thinks it needs to go, even when most of these ideas never make it to market.

Everything's on FutureOfGaming.com - direct links to the H1 2026 Filed Report and H1 2026 Granted Report