I think some buildings are actual 1:1 scale as well, which helps. I know the majority is 4:1, but at least Notre Dame is 1:1 if i remember right.

From a purely architectural point of view i think you’d be hard pressed to find a better video game city than Night City. Scale too, like you mentioned. I always hold Paris in AC: Unity in really high regard too, but Cyberpunk is on another level in terms of complexity and verticality.

They’ve been shutting down Smash Bros tournaments as well.

It’s been a minute since I played but setting carry capacity to infinite should certainly be trivial (I didn’t use it but I’ve seen it around). Smarter Scrapper was enough for me I think. Also Muted Markers in the same vein, though it’s not strictly inventory. Limited HUD is also a must have. But if you let me keep going you’ll eventually end up with 250+ mods just like me.

I hope you’ll enjoy your time in Night City! I think it’s a great game at this point with some really interesting characters and a good story. It has its flaws, but I had no problem overlooking them though your mileage may vary. If you intend to pick it up on PC when it’s arrived there is also a vast assortment of great mods.

Also, you’ll be blown away when you’re trying it on your new rig, fully path traced Cyberpunk is probably still one of the prettiest games out there.

Don’t know why you’re downvoted when it’s factually true. Well, I don’t know about bugs these days since I haven’t tried the latest patches, but if you want an idea of how much they bit off versus how much they could chew then just glance at the huge list of cut content. Granted this post is old and I think some of the things mentioned - like additional epilogues - were later added in patches. But the Upper City for example is still completely missing. Not that Act 3 needed more content, mind, it’s already too huge. Which is part of the problem I suppose.

It’s not strictly a 90s schmup but I got the original XIII (2003) on sale on GOG last month and played through it. I never played it back then and always thought it looked cool. It’s a shame it wasn’t a big success, the art direction and concept of playing in the panels of a comic strip was really cool and still holds up. I love the typed out sound effects like TAP TAP TAP on footsteps and BOOOM on explosions. So I guess that’s my retro recommendation.

Next for me will be No One Lives Forever, which I also missed back in the day but heard was amazing. It’s been unavailable to purchase for decades but I just recently found out the game is made available to download for free by some fans.

I guess I’m on a bit of an old school spy game kick lately.

One of the top Deadlock players uses a trackball. We all stan our ergonomic king.

I guess they mean they’re optimized for Nvidia in the sense that they need upscaling technology in some form due to either demanding graphics or poor optimisation or both, and Nvidia has the best one at the moment. I wish it wasn’t the case, but DLSS does look better than the alternatives.

Depressing? There are a lot of other things right now that depress me way more than the type of tools used to project the image I’m consuming in my escapist entertainment medium of choice. Maybe I would be more outraged if I was a programmer and knew exactly what kinds of optimizations developers were (or weren’t) doing these days. As an end user I have no problem with DLSS to be honest, I just see it as another tool and frankly it strikes me as one of the better applications of AI we’ve developed. There have been multiple examples where I was happier with the visuals with DLSS on rather than turning it off but also having to turn off or down a lot of other graphical bells and whistles. Also, making games that require DLSS on current hardware is future-proofing in a way, is it not? A generation or two of hardware down the line and you can just turn off DLSS and enjoy it in its full glory.

Though Unity will always have my favorite game play(…)

I love seeing another Unity enjoyer around here. That game is severely underrated and had it not had that disastrously buggy launch the AC franchise could have gone in a completely different direction than the open world RPG flavour we ended up with. Plus, revolutionary Paris is one of the best realized video game cities of all time, it’s just beautiful.

How powerful is the PC? Is the question more about games optimised for mouse+keyboard, or is it about demanding recent games that allows his new machine to flex its muscles?

Since you say he likes Souls-likes Black Myth Wukong probably checks both boxes - I never ended up playing it (my backlog is too long) but it looked great with stunning visuals and I heard good things about the gameplay.

Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there and a pretty damn good game too after the patches and expansions.

Finally, something like Fallout: London could be an interesting suggestion as mods of that nature are out of reach of the console crowd. Could give him a whiff of what he’s been missing out on.

What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)

Gacha games have been taking over the world ever since Genshin Impact and those are pure gambling. Going even further back, Ultimate Team on FIFA (EA FC now) is probably the worst true “selling gambling to kids” product I can remember.

Jesse didn’t really do it for me as a protagonist, not sure if it’s due to writing or the performance (I suspect both). Which is really a shame because the game itself is really fucking cool. I still recommend it to anyone, the gameplay is slick and the SCP/world building aspect makes it engaging and interesting enough by itself.

Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there. And I also think - in its post 2.0 state - that it’s just a very good game too. I recommend the Ultra+ mod to squeeze out even more performance and visual fidelity from the engine.

I still haven’t worked my way through the deals I got during last year’s sales, and despite that I bought another dozen games on GOG this black week. So I’m trying to stay away from the Steam winter sale this year lest my backlog becomes such a behemoth it gives me uncontrollable anxiety.

I really like GOG so it would be highly unfortunate to see them go under. I guess we really can’t have nice things in this day and age.

Much needed. I finished the game before this latest huge patch dropped and had to use console commands three times just to fix progression locking bugs in the main story.

It’s still a must play for fans of the franchise I would say, but if you can wait it’s probably a good idea to do so. They still haven’t gotten A-life working.

If Warren Spector is actually involved I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt but I’m not thrilled about the competitive multiplayer aspect and the trailer presentation made me think “hero shooter” more than Deus Ex/Thief spiritual successor. Also Spector’s track record over the 20 post-Eidos years isn’t exactly glowing.

Ragebound sounds about right. I had Ninja Gaiden on my original Xbox back in the day and while I loved it and played the shit out of it I never beat it. These games were fucking hard.