Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, as ever, by Matthew Castle. Ooh, hello. Hello, Matthew. How was your big plate of sandwiches yesterday when you went for afternoon tea? Did you have a good time? I did have a good time. Afternoon tea is basically rich people who’ve come up with a clever way of stuffing their faces without feeling bad about it. You just eat lots of tiny things, which amount to a vast feast, but you get to pretend you’re being austere and polite at the same time. Yeah, it’s like their version of food horde mode, isn’t it? It comes out in ways. You just got to survive it and then afterwards you feel triumphant. So yes, good. Glad to hear it, Matthew. I’ve just eaten an egg sandwich. I’m just de-clagging my throat as we speak, as we go along with this. All the best podcasters do just before recording, eat a load of eggs. That may be ill-advised, but hey, I can mute my microphone when things go a bit awry. But we are joined by a special guest, rejoined I should say, for the third or fourth time. I can’t remember how many times it’s been now, but Jeremy Peel is back, the third host of The Back Page. How’s it going, Jeremy? Very good, thanks. Agreed on afternoon tea. They do like the mini version of scones, don’t they? But they’re still half a metre high, so I’m not sure how much is really shaved off in the long run. Well, the one in Bath also has a bath bun, which is just like a roll full of some kind of sugary paste. I’ve never heard of that. Is that a thing? Yeah. I think it’s got a lot in common with like an Eccles cake. Yeah. Okay. That’s a lot of course. It sounds like something you’d be shocked for buying in Judge Dredd’s world. I remember when I worked at One Stop, there was a woman who had a breakdown because we sold out of Eccles cakes, and she just started crying in the middle of the shop because we didn’t have any. That was what working retail was like in 2005. I hope you enjoy that little insight there. Speaking as a Northerner, every town, every village has its own cake, and you can’t get that head up about any individual one. At a certain point, you just have to be like, I’m in a new place, it’s got its own cake. It’s probably marginally different from the one the next start over. Yeah, that’s true. I was born in Mansfield where they don’t have cakes of any note, but their regional local food is, and this sounds so disgusting when I explain this, a cockles and peas. It’s like a big pile of mushy peas, a big pile of cockles, and then they dump a load of mint sauce on top of it. I don’t know what that is. That’s like something you’d eat as a dare in some kind of like BBC game show from the 90s, like the kids. But yeah, that was their local cuisine. And there’s like a web page that explains, oh, I remember they used to sell cockles and peas. And it’s like, I don’t know, it was kind of a war crime, but I did eat it and enjoy it a couple of times, I will say. So yes, steered us into a right cul-de-sac here, haven’t I? Jeremy, how does it feel to be the first guest to appear on a three-way draft, which is what we’re doing this episode? It is a form of honour, right? I guess I’m choosing to interpret it that way. Yeah. And also I feel like, I think I’ve said before, like I’m sort of the guest who’s been enough times that like mum’s not trying too hard anymore. And so I feel like for a draft, you need that sort of energy. Like you need to be able to like attack me a little. And like, you know, like you’re not going to do this to Simon Parker. You’re just not. So I am honoured to be here and it also makes a kind of sense to me. Yeah. I don’t know what kind of draft we ask Simon to be on. Some kind of like a Neo Geo draft or some kind of like obscure sort of like hardware, you know, only like 80 people in the UK own, something like that, I think. But yeah, I mean, I don’t think you were just brought in because, you know, we feel safe putting you in the firing line and say, actually, Jeremy, I think you’ll find that shit. Like, it’s not, there’s definitely not the intent there. More brought you in for your expertise, because this week’s draft is the PC Gaming Draft from 2010 to 2019. So people who listen to the podcast, remember we did a 90s PC Gaming Draft. Matthew won that one, and then we did a 2000 to 2005 PC Gaming Draft as well. I won that one, and so it’s been a while since we revisited this area. But of all the different drafts that have been sort of swimming around in my head of things we could do, this felt like one where there was an exciting mix of past and present. It is a decade, but it encompasses so, so much. So it’s gonna be interesting to see what we can pull out of it. It’s not straightforward as doing a 360 draft where you cover a seven year period. Ten years gets you a lot of stuff. So Jeremy’s PC expertise, much welcome here and I think it’s going to be good. But before we get into it, Jeremy, I did want to ask how work things have been lately. Can we ask about your Ken Levine interview you did for Edge? Yeah, that was a bit wild. I feel like I’ve been very lucky with Edge lately. They’ve trusted me with some sort of big opportunities, and that was one of those where I’ve always sat in the sidelines and watched the likes of Jeff Geely interview Ken Levine and scoffed a bit and go, no, he doesn’t ask any of the hard questions. If it was me, I would ask this. I would ask about the closure of a rational and what really went on there, and his altered status of what he feels about that. Then Edge said, do you want to do it? I was partly felt, oh shit, I’ve got to live up to my own self-regard now. Yeah. And do it right. So I was pretty nervous about in the run-up, but yeah, it was pretty fantastic. I’ve got like a full hour and a half with him. So this is for Edge’s audience with, oh sorry, Collected Works format. So you talk about a lot of games over the course of someone’s career, which suited me because, you know, I’ve got to talk about everything from System Shock 2 through Swat 4, Tribes Vengeance, Bioshock Infinite, like the deep cuts as well as the stuff that everyone knows. But then also like some of the big stuff was where the, you know, some of the really juicy, interesting stuff came, like hearing you talk about Bioshock Infinite and how the combat works in that game. And, you know, he was saying he kind of lost control of that a bit. And, you know, it was such a big game and he was so focused on the story that it ended up playing as a game he would necessarily choose to play. Or at least that’s the way I heard it. Like, you know, he is more of a kind of old school, immersive sin type player. And, you know, you can feel like in Bioshock and Judas looks like that as well. And Infinite was a little more towards the sort of Call of Duty end of things. Right. And I think it’s just interesting to hear him talk about that in terms of like, oh yeah, it’s fine, but it’s not, it didn’t end up playing quite the way he would have liked, which you just don’t expect from someone whose reputation is for having complete control over a project. Interesting stuff, yeah. So what was his kind of response when you asked him about Irrational’s closure? Because I had never really seen as much insight on that subject as I saw in that edge piece. I feel like either people have not asked him about it straightforward because they feel like they can’t in covering Judas or yeah, he just hasn’t, you know, he hasn’t elucidated on that in quite as much detail as I’ve seen in interviews I’ve seen elsewhere. So what did he kind of respond to you about on that? How did he respond on that front? Yeah. Well, the context of that is after the DLC of Infinite, I think over a hundred people were let go. The remainder of people at Irrational were rebranded as Ghost Story. And the only statement we got from that was a public one from Ken Levine, which talked about his creative need to go back to something smaller and work in a R&D type capacity. And he later talked about his narrative legos and these concepts he was developing. And it made it sound as if over a hundred people lost their jobs because Ken Levine fancied a change. Yeah, it definitely did. It really landed him in it. And I think is part of the reason that he’s somewhat demonized in game circles today, at least in developer and journalist circles. But yeah, I guess unsurprisingly, there was a lot more to it. And his intention was to leave, step aside, and let some new kind of creative, let Irrational figure out, you know, who its next creative figureheads were going to be. But that’s not what happened. Take-Two decided that they were going to close Irrational, and that was a surprise to Levine as much as anyone else. And yeah, it is quite poignant to hear him talk about, you know, he’d lost, I think, both of his parents in that period. And he felt on Infinite that he lost the confidence of his team, and he didn’t feel like he could do it again for his own health, and he didn’t feel like it was right for the team. So there’s a lot more humanity in that situation, as there always is when you get to the truth of something, I guess, but I don’t know. Yeah, I ended up feeling feeling bad for him. And, you know, I don’t know whether I would feel the same way about him if I worked for him. And, you know, he tossed out something that I spent months working on because it wasn’t quite right, or the vision had changed on a game or something. But, yeah, I came out with quite a different view of what he’s like as a person as a result of, you know, finally getting to ask those questions and him being open enough to answer them properly. Hmm, yeah, well worth reading. Now, that’s an issue 400 of Edge, which is obviously no longer on sale, but you can buy it digitally. So well worth checking out. That’s got an all-timer back half section, that issue, as you might expect. It’s just really packed with good stuff. Did you also do the making of Baldur’s Gate 3? Jeremy, was that you in that one? Yeah, that was me in that issue. That was a bit of a bucket list one as well. Although I almost felt bad for asking Lauren about Baldur’s Gate 3 still. They’re so desperate to move on. People won’t let them. And we were very grateful for all the awards, but you can kind of see like, oh yeah, if a game gets celebrated over and over and over and that cycle doesn’t seem to end. Like when do you sort of put it to bed? If you’ve worked on it for several years. Yeah. Okay. Interesting stuff. Well, clearly we have the right person on this episode anyway, for PC Gaming Draft specifically. It doesn’t get much more PC gaming than Ken Levine and Larian and Baldur’s Gate really. So clearly we’re lucky to have you here. Matthew, PC Gaming Draft. How are you feeling about it? Because we’ve done, like I say, two of these before. We have Jeremy here. The range of games here, I think, is tons wider just because of what happens to PC gaming in this period. So in theory, there’s lots to pick from. But I thought just checking with you, buddy, and see how you’re doing over there. I’m doing fine. Yes. Yeah, it’s an interesting period because I wasn’t like a heavy PC gamer until I joined RPS in 2018, I think it was. So I feel like I’m kind of dunked in right at the end of this period. That will probably impact a lot of my picks. Although I’ve played a lot of the big hitters. I just played them on console rather than PC. I think there’s a bit of wrestling in me over things which feel more inherently PC than other games. There’s a really populist selection of games you could go for that aren’t necessarily like PC in their bones, but might win the draft just because they’re really popular games that people like. And it’s the temptation to go, do you fill it with that, or do you try and honor the specific PC quality? That’s the tricky one with this. Yeah, I think that is true about the games from this period. One of the reasons I got into PC gaming around this period is because actually a massive catalyst for me was the fact that Xbox One, PS4 didn’t do backwards compatibility. I found that heartbreaking because I just had these vast collections of games, partly from working in games journalism, but also I just thought, wow, the idea that all these games just die, they just stop here. But on PC that just wasn’t the case. It was like, oh yeah, you can play Bioshock Infinite here or look better than it does on 360 and PS3 and also you’ll be able to play The Witcher 3 on this thing too. So that was part of the reason I made that leap at this time. I hadn’t had a PC for a long time, couldn’t fucking afford it working in games journalism to be honest, and then made the effort to get into it again during this period from about 2013 onward. So yeah, I can see the sort of like slight bind there, and I do agree that that means that some games don’t quite make sense as picks, but there are definitely plenty of multi-format games that do make sense as PC picks. So I’m sure we’ll get into those. So now for the treasured preamble part of the draft. So our last PC gaming draft ended at 2005. We didn’t do an 06-2010 draft or 05-09 draft. Obviously PC games were released, and there’s plenty of games of note that released in that period. But it is considered a bit of a dark age for PC gaming. So Jeremy, what did happen in those years? Because I’ve made some notes here, but it felt like games for Windows Live, multi-platform games taking precedent over PC exclusive games, thanks to the more powerful console hardware. At the same time, I can’t speak to this, but I hear PC hardware was not necessarily in its best shape in terms of price and function at this time. You also got traditional retail games dying on PC, a lot faster than they die on consoles, but it takes a while for digital distribution to get there. What do you think? Are those all the factors that make it a dark age for PC gaming or is there anything else I’ve missed there? Yeah, I think that’s the big stuff and the knock-on effects of that, like PC ports being an afterthought. You know, even the term PC ports, you make your game for the consoles and then six months to a year later the PC version comes out and it’s a bit wonky. You know, this was something that we just sort of had to accept in PC gaming at the time. And I feel like where PC gaming had been sort of the birthplace for a lot of genres prior to that period, it sort of lost that status for a while. And yeah, it’s starting to feel less important. It’s interesting as well that like during this time like Can It Run Crisis is a big thing for a long time. Crisis is the benchmark game for, you know, high powered PC gaming, which shows that people were still kind of clinging to that thing of like, okay, the next big game, whether it’s Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 or whatever is going to, you know, that’s going to just divide and upgrade. And I will be at the forefront of what games can do for a little while. But yeah, I mean like Crisis is good, but it’s not great. And it’s, you know, it’s sort of telling that that was like what PC gamers were somewhat obsessed with at that point. You’re just kind of desperately trying to continue that, that feeling of being at the cutting edge. And yeah, I think, yeah, machines were certainly were to me unaffordable. And like, you know, if I hadn’t been given one by work in order to do my job, you know, on 18 grand a year at the end of that decade, then I wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t have been able to get involved. So I sort of like did miss out on this period a bit because, like I said, I just didn’t have the money for it, but did go back and sort of dabble with the games a little bit more afterwards. Things like Dawn of War 2, which I think came out in 09, and Empire at War, which is a little bit before the Games for Windows live era kicks off, I think. But there’s definitely sort of like, it is a weird blank spot for various reasons. And then, yeah, it just sort of like starts to change a little bit after that. Matthew, do you remember anything about this period, PC gaming-wise? So you’re just firmly in your Nintendo. Yeah, I didn’t have a game PC. I don’t really remember the period that clearly. I remember, I mean, this is how out of the loop I was. A friend telling me about how good Steam was at some point. I mean, it must have been early 2010s. But the fact that I, a games journalist, was just having a friend go, well, actually PC gaming is really legitimate now because Steam makes it just like a console and it does it all for you. I literally remember having that conversation and being like, huh, I had no idea. That’s, yeah, I was just completely out of the loop on it. And I was reading little bits of PC gaming journalism, but it all seemed to be complaints about coming second to console. Lots of people complaining about, lots of reviews moaning about bad keyboard bindings and things like that. And just sort of carelessness, I guess. And, you know, you were like, oh, well, it sucks to be them, goes back to playing a poona on Wii. Yeah. Yeah, that’s triggered a memory, actually, because I do remember when I created my Steam account. It was in 2009. It was when they released those Monkey Island special editions with the new visuals. And I realized I could download, I mean, this will not surprise you at all, but I realized I could download and play Dark Forces on there, which was very exciting to me because that game felt like a long, long loss to me at that point. And so I started to realize then like, oh, wow, this is OK. This is what Steam is. I mean, I don’t have the hardware to really enjoy this, but it’s nice that it exists. And then, yeah, it’s sort of like this is kind of like a swirl of controversies around games for Windows Live, which is eventually shuttered. But like when Dark Souls finally comes to PC, for example, there’s like a petition with over 20,000 signatures in under a week when they learned that it would use for games for Windows Live for multiplayer, because it just people just were not happy with the service. Now, PC players always make it clear when they don’t fucking like something, no matter how petty it is. But I think in this case as well, even Microsoft’s been like, games for Windows Live was not a success, and now they put all their games on Steam, and that kind of is what it is. But yeah, just this weird thing of like, consoles kind of powering ahead. You obviously have, in parallel to this, the 360 becoming this place you can go and enjoy multiplayer games as well as you could on PC. That’s the significant thing that happens on consoles that generation. Then PC does just weirdly feel second place for a while, and as the budgets for games escalate, it starts to make less and less sense to make a really expensive RTS game or RPG that’s just aimed at that audience. Suddenly, the amount of players you can be speaking to is a lot wider if you get those games to parity on consoles as well. It does start to change the landscape a bit. However, things are not constantly bleak because you get to this period of 2010 to 2019 and things do change for the better. I guess Jeremy, how much do we credit the revival of PC gaming to Valve and Steam specifically? It’s certainly part of the picture. It takes a while to stick. I think my first Steam game was like, I want to say Audio Surf. Is that the name? It’s almost like a classic. Yeah. You put your own tracks in and you ride. It’s a guitar hero riff, but you’re a little spaceship riding down a track, writing the beats of songs. I remember the pleasure of starting to build up a library, and we know how attached people are to those libraries now. The idea of moving off Steam for something else, even when Tim Sweeney holds a million free games of people, it just doesn’t happen. This is really the origin point for that feeling to be like, okay, we have a home for these things, for this hobby. But it feels right for the platform because PC isn’t a closed platform. And as much as you can disagree with Gabe Newell’s politics, sort of free market libertarianism, that in some ways felt like a good fit for PC because it didn’t feel like there was a platform holder like PlayStation or Xbox gatekeeping as such. Although in the early days to get on Steam, I think you really just did have to get hold of Valve and speak to them and that was a form of gatekeeping in itself. Yeah. And they did pull devotion from sale. Oh yeah. Yeah. So there’s missteps and controversies and what not. But it felt like, okay, maybe these could be the right people to do this. And it helps to have somebody pulling things into one place to know that your friends are likely to be in that same place. And you can grab them on chat and see that they’re playing Left 4 Dead or whatever. And all that stuff that we would take for granted now, which beforehand everything on PC was splintered. So and less approachable as well. Like you just wouldn’t necessarily know where to go, to find communities to play with. And I think PC gaming communities can underestimate how distant they can be to someone who’s just getting into PC gaming. Yeah, you know, the idea of like using mods and speaking to people on VoIP and all this kind of thing is just like, that’s very intimidating. And so to have somewhere like Steam where this all begins to live is super important, I think, yeah. Yeah, it’s just, there were so many factors that just made Steam the right kind of fit. It was interesting seeing the revolt against launchers like Origin in the early 2010s, because I think that was where, I’m pretty sure for a long time that was the only place you could play Dragon Age 2, for example, and maybe even Mass Effect 3 too. It was just a fad. I think it was every single one of the Bioware games up until like, up until even Andromeda. And then eventually they do move, EA starts to move back to Steam, I think during the pandemic or around that time. And yeah, people were just so angry at the thought of playing things on another, on another, using another launcher. And you know, it’s sort of managing a lot of launchers is not, is I can see the frustration. But yeah, like the devotion to Steam as a platform is quite an unusual thing, but it’s not unearned. It is very straightforward, easy to use. They have been pretty responsible with it, in terms of like access and features and moving things along in terms of things like early access. That was the other thing that happened with PC gaming in the early part of this decade, is that Steam’s agility and flexibilities of platform really like starts to put it in a very advantageous position for developers. It means you can launch games before they’re feature complete, find an audience and kind of grow it from there. Couldn’t do that on PlayStation or Xbox or Nintendo, obviously. So how easy is to launch a game on Steam, like pioneering early access, it’s placed itself at the heart of all gaming arguably, because no other platform can surf his hits as quickly as Steam. An indie game will explode on Steam and then kind of get huge everywhere else. It doesn’t really happen on another platform first, then happen on PC, it’s always PC first. Everyone launches games there now, even Sony and EA. So is this it for PC gaming now, do we think? Is this the shape it takes forever? What do you think, Matthew? Probably, like you say, the audience is so wedded to it. There’s stuff I wish that they would still address, and you wonder if they ever will. Like you say, how open they are to every kind of game. I think it’s kind of crazy that you can be a sort of shop for a product, but also let certain unsavoury types form hate groups against those products in the shop. That’s like Sainsbury’s letting a bloke stand in the doorway telling you potatoes are shit, you know? Potatoes are woke. Yes, potatoes don’t buy the bananas here, they’re woke. And that’s obviously currently a big thing you hear a lot about, and I’m sure a lot of it’s amplified just by, you know, because it leaves such a sour taste that people are obviously focusing in on it, and not the millions of people who are just using it at good faith as just a shop. I still think there’s some like discoverability stuff. I don’t really know where I sit on the whole. Anyone can put anything on here, you know, which allows some really great people to have a platform. But finding some of those great things, you know, obviously remains a problem. And I’m not a heavy, heavy Steam user. Like the truth of it is, it’s like mostly fine for the level I need. You know, I go to Steam with something in mind. But if I was someone who just wanted to like find something truly new or actually have that kind of proper discovery experience, I don’t know how I’d have it. I just think if you can’t get people to use another store by giving them the kind of stuff that Epic is giving them, I just don’t know what could possibly move the needle really. Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s sort of like this. There are a few things that just made Steam so appealing. Like Jeremy says, it’s the fact that it’s this all in one storefront. And I just used to think of PC Gaming as being so disparate in terms of like the different codes you’ve got to redeem to make sure the online works in a first person shooter or the different multiplayer services you have to use, like on a game ladder or whatever to play a particular game. And it just, yeah, the way it kind of irons that out. The fact that Steam sales, definitely like, it feels like maybe they used to be more exciting, but first discovering the platform and seeing just how deep the discounts were on some games, pretty amazing. And the other thing that happens at this time is, like I say, everyone starts releasing games on there. Even developers you thought would never release games on PC. Like every Persona game is on PC. Every Yakuza game is on PC. That didn’t seem like it would ever happen in like, you know, the early part of the decade we’re talking about here. Like it just, and yet we’re in a position now where these games are mostly, with the exception of Rockstar Games, everyone is releasing their games simultaneously on PC now. Yeah, it was just while I was on PC Gamer at this time, and just seeing like the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy come to PC. And I never ever thought that sort of thing would happen. And a lot of what Jeremy says about how these games would arrive without being in proper sort of shape for PC, that was still true with a lot of these games coming over, a lot of keyboard binding issues as alluded to. But yeah, an interesting and exciting time for a few reasons. One of those is that we also start to see, thanks to Kickstarter and market trends more generally, a spate of 90s and noughties genre revivals in this period. So Broken Age kicks us off from Double Fine. You also have Pillars of Eternity from Obsidian, which is kind of like a pivot into kind of like a game to save themselves essentially during a dicey time for getting publishers to bankroll newer RPGs. So which trad PC genres win in this decade, Jeremy, and which do not? And what did you think of that overall trend towards bringing back these classic genres? It was kind of exciting to be covering PC games in that period. We sort of learned fairly quickly, reasonably quickly, to be quite wary as well. Like it became apparent, like, you know, like I said, just how many of these games were quite desperate bids for solvency from companies that were genuinely struggling. And they, like, to pitch the public directly in that way, it was at once kind of really exciting, but also opened developers up to have severe breakdowns of trust with the public. And, you know, when you have one or two of those really big early crowdfunding efforts go sideways, I think, is it Neil Stevenson who had a weird sort of sword fighting game pitch and, you know, crowdfunded a bunch of money, took that to try and get further investment, didn’t succeed. Oh, well, you know, like, this kind of thing was pretty new as players to be like, OK, I can give my money and I hope again comes out this in some years. And it hasn’t happened. That was weird to cover and I think weird for gamers as well. But it was it was definitely a healthy thing for bringing back genres that clearly people still wanted and publishers were working under a kind of, you know, received wisdom that these games weren’t wanted anymore. So, yeah, like CRPGs, we still have a healthy sort of isometric type dialogue heavy reactive RPG seed now and that really begins in this period with Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original Sin and some of these big crowdfunding games. And so, yeah, Point and Click is really where it all started with crowdfunding and that’s in a pretty healthy place as well, I think. Although it’s notable that like these genres didn’t, for the most part, they didn’t kind of soar indefinitely. When Pillars of Eternity 2 came out, despite being very good, that kind of sank, which suggested that like, okay, some people just wanted their nostalgia film and they’ve actually had it now. So you can’t rely on that boying projects indefinitely. And to some degree, things returned to the way they were, but you can still see like, okay, there are threads of genres here which before were considered dead. And that’s, you know, there was something quite lovely about the fact that had come directly from developers and the public rather than a suit approving them or not. Yeah, and like, not every genre did win out here either. Like, there’s a graveyard of dead MMOs from this time. I remember PC Gamer doing a Wildstar cover and then I remember Wildstar dying inside the same like, period that I was working on the magazine. And like, that was a game that people liked. People said that was a good MMO, but it sank, it disappeared. There’s also a Firefall, making Phil Savage review that is still the thing he holds against me the most and I can’t fault him for that. Real-time strategy games just always up against it a little bit. So in this period, you have Company Heroes 2, which is a success, but you also have games like Dawn of War 3, which is not a success, failed attempts to bring back Command and Conquer as well, that are just an out and out disaster. And in general, that genre never really has its moment again. And even this year, where it’s had a few, there’s been a few games in that space, they’ve not really taken off in the way that people were hoping. So not everything got a second chance. Like Jeremy says, some things came back, and then ran their course again. And then it felt like people remembered why they maybe reached the point they did in the first place. And in the case of CRPGs, kind of exited that space and moved into the Neverwinter Nights Couture era of things becoming more in that kind of 3D space and kind of like space where you can plause, where maybe just a presentation step up means that the game itself changes a little bit too, but that maybe that was the right move for the genre, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, an interesting time. Okay, so last thing I want to ask them before we get to the draft, and I think this is the most interesting thing to discuss, but Jeremy, Matthew, we all covered PC gaming variously during this time. It felt like actually that PC gaming was growing consistently during this time in a way that console gaming was not necessarily. And I want to talk about the challenges and opportunities of doing so. So Jeremy, you’re on PC Games N from the early part of this decade, right? So how did you find covering this space? It was tricky. It was very fun, but it was hard. I think if there was any sense by this time that games journalists were still the tastemakers, that died really quickly because we were playing catch up a lot of time. We come in on Monday and you’re like, okay, this thing is blown up on Steam, and we’ve got to scramble to have somebody play it, figure out what it is, if it’s actually good, and cover it. There’s a lot of value in that, but it really felt like the groundswell took over, in large part because of Steam, and can’t underestimate the impact of Steam making a lot of information very public that other platforms never have, and probably never will. Matthew mentioned having people, like the user review thing is kind of like, it speaks to the dominance of Steam, the publishers and developers accept that. They can have the nice marketing spiel on a page, and then have people shouting, it’s not good though. It’s not good in that same spot. Equally, you can see exactly how many players are playing something on Steam at any given time, and that definitely has its downsides, as with stuff like Concord. There’s some pretty nasty pylons as a result of that. There’s some shot of fraud that goes on there, which maybe isn’t particularly healthy, but it also allows us to identify, oh, this game is getting massive, and no PR is telling us to look at it. There’s no marketing campaign for it. It is pretty much wholly organic thing. So that was kind of tricky, but exciting to get on top of. The other thing is that the growth of hobby games like League of Legends, that was really difficult. When I was covering news in the early days of my career, and I would just get handed, oh, there’s new League of Legends patch notes. We need to basically re-blog this entire thing on our CMS, and I’d feel the website just creaking, as I put like 100 bullet point entries into a post. I just hoped that the thing would stand up. Then just like the idea that I could offer any kind of meaningful commentary on that. As a generalist, games journalist, who’s trying to be able to cover a bit of everything, is kind of laughable. It’s like reading The Matrix, if you don’t play one of those games, to look at those patch notes. Whereas, if you do, you can immediately say, oh, this ability has been changed. That’s a huge nerf to this character, which is going to have this impact on the meta. As a generalist, you just cannot do that. So in a way, you respond to that in a way that journalists always have to, which is just know your limits, don’t overstate your knowledge, just be very careful in how you write and let readers take that extra step in interpretation where you can’t. But also over time, I think we realized that we couldn’t cover these games properly. A whole field of e-sports and hobby game journalism has sprung up as a result of that need since then. I’m not sure how stable that field is. A lot of those sites seem to be, games journalism itself is fairly unstable, but that sphere even more so. But it’s clear that that’s needed, that those communities need people within them to speak to them clearly about how these games work and what’s going on with them. In a way, it’s a story of us losing control as PC games journalists and doing our absolute best to figure out how to cover all these exciting developments. But realizing, okay, we’re going to have to see some ground here. Yeah, I think that is true. I have more to say on this subject, but I also would like to hear Matthew’s perspective on covering this from more of a video capacity. How on earth did you try and capture the broad sweep of what PC gaming was running that RPS channel, Matthew? It was really, really difficult. The closest we had to a solution was having multiple personalities on the video team, and I wouldn’t say it’s defined how we recruited, but you know, maybe it was more of a lucky outcome. But you know, having a range of tastes, and thinking quite carefully about staff in general, you know, a lot of sites have gone after specific writers who they know to be great on certain genres, and certain genres are so big that that writer can kind of earn their keep just covering that sort of beat. And there was definitely a bit of that in video. So you know, I was an absolute sort of generalist. But then Ashlegury was, you know, super into like The Sims, and a lot more tapped into, I’d say, kind of younger, a lot younger than me. And so kind of tapped into kind of younger trends, and you know, what people were playing online. And then we had Astrid, who was very into the indie side of things, and more open to sort of some of the, some of the weirder things, perhaps more kind of traditional, like RPS writer. And sort of so between us, we could naturally pursue our interests and cover them. But to be honest, when I was on RPS, I felt like I was just being a multi-platform games writer. You know, the stuff I had my biggest successes with, were things which weren’t inherently PC. Forza Horizon and Control and Red Dead Redemption 2 and Sekiro. I’d say one thing we did benefit from and one thing we went after quite aggressively was trying to kind of like mine what you would probably call the AA tier of games. So not too niche in indie, not mega hits at everyone and like all the mega sites would be kind of stripping clean, but the kind of you kind of focus home interactive tier of developer. You know, they looked shiny and had kind of glamorous 3D graphics. They kind of were sort of nudging at being AAA in many ways, but weren’t quite there. And a lot of those things could slip under people’s radar. And we we did some really good video business covering that stuff thoroughly and being the place to get information on the first Plague Tale game, for example, or being like really hot on Desperados 3. And I think that that was, you know, as close as I had to a strategy was like really identifying games which had like a big enough audience, but weren’t necessarily big enough to be of interest to like IGN or Gamespot, you know, outside of maybe like one review piece. And becoming the place to go to for those games. Probably doesn’t say like a huge amount about PC Gaming as a whole is putting more of a broader where games journalism was at in that time. That’s how it kind of played out to me. So for me, running PC Gamer, the magazine from 2013 to 2017, I was so tired by the end of that. That was when the landscape of it was really changing. And you had fewer old reliability to stick on the cover. Because I remember a previous editor told me, if in doubt, put an MMO on the cover, because they always do well. And then for whatever reason, and I looked at the sales numbers and they were right, every MMO did just seem to do well, because I think they just created a lot of intrigue as a potential time sink. And obviously it’s a genre you don’t find anywhere else on different hardware. But then yeah, they all died before I joined basically. Like the last one to launch was Guild Wars 2. Then like a couple of others, like I say, like Wildstar, Firefall came along afterwards, but they died too. None of them could get that monthly thing kind of going. And then the shape of live service games starts to take, starts to form around Destiny, I would say. And then kind of like Fortnite and that sort of like Battle Pass, microtransaction era of games. And then suddenly that MMO genre just doesn’t really, doesn’t really exist anymore, doesn’t really make sense. So that goes away and it becomes a lot harder to figure out how to boil down PC gaming. There’s a few, you know, multi-platform games where you’re like, oh, that does make sense to put on the cover here. Like Alien Isolation, we did a cover for, for example. Obviously The Witcher 3, we did covers for as well. But when it comes to things like Assassin’s Creed, it doesn’t really make sense to do a PC gamer cover on those. That’s just firmly not the wheelhouse of the brand. So I found that quite hard to navigate. And it meant that, meant taking a few chances, like putting Mount and Blade 2 on the cover, putting Pillars of Eternity on the cover, putting DayZ on the cover. Things that would never have been like traditional cover games back in the day, but almost through necessity because the really straightforward route of the four or five dependable RTS games or series or RPGs or whatever it might be, are just all in some kind of dire straits. It just means that you have to be a lot more creative with how you do it. And then in 2017, I moved to the website, and that was definitely a bit of an eye-opener in terms of what we were both saying, what we were all saying about specialists coming along and owning the beat of a game. And I was such a generalist, I just felt a bit out of my depth with that. So I forced myself to learn GTA Online, so I had like one game as like a beat to cover. But I definitely found it, yeah, like a bit, it takes a while to get used to. And now I think you kind of need a team of the size PC gamers got now in order to cover, to service all of those different beats as well as they do. Because like you say, otherwise you have to meet your readers halfway and hope they can understand from your patch notes exactly what everything means. And that’s not the sort of coverage that does well anymore. The sort of coverage that does well has kind of like opinion tied to it or a spicy headline or just something a bit, you know, like a real flavor to it, a sense of the expertise before you click. And so all of that was kind of changing around PC gaming. At the same time, it was exciting to be there because it was a genuine, like a genuinely evolving platform. It felt like it was growing before you. You were seeing the site numbers grow because the amount of players on Steam was growing and it was pretty exciting to be a part of that. And yeah, I don’t know if there will ever be anything like it again in terms of how one sort of platform transforms across a decade like this because it really did become so huge and is still growing and feels like PC gaming is still the kind of like growth space for where games can kind of go. So yeah, it was exciting and challenging for sure. You can never get your arms around the whole thing with PC gaming, whereas you definitely can with Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox. As busy as they ever get, you can always boil down what those platforms are for people. PC gaming is fucking endless. And, you know, what’s happening on itch won’t also be happening on Steam. So keeping an eye on that sort of thing or like where where tomorrow’s kind of like most important indie games might come from or game jams where, you know, concepts like Superhot will be birthed and things like that. It’s just so, yeah, so so enormous. So, yeah, that was kind of my memory of it. But, yeah, OK. I remember also thinking there’s no user base with more weird hang ups than PC gamers. I did find that really tiresome. I know it’s a minor thing. When I was on RPS, it was right at the sort of the the heart of Epic Games Store trying to make itself a thing. And lots of people doing exclusive deals. It’s a combination of A, I didn’t really give a fuck where I bought my games from. I just didn’t care. And perhaps that’s because I’m a console gamer. I’m used to doing what I’m told. And I get that. And PC gamers, they’ve all invested in their Steam libraries and they don’t want to have to click on the icon below the other icon because that’s a huge lift for them, I know. But just the tiresome humour of the PC gamer, not PC gamer in the magazine, but the PC gaming community. We’d review games out new on Epic Games Store and the amount of comments for people were like, why are you reviewing this? This doesn’t appear to be out yet. I’m lucky on Steam. It doesn’t appear to be out. I don’t know why you’re reviewing this. As if, like, I hadn’t heard that joke a million times before. Like so much of my memory of this time is like rolling my eyes at fucking babies. And it’s just, it really put me off it. Like even the RPS audience were pretty nice. Like in the comments there would be like, oh, yikes, this lot. I just don’t miss that at all. Just grow up. Yeah, absolutely. I like the, I remember like one, the backlash one writer on our team got for calling out the name of a certain subreddit, which I won’t go into, just to avoid their wrath here, to be honest, because it’s not worth it as I learned from that. But like that combined with things like the fact, I’ve never seen a funny Steam review and I never will see a funny Steam review. Like no such thing exists. And there have been tens of millions of attempts. They’re so, so bad, like humor on Steam reviews, just an absolute no from me dog. Sorry, Jeremy, you can say something. In the early days of PC Games, our news stories were kind of fed directly into the news channel of a big forums for… It’s a facepunch forum, so Gary’s Mod and Russ, that community. And we kind of kept denying it because it was useful for the site. But I remember one time I wrote a headline calling… Jurn-a-Russ or Jurn-a-Russ or whatever. However, it said the DayZ map. I called it the DayZ map in this headline, which it is, and which most people will know it as. But it had been an armor map first, and this community ripped me to shreds for that. Like, just destroyed me. And I remember pointing this out to my editor at the time, and he said they have a point, which was the least helpful thing he could have said. Great cheers for the support, bro. Yeah. These communities could be really, really nasty, because they were deep into their own subcultures and niches, and part of how they defined them was by pushing against outsiders, right? Which, as a generalist, you’re an outsider to most subcultures. So that’s quite a tricky thing. I mean, something that I want to credit PC Gamer with, that they’re doing right now, PC Gamer, the website, is pushing back against a habit that we had in games journalism for a long time, of looking in communities and going, oh, they’re all getting hit up about this thing. They know better than us, they’re probably right. So that becomes a news story. Whereas if you go on PC Gamer currently, you’ll see them going, hang on, everyone’s down voting Hunt Showdown’s amazing new map, which is essentially a sequel reboot. Because they don’t like the menus, isn’t that not the game? Like, isn’t that almost irrelevant? So I’m enjoying seeing them start like, and I think as we’ve discussed, they kind of have the breadth on the team to know and to have their heads in stuff a little more. Most outlets don’t have that luxury, but they’re also brave enough to go. I don’t think this is reasonable. This doesn’t seem like a proportionate response. And I do think PC gaming communities need some of that. They can’t necessarily be trusted to have a measured take on things they’re upset about. Yeah, it’s a weird one where it’s like, I think in my head, I was trying to do this maths between like, okay, so I understand the readers of the magazine to be very like, you know, you’re sort of died in the wall, 90s PC gamers who have a lot of warmth towards the brand. And then when you go on the site, you just get pelted by interlopers who make casual death threats and stuff. Or even like YouTubers who have kicked us as like traditional media, right around the kind of like Gamergate times. Yeah, it was a bit weird and hostile, but you kind of just had to sort of like, eventually you just build up a thick enough skin that it stops bothering you. It genuinely does. Like after my two years working on the website, I didn’t really care that people were atting me or whatever. It’s like, yeah, whatever, you’ll forget about this in a day because you’ll be angry about something else. Yeah, it was a weird time, but focusing specifically on the games coming out, it was exciting, it was cool, and there’s just this huge breadth of stuff. It definitely reshaped my gaming tastes into it. I feel like I have more interest in gaming tastes for having covered that space for so long. Before, I think my gaming tastes were very linear before. I just played whenever it came out on 360 and PS3. Then after this generation, I don’t know, there was too much exciting stuff going on over on PC, on the indie game side, that I just felt like I had to be involved. Like I say, multi-platform games as well, just having that continuity of your library, that was very appealing too. Lots of upsides to PC gaming to balance out the bastards. That’s what I’m going to say, the bastards. So yes. Okay lads, that’s enough preamble, I think. So shall we take a quick break and then come back with the three-way draft? Let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. So, time for the draft bit of the PC Gaming Draft, 2010 to 2019. So, we have 10 categories here, and picking a game gets you any expansions for that game. Whoever wins the coin toss can pick whether they go first or second. They can technically go third, but there’s no point doing that, because in turn one, you get to… God, I’m doing such a bad job at this. All right, so, if you win the coin toss, you go first or second. If you go first, you get one pick, because you’re going first. And the person going second or the person going third, they each get two picks. So, I guess I have to do two coin tosses, actually, to decide who goes second or third. So, that’s fun, a bit of extra drama there. So, we have 10 categories here. I came up with them, but they were signed off by the officers of Jeremy Peel and Matthew Castle. So, they are legitimate, canonical. So, category one, RPG. Category two, tactics or strategy. Category three, launched in early access. There’s a very specific reason for that. Steam early access, huge deal around this time. Makes sense to represent that in this draft. Category four, indie game. Category five, immersive sim or stealth game. Category six, shooter. Doesn’t have to be first person shooter, but it’s up to the interpretation of the person picking. Category seven, multiplayer. Category eight, sim or management game. Category nine, free pick one. Category ten, free pick two. So, you can pick anything you want for those last two categories. Straightforward, but, you know, there’s a fucking ton of games to pick from. So it’s actually a bit unusual as these drafts go. It’s not so much a race to get things off the borders. Where the fuck do I even start? Jeremy, what did you think of these categories? Want to send them over to you? Yeah, they’re quite juicy because there’s like interesting aspects of crossover. You know, things that would… It’s not just a free pick that you can repurpose big and important games for. You know, there’s some that fit in early access as well as the genre they’re in. So I think it’s going to be fun strategically. What about you, Matthew? What did you think when I sent you over these categories to you? I thought they were okay. I think there’s a couple where I was like, Ah, shit, I’ve got one thing that I can talk about legitimately. And I hate picking games which, even though they’re good games, I don’t have much personal experience with them because it always feels like a dirty win that way. Yeah, but the audience loves it when you do that and have to explain your work. I know they do, but from a point of personal pride, picking a game and then having Samuel explain why it’s good, it just feels grim. I know it’s good radio, but it’s not good for the soul. Yeah, we should start getting BBC Radio Somerset to rebroadcast these drafts. I think that would be good, Matthew. Saying radio there threw me off slightly. Yeah, I think even I felt that way a little bit though, Matthew. There’s some stuff where some of these categories where I’ve got two picks and those are what I’ve got, and then if I don’t get those, then it’s a bit more fraught. But that’s okay, because I think that’s the exciting drama of the draft, is that you can’t just have your corner in a draft, you have to be more all-encompassing. That’s the exciting challenge of doing it, I think. So yeah, okay. Well, Matthew, do you want to do the two coin tosses? I’ve actually created, I found a site which lets us spin a wheel with three names on it. That makes much more sense because I was thinking, how does a coin work with three people? The answer is it doesn’t. It plays a song as we do it, which you might be able to hear as well. What’s the song? I’m going to spin the wheel, just like a little bit of dance music. Here we go. So this is picking for who goes first. And then we’ll do it for who goes second, right? Yeah. Does it matter who goes second? It does matter. Well, whoever wins this first spin can decide whether they go first or second. Oh, okay. Yeah. Right, here we go. Oh, fucking hell, there’s an advert with an old lady on it. What’s going on? Here we go. Old lady, it’s available now. Oh, it’s me. It’s me, Matthew. It’s me, Matthew. I get to go. I’m going to go first. So who’s going second then? Well, I’ll delete my name from the wheel and spin again. Here we go, we get to hear the tune again. Can’t hear the tune, to be honest, so I’ll just have to take your word for it. It’s Jeremy. I’m going to go second. I can’t think of any tactical advantage to going third. Sorry, Samuel. No, that’s just simply fucked, basically. I’m simply fucked, but that’s okay. I will rise again in another draft, so we’ll see how it goes. All right then, Matthew, you go first then. So you get one pick. What are you going to go for? Oh my god, I mean, there’s an embarrassment of riches. Why did I say first? I don’t know what I want. I think there’s one pick here that I know exactly what I would have grabbed if I went first, so I wonder if you’ll get it. Really? Yeah, for sure. It’s really obvious. I hate it when you say that. This is my hate going first. Um, the pick here that is most valuable. Oh my god. What do you think, Jeremy? Do you think there’s a really obvious first pick? There is for me, but I don’t know how obvious it really is. I don’t know if I’m thinking of the same one as you. It’s PC gaming. There’s no one dominant thing. It’s not fucking mind games. No pressure, Matthew. What’s the fucking defining PC game of the era? I don’t know. Yes, I do. This is the entire reason the episode exists for this one moment. Fuck yeah. RPG. Is it an RPG? Listen, I’m going to get a mainstream hit on the board. It’s a game I really loved. It’s a game I played loads on PC. I played it on PC and I’ve never quite clipped with it on console. RPG. I’m going to take The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt. That was the pick. That was the pick I was thinking of. Oh yes. I’m so fucking good at drafting. Phew. Anything more to add on that one? Oh yes. Awesome relief. Oh, I’m so glad. I’m so glad I didn’t biff it. Okay, good stuff. The Witcher 3, truly epic RPG. What I love about it is actually that it cuts away a lot of the customisation and I really like the character you play as Geralt. I like the fact that you occupy that very specific role in this world, and role-playing as him is a real pleasure to me. I think it’s why it’s pretty of these bigger third-person RPGs. It’s the one I’ve clicked with the most. I love the nature of the world, the tone of it. Not so high fantasy that it’s a bit of a kind of eye-rolling or nerdy or embarrassing. You know, it’s still got a bit of that kind of Game of Thrones grittiness. Maybe not like the greatest nuts and bolts like combat of any game, which is often said about The Witcher 3, but I think the scale of the world, the variety of stories told in it, the flexibility of them in terms of their choices and consequences, and of course, reinforced by two of the best expansions around Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, which both do very different things, but Blood and Wine particularly is a really nice sign off to that series and that character. The Witcher 3, a good pick apparently, few. Well, I thought it was the one RPG that everyone could agree is like the definitive modern RPG on the platform. Like it’s, you know, it’s the one, the most people agree on, I think. It sort of hasn’t happened for like Cyberpunk, for example, in the same way, because I just think it’s a slightly different proposition. But like The Witcher 3 has got that evergreen thing of like people buying it over and over again, talking about it over and over again. It’s got the side quest design people like, even if it’s like lacking combat, combat side, it’s just it gives people the world they want, the stories they want. It’s going to live on in a way that that Netflix TV show is not going to in the cultural memory. So, yeah, I think it’s a good pick, Matthew. So there you go. No more validation for you, though. You’ve had enough now. And we move on to Jeremy’s first pick. Okay, so I get two, right? You do. I might upset you with these, Samuel. We’ll have to see. Inevitable, I think. Tactics or strategy, XCOM enemy unknown. Ah, not XCOM 2. I went back and forth on this and I think maybe I prefer XCOM 2 for its stealth systems and stuff. But you know, this is the one that really changed. It re-birthed a whole genre, like we’re still feeling the impact of it now. And it took what was already a great game in the 90s in the original XCOM. But it took the things that were, you know, that was made up of hundreds of possible granular, tiny decisions which made it sort of hard to perceive the big choices you’re making as a new player in that game. And the genius of this version is that it made those choices very big, very discreet, very clear, you know, almost in a kind of Telltale’s Walking Dead kind of fashion. Like there are three cities being attacked by aliens. You can only go and save one of them. Which do you pick? Who are the advantages, the disadvantages that might come with that? And then on the battlefield level, just like an inspired balance of approachability and depth to have that kind of like little cover symbol there at all times. It felt like there was always somewhere for you to go, always something for you to do each turn. And it felt like it was a hard core PC game in a structural sense, and that it really let you fuck things up. Like you could definitely get 20 hours into a campaign in XCOM, and then lose. And reloading a save not being a particularly simple deal, because you’d have to go back five, ten hours to correct some crucial mistakes. But in that willingness to let you fail was, you know, it let you have these incredible turnarounds. And some of my favorite memories from XCOM are from coming back from the brink and that happening organically. And no matter how bad things were, when you hit the battlefield, it felt like if I can just steer these guys right, we could come through this and we might all survive. Yeah, really good. Yeah, I loved it. I think I did weigh up this versus XCOM 2. And the thing that I sort of like a few ticks in the favor of this one is the simplicity of it is, you know, it’s definitely to be commended. The spooky vibes of it as well, like the weirdness of going into these abandoned public spaces or like forests or whatever it might be, places on earth and then just looking for this alien threat and then maybe an enemy you’ve never encountered before will pop out and it will really kind of unsettle you and you’ll realize the stakes are a bit higher than you assumed they were going to be going into the mission. Had a really good escalation in that respect. Enemy Within as well, you obviously get that as part of this pick. That is a fantastic expansion too, where arguably it throws the balance out too much by giving you kick-ass robots, but also they are great fun. So you know, I think it sort of balances out there. Matthew, any thoughts on this pick? I mean, in terms of the knock-on effect it has and just how many games borrow its mechanics and visual language, I mean, it just shows the kind of, you know, you know you’ve got it spot on when people will just take that and you’ve done the heavy lifting for them. Great stuff. So what’s your second pick Jeremy? I’m going to go to a Mercy Sim or Stealth Game and take Dishonored 2. Oh, fuck. There it is. That hurt more. I knew you’d want that one. That’s why I went here early because I knew you would want that one. But yeah, the Dishonored games are assassination simulators in which you don’t necessarily have to kill your target, put simply. So you have so much freedom of approach that you can tackle things basically any way you want to. This one takes you to a southern island in the Empire that’s ruled from Dunwall, the city in the first game, which gives it a very distinct kind of Mediterranean flavor. The atmosphere is dense as porridge in this game. It’s like nothing else, like just standing in the docks and watching guys chopping up fish. I honestly felt like I could smell the fish in this game. So effectively, Evoked was that world. The thing it has over the first game is two kind of pearls at the center, these two centerpiece levels, one of which is a crack in the slab, where you flip back and forth between two time periods in a kind of stately home, and you use that to get around enemies and also to change events. And Dishonored is at its best where through your actions, you’re changing the story. And it really feels like there is room for you to change the outcome of the coup at the center of this game and decide what’s going to, you know, this Ciconos, this city, what its future is going to be. You know, it feels like it’s kind of mid fall. It’s not a dystopia yet. It could be. You could push it in that direction. But through you save, through who you kill, what factions you leave and touch, which ones you empower, it feels like you can have a real difference. That other centerpiece level is the Clockwork Mansion, which I think really embodies Arkane’s approach to level design. It’s like the magic is real, nothing is faked. There’s this incredible building where all the rooms reconfigure around you, like the layout is changing, but it’s really happening. As they’re changing, you can sneak between the gaps in these rooms and get in the walls and seal the machinery and sneak around that way. All the while you have the mansion’s owner in your rear going, I can’t see you, but I’m going to find you again. Yeah, it’s really magical. I played a lot of this game during night shifts. My wife was on night shifts, so I spent a long weekend of 3 AM play sessions on this game. And so I have a lot of delirious magical memories of it. Yeah, it’s like nothing else. Yeah, I think this is a 10 and I would have picked it first. Absolutely. So you’re right to get it off the board. I think that makes sense. It’s kind of like the no caveat pick for the immersive sim on stealth game category. So makes perfect sense to me. Matthew, did you have this one in mind for this as well? Yeah, I’ve got another thing I wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t mind getting, which I hope you don’t take. Well, I guess we’re about to find out. So, yep, so I get two picks now. I know 40 minutes into the draft picks, it’s my turn to start, so that’s good. All right, so what should I get off the board straight away? I’m going to start with category six shooter, and I’m going to take Doom 2016. That is an interesting category in the sense that you either pick one of very few great single-player things, or you end up with a multiplayer game that I just don’t think is going to be as appealing to our audience, plus we have a multiplayer category anyway. So Doom 2016, long time coming, kind of reset, and I guess I should say in general that it’s going to be a lot of what seemed like craven picking of games published by my current employer going on here, so just going to say that upfront, but they are bangers, so what can I say? But Doom 2016 just brings back the series after a hiatus where they essentially rebalance the combat, so it’s a mix of really kind of like tasty weapons that can be customized and augmented in these different ways with this like Resi 4 style loop of when an enemy is damaged going in for a melee kill and then replenishing your ammo and kind of keeping moving like that. So it’s this really beefy but also athletic combat where you just, you’re constantly moving and your guns are constantly changing and the level design is absolutely top notch. And they also updated all of the Doom iconography for the modern age in this really, really spectacular way. I think it was just one of those games where I think expectations for it were just, I think people, because I think there was like a reset on it before it came out. Like there was another Doom game that was in development. When it came along, I think it just really surpassed expectations. And so, and now Doom is obviously like kind of at the center of, you know, single player, first person shooters, it is the gold standard. And Doom 2016 is much loved. And yeah, so I think this is the right pick for this category. Thoughts, Matthew? I love that it just found its like own rhythm, its own vibe, that incredible constant pressure and mechanically leaning into that, the needs to be kind of close and up close and personal with things just kind of forces you to think differently. You can’t play it, you know, most shooters you can sort of force into a play style of your own liking. This one, I think you really have to meet it halfway. And I thought that that was really, really exciting. I loved being out my comfort zone in this game. Also just looks amazing as well. I just love the I love the visual style of it and how shiny and gory it all is. Yeah. Yeah. What about you, Jeremy? Was this on your shortlist at all? Yeah, I might well have picked this one. It, you know, more or less killed off the cover shooter by forcing you to kind of close that distance and also, you know, kind of help usher in mobility is one of the key factors in first person shooters, which is still a big deal today. And yet it’s completely itself. There’s nothing else quite like it. It’s a very deep resource game. Like you’re, you’re always thinking, you’re circling these arenas, you’re dodging arenas that feel kind of like multiplayer Quake arenas, right? They’re not really like what we had in single player shooters before. And, you know, you’re always calculating, OK, what do I need to get? Who? What can I? What weapon should I use against this enemy? When should I dive in to get some more health? And the sound design is unparalleled. So, yeah, all really still stands up and in many ways is unsurpassed. Well, good stuff. Good stuff, me. Well, I enjoy picking between Titanfall 2 and Max Payne 3, lads. Or pretend you like CSGO. I wish you well in that endeavor. OK, so this is tough. I feel like I’ve got to take category five of Mercer’s Sim or Stealth Game and grab Hitman 2. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I knew from what Matthew said in that last bit that he was talking about Hitman 2. The problem is, you can’t win in a straight fight between Deus Ex Human Revolution or Deus Ex Mankind Divided versus Dishonored 2. You can’t win that fight. That’s like Gun vs. Knife, unfortunately. I love the Deus Ex games from this time. May well pick one in the free pick categories, but it’s Dishonored 2 and Deus Ex are essentially on the same corner. And Dishonored 2 is a masterpiece. Both of those Deus Ex games are close to being masterpieces. So you’ve got a counter program instead. I thought about two games for this. I thought about Bioshock 2, which is 2010, just about scrapes in here, and definitely has its own take on the immersive sim, where you’re this very tanky character setting up all these traps and turrets for enemies. But fucking Hitman 2, man. I mean, come on, it eats the levels of Hitman 1. It’s like this really comprehensive package. I remember Christmas 2018 playing 100 hours of this game on Steam. Just like going up the leaderboards, shit-talking people who’d already played through the levels, getting them to reinstall it and go back and have another go. Discovering all these rich sandbox-y locations for the first time and picking them. And Hitman 2’s range of levels are just great. I think we’ve pretty much decided that Hitman 1 has the great levels. But, technically, the Hitman 1 would count as an expansion for Hitman 2, so this has to go in here, I think. And yeah, I think it’s a good pick for that reason. What do you think, Matthew? Gets you the bank, gets you Haven Island, which I like both of those levels. Pretty good levels, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Hitman 2’s got some of the best levels of the series. I think Miami’s low-key, absolute genius. Sometimes gets overlooked in the rankings, but it’s so, so fucking good. Yeah, I mean, I would have absolutely picked this. I would have actually picked Hitman 2 over Dishonored 2 personally. So I’m kind of sad. Sad not to have it. Also sad that you kind of sort of burnt some of the other picks for this option by making them sound less appealing, which is an interesting tactic. Yeah, that’s good. I salted the grass so that nothing would ever grow again, Matthew. Yeah, did you have to salt the earth so nothing would grow again? Oh, yeah, I did do that. It’s true. Thank you for that. Yeah, no worries, pal. Jeremy, what did you think of this pick? Asund and I would be great. Annoying that you get a retroactive expansion of a previous game in this bargain, but that is literally how it works. So, yeah, can’t really complain. Yeah, it wasn’t my tactic at all. And then I just had to like, I was like, oh fuck, he’s talking about Hitman when Matthew was in that last bit. If he’d have said nothing, I would have left this category and picked something else, but. Oh, why hit me in my big mouth? I feel better at reading Matthew’s, the things between the words than I am, because I did not pick up on that. And I’m concerned, I’m concerned about how it’s going to go from here. Well, I’m excited, frankly. So I feel like I’ve, Doom 2016 Hitman 2, I’ve done alright there, considering I was picking third. So we move on to Matthew again. So am I just down to one pick now a turn? Yeah. Okay, I’ve got to make it count. There’s things I don’t think people will pick. So I feel like they’re safe, but they’re also like, I need those because I don’t have other picks for those categories. Right. Do I gamble on that and just take some other popular things off the board? RPG is interesting, because now you’ve grabbed Witcher 3, I don’t think there’s a rush to pick from it. Because there’s fucking loads of RPGs from this decade. So yeah, I’ve just got to take a personal favourite. For indie game, I’m going to take Outer Worlds. Nice, good pick. Open world, open solar system mystery game where you fly around learning to be an astronaut, trying to work out why the universe explodes every 22 minutes and resets you back to the start. It is one of the sort of information, it’s almost like an information led Metroidvania. I know someone coined a horrible phrase for this, but I can’t remember what it is. It’s like mindvania or something. Brainvania, was that a thing? Oh, fuck off. Like absolutely fucking not, no way. But a game where the upgrades are the information that you learn on each loop and how you apply those to the next loop. You know, here, it’s in quite a concrete form in that information you learn on one planet is very deliberately designed to help you kind of crack the puzzle of another planet. That mechanical beauty aside, there is just wonder in seeing this 22 minute loop play out and the kind of quite mad concepts of the planets. There are two kind of planets that orbit each other where one sucks the sand from the other. So as one planet becomes more sparse and reveals its secret with time, the other planet’s secrets become drowned. So there’s a real race against time to reach one planet while the other one’s more relaxed. There’s a planet which is slowly collapsing into a black hole in the middle, again creating this great race against time. But putting aside all that, you can just sort of marvel at the sort of ingenuity of it all and the beauty of it. Does this also get me the DLC? The mystery of the eye? The outer eye? The inner eye? Even though it releases later, it’s still the DLC. Yeah. That introduces a new kind of planetoid with an absolutely killer mechanic, which I won’t spoil here because discovering it is one of gaming great wow moments. But yeah, I think this is just a perfect marriage of mechanical ingenuity and just startling beauty of this little perfect world they’ve built. It’s one of my top 10 games of all time, so I have to have it in there. Nice, one day I will play it to its completion. You big Outer Wilds guy, Jeremy? No, it’s still untouched for me. I’m definitely going to play eventually. Yeah, so who can say if it’s a good pick or not, right? Everyone loves a good pick. It’s a deeply popular game and one of those games that conceptually you wonder where on earth it came from. It’s so unrooted, un-molded in games that came before. It feels, you know, completely on its own. So yeah, well said. A very good case for a very strong pick, I think. Okay, good. The propaganda machine is absolutely popping off here on this draft. So what’s your next pick, Jeremy? I’m going to go Divinity Original Sin 2, but not for RPG 4 launched in early access. Hmm, interesting. Oh, that’s good. I feel like it’s important to note that before Baldur’s Gate 3, there was no sense that there was really… Nobody played Divinity Original Sin 2 and thought, oh, there’s a room for them to take this a level higher. It was a masterpiece and it felt like Larian at the peak of their craft. It’s also a slightly different beast where, you know, Baldur’s Gate 3 took on the cinematic trappings of a Mass Effect or a Dragon Age. Original Sin 2 is an isometric game and has more of that kind of classic CRPG flavor. And yeah, it’s more reactive and more open to you that and, you know, making choices than any of those classic RPGs that were with the exception of maybe Fallout 1, which feels like a kind of, you know, related to this game. Yeah, it had fantastic companions. And I feel like as a way into actual role play, which is sort of a bit taboo to talk about, but like role playing in computer RPGs is a thing that a lot of us don’t really do. Or, you know, you start with the intention of, oh, this character’s gonna be this kind of personality. And then you gradually fall into making choices as yourself or you finish a game and you feel like the character you made never really came together as a coherent person. Whereas Original Sin 2, it encourages you to play as one of the companions. And that is a brilliant way to play. I played as the Red Prince, who is a lizard guy who has been banished from his own sort of ancient Egyptian style kingdom for cavorting with demons. So many demons and messing around with them. So he has this incredible sort of haughty air and sense of entitlement that is out on his arse. And you get all the kind of conversation options that come with that. And you can kind of choose whether his story is one of redemption or kind of doubling down and getting revenge. You know, one of the other companions is a former slave of the lizard people. So like lots of juicy potential interaction with all these characters. And then all of that is supported by this incredible systemic machine without which Baldur’s Gate 3 never could have been built. Where, you know, all these elements interplay. And when you’re fighting combat, you’re, you know, using a fireball to get rid of a puddle of water, which creates a cloud, which you then electrify, which stuns your enemies. There’s so much depth in all those interactions and all the things that you use in combat, like teleporting enemies. You can also use out of combat to find, you know, access areas you maybe wouldn’t be able to. Otherwise, it’s a game that constantly says yes to you. And there’s nothing more PC gaming than that. Seems like a good pick and still leaves you with RPG to choose. So, a canny move to double down on the RPG lads in the audience. Very wise. Matthew, was this a big deal for you? Yeah, we did a let’s play of this on the channel. That’s how I played Original Sin 2 over the course of 82 weeks. Like, an hour a week with Ashlegury, with a swarm of people in the comments telling us what we were doing wrong, or often telling us interesting things we could do. So, it was a real learning process. I felt quite naked having to sort of get my head around a game, which I didn’t really understand for several hours in videos. We probably shouldn’t have done it as a let’s play, because, like, the viewing figures were terrible by around episode five. But we thought, we’ve started, so we should finish a year and a bit later. But, yeah, you know, for the ten loyal viewers, it was a good time, and I certainly enjoyed myself. Nice. Okay. In which case, then, it’s back to me for my next pick. I’m going to pick for a great game from a really tricky category. So, category eight, Simul Management Game, taking City Skylines. Gets me an absolute mountain of DLC. We’re talking about genres that kind of came back at this time, and Thrive. This was very much a kind of like the poster child for it in the sense that brought back basically the city management sim in amazing fashion right after SimCity kind of biffed it on PC from EA and won over the audience immediately. Just such an open game. Mods can really transform this game in some amazing ways, but the core experience is just really rock solid, has a lot of personality to it, does everything you want from a game of this nature, and then the DLC adds to it in various ways, like different building options, but also basically different shades of personality you can add to your city as it goes. An amazing open model, kind of like modern PC game. And I think it’s the one thing in this category that just felt like a slam dunk to me, and there’s no other game like it of this caliber from this time. So City Skylines felt like the pick to me. Thoughts, Jeremy? Yeah, I mean, it was indisputably huge, covering PC games at that time. It was also very weird and sort of… Was it funny? I don’t know. The way that EA had done all of the marketing work for it with the SimCity reboot, which then biffed it and which City Skylines then capitalized on and ruled for another decade. Yeah, that was funny. Yeah, until eventually slightly mucking things up with its own sequel. But hey ho. Yeah, I mean, you can’t… There are no competitors to it in that field. Certainly not during this period. So it’s a winner in itself, yeah. Any thoughts on this one, Matthew? I’ve never played it. It’s not a genre I play. I mean, this whole category is a fucking nightmare for me. And I’m just going to have to pick something I haven’t really played and lie about it. So look forward to that in a few minutes. Can’t wait. It’s going to be great. Okay. Well, that was me. So back to you, Matthew. Yeah. Well, let’s go with it. Let’s go. Simul management game. Let’s pick my favorite, Stardew Valley. I know you love that game. So that’s good. Yeah. I really like this game. It’s quite like Office Moon, the classic farming game. I’ve only played about an hour of Stardew Valley, but I know it’s about building up a farm. I know that people fancy the partners you can shack up within this game. It’s got a bit of that sort of performative horniness element to it, except it’s for quite wholesome lady who works in library and man in the local tavern. So it’s less egregious on that front. It has the same classic loops as Harvest Moon. Very carefully tending to your ground, planting your seeds, watering your crops, feeling a sense of ownership over the projects you’ve made. Through that quite careful nurturing, people find it very hypnotic. I know it’s loved. I’m not really worried about picking it for this category, which like I said, is a category which doesn’t really do it for me. It was between this and The Sims 4, which I had a little bit more of experience from RPS, from just watching Ash cover it on the channel. But again, I couldn’t quite claim it as a personal favourite, but Stardew Valley is adjacent to something I like. How’s that for a bitch? Yeah, I’m almost convinced and that’s enough, you know, that’s good. I think everything you said there was factually correct. A great victory for accurate information. The thing is, a lot of people just see the list, they won’t think of the episode. We’ll even listen to the episode when they see the list on Twitter. That’s the thing. Fair enough, Matthew. With that in mind, your picks can all be shams and who would even know? That’s the only sham I’m picking today. Okay, well, we’ll see. I mean, there’s still time yet, you know. We’ve got a few categories to go, so… Alright, back to you then, Jeremy. Okay. Sounds like I’m on location in a new station when I say that, doesn’t it? Back to you, Jeremy. I think I’m going to RPG and I’m going to take Fallout New Vegas. Oh, no. That’s right. Hang on. Wait. Yes. No, we’re in the period. I doubted myself then. 2010 is right. It’s just within. Fallout New Vegas, obviously a fan favorite, so a bit of a populist pick. However, I’m genuinely into it. I think sometimes you hear a complaint among Fallout fans these days that the series likes to revert back to a sort of primal state of post-apocalypse and doesn’t sort of entertain the idea of society building. But this really is the game that digs into that. And it has a form of civilization in the California Republic and a sort of wall that’s ticking along in the background. It’s in a stalemate and you can have a role in figuring out which way that’s going to go. I think it’s masterfully paced. Josh Sawyer, the director of this game, said he doesn’t really like story twists, he likes turns, sort of slow, you know, gradual realizations and dawning understandings. And geographically, this game is set up for that. Like, you can force your way through if you head north from Run Good Springs, the starting town, and make your way straight to New Vegas that way. But that’s incredibly difficult. It’s much more natural to head south and kind of follow the main quest lines round in a sort of horseshoe shape. And that journey takes you, like, introduces you to the factions in a gradual way. You know, you kind of get to witness the shock of what Caesar’s Legion’s left behind when it’s kind of burned and crucified the village and you get to see how the NCR is functioning and as you get further on, you get to see how it’s dysfunctioning. And it’s just kind of gradually feeding this information to you, with which you can make some very meaningful choices. And it’s a game that’s super open to you making choices. Like I know Deus Ex was a big influence on Fallout 3, even though that’s not usually acknowledged. And I think New Vegas is the game that really, you know, takes that forward. And it does feel like an immersive sim in the sense that you have these quest lines and you can kind of think up a solution and try it. And more often than not, that’s supported, which for a game of this scale is just ludicrous. Also, the aesthetic really stands up. It looks gorgeous on modern PCs, much, much better than it did back in the day. And has just this fantastic constant cowboy horizon behind everything you’re doing. So yeah, great vibes. I know it’s your favorite game of all time, Matthew. So how do you feel about Jeremy picking New Vegas? Yeah, I wasn’t in the mix for me. I thought actually it was an earlier game, you know, I won’t get into it and bog the episode down with my, you know, I’m not particularly into obsidians, RPGs and their whole kind of way. Whatever you play as, there’s always a path and a solution. Because I actually think it sort of devalues some of those choices when like everything is pandered to. It’s not quite for me, but I know this one’s gonna resonate with lots of people. Definitely the drive-by Twitter votes Jeremy’s absolutely going for there. And you know, fair play. It’s all about winning, isn’t it? It’s not about taking part. I think I need to spend more time pulling down Matthew’s picks. And I’m gonna start now with a misinformation campaign and say, why did you pick the outer worlds? If you don’t like obsidian games, just start seeding that confusion now. Fair. It’s yeah, it’s how you win. So it makes sense. Okay, my next pick then. Let’s grab something that there is nothing else like from this decade. That is a 10 out of 10 masterpiece. Gonna take Free Pick 1, Category 9, Portal 2. Just an absolutely peerless game. Thought about taking it for multiplayer because it has a whole co-op campaign to it. But basically takes the core of Portal in terms of its three-hour puzzle-based experience where you use Portals to move objects and yourself from one part of a test chamber to another in order to progress, and then expands it out massively in terms of storytelling. There’s a great story, a great voiceover turns here from JK Simmons and Stephen Merchant. Just absolutely fantastic, adds so much character to the game. And the addition of different types of paint as well to affect the way you solve puzzles, your kind of momentum moving through the arena. It is a 10. It’s like one of the best games I played on a playback back in the day on 360, but on PC obviously kind of lives on. People building their own kind of like additional test chambers for you to play, that sort of thing. It’s a true like immortal PC game. In the last, probably like relevant to us, Valve game that they made other than Half-Life Alyx. So Portal 2 feels like a strong pick to me. What do you think, Matthew? I’m not going to slag off Portal 2 in the name of trying to win some easy points before there. And yeah, I played a big chunk of this recently. And it was a game I was worried was a bit like one and done. But actually, I’d forgotten so much of it that going back to it was a pleasure of like reminding yourself of the subtleties of the writing. How rich the characters are given that they are just recorded voices is pretty wild. And the constant kind of drip of new ideas, particularly that the section where it introduces all the different gels, I think it, you know, the game just absolutely like lifts off and becomes something else entirely. So yes, it’s really, really good. Were you thinking about this one, Jeremy, or not on your radar? I guess I don’t like paint as much as you do. I’m not really a big painter. He’s learning people, he’s learning. Yeah, as you say, Samuel, it’s really kind of the high, the last high point for a certain kind of Valve game outside of VR. And I think a lot of us feel pretty strongly about that lineage. I think Pålsson is also much more closely related to Half-Life than is usually, not just, you know, there’s some kind of story nods, but that’s sort of like navigating hazardous environments, which Half-Life was always about as much as it was kind of fighting enemies and puzzling your way through. Yeah, it really is that sort of classic Valve feeling which you can’t get easily anywhere else. Yeah, exactly. There’s nothing else really like it. I think the Half-Life connections, yeah, you definitely, you definitely, just the kind of like feel of it. It’s very much a vibes based thing, but I definitely agree that there’s some DNA carried over there. Yeah, just one of the best equals of all time for sure. So we loop back around to you, Matthew. Go off, son. No, I’m going to take, I don’t know if anyone else is going to take this, but it’s the only really obvious one I have for launched in early access. I didn’t think of Divinity Original Sin 2, which was a really good, a really good pick. I’m going to take Dead Cells, which I think had just come out, was just about to come out in its final version. When I joined RPS and was like a minor obsession for a few months, kind of Castlevania meets 2D Prince of Persia looking thing, roguelike runs where you’re running through 2D mazes in the kind of Metroidvania mold, collecting items and upgrades which help you fight off increasingly nasty enemies throughout. And what I loved about it was the tactility of everything. It’s a game which kind of tempted you into lots of different weapons and builds, just by everything feeling so good and becoming so crazy as their powers got amplified. I often think that the trick with roguelikes is getting me out of my winning habit. Once I have a strategy that feels like it’s working for me, I feel quite unsatisfied if I haven’t got that particular loadout or if I’m not heading in that direction on a particular run. But the very best of the genre are things where however they do it, and in this case it is just through the feel of the thing and how exciting all the weapons are to use, that I don’t really mind what I have and I give it a go either way and that’s the kind of key to keeping me engaged. I did drop off with it after a while. I don’t have it in my gaming time to play one thing religiously, but for a while this was definitely it. Huge amount of fun and just a really great bit of game feel. Yeah, a good choice for sure. Do you have any thoughts on this one Jeremy? I haven’t played it, but undeniably the I mean, this is the roguelike era, right? That’s a deeply PC genre that came into its own in the mainstream in this decade. And there are a few games which really own that. And this is one of them. Yeah, it makes sense to me, Matthew. I think it was one of those games, I think. I felt like I came to associate with Switch after it launched on there. But it is true, it launched in early access on PC. I’m sure tons of people played it there. A great Steam Deck game as well, of course. And yeah, I agree. This is a hard category to navigate. So I can see why you went this way with it. That makes sense to me. OK, good. All right. So I guess I’d better grab an RPG before Jeremy fucking free picks every single Bethesda RPG out of existence here, which I think is maybe what he’s thinking. So Category 1 RPG, I’m going to take The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim. Huge moment for this series. Oblivion was kind of like the game that I feel like they’ve got the mainstream hooked on this kind of grand sweeping fantasy RPG. And then Skyrim was the one that took it to the next level in terms of the kind of like dungeon design and like how characterful the world was and how memorable the quests were. And the absolute spectacle of seeing a dragon kind of come down from the sky. It’s got one of the all-time great openings this game. And then of course like the way that players would expand upon it with mods and the different expansions that were released for it. And the fact that it’s kind of like kept going and going is this evergreen game that people return to over and over again, make look mega shiny with mods and dive back in. It’s truly, truly sticky. It feels like a great pick for this category. Like it’s as definitive a moment for the RPG in this decade as The Witcher 3 was I think but just for slightly different reasons. So yes, don’t have any thoughts on that pick, Jeremy. Indisputable, really, isn’t it? And I think really it’s the best game for setting out to reach somewhere for a quest and then tripping over something more interesting on the way there, which is a feeling that many, many developers have tried to capture since and not quite so successfully as here. And yeah, just it’s a beautiful setting, a pleasure to just kind of exist in really robust style systems that work really nicely with the spells because there are so many of them and they work in lots of different ways. And, you know, some of that is lost in the Fallout games since. So, yeah, there’s an awful lot going for it, obviously. Something just occurred to me, lads. I fucked it and it was actually Jeremy’s turn. Oh, I just, I trust you as the host, but that’s a position you can exploit. I just phased out, like, for once. I don’t normally do this because there’s three of us. I thought I should, like, actually keep track of who’s picking what, just because then I’ll understand whose turn it is. And I just looked, dead cells Matthew? But Jeremy was supposed to be next. So I fucked it. So you can technically take Skyrim if you want to. It’d be a great shit lord move, Jeremy. So, yes, it’s, the ball’s in your court and I will simply apologize. I’m not going to do that, but… Go on. If you do, I’ll just take Disco Elysium. You can’t destroy me, Matthew. I’ve already made my argument for Skyrim. I mean, does that beat up? God, I don’t know. I don’t know. There’s a lot of RPGs for this decade. It’s, it’s, yeah. Yeah. What will I pick? Do we think Alien Isolation is a shooter? No, I don’t think so. I would have picked Portal 2 for shooter. You know what I mean? No, because that, I suppose. I mean, they’re actual functioning guns. And you know, all right, I thought about it in isolation for free pick, for example. But I don’t know, Matthew can also weigh in on this. What do you think, Matthew? Yeah, I mean, I was like some of my picks of shooter I was feeling nervous about, because they’re, you know, I was like, is this actually more just this got a first person perspective? Does technically have guns in it. All right, then. All right, then. I will allow it if you will allow some bullshit down the line for each of us, Jeremy. We each get a bullshit token where we push the boundaries slightly of a category in order to get what we want. It’s a devil’s bargain. I will allow alien isolation on that basis for the shooter. Or maybe I should just say it’s a free pick and not allow the bullshit. I don’t know. No, okay. I’ll go for for alien isolation in shooter. It’s one of a kind. It is the best transposition of alien into video game that there’s ever been. In terms of direct licensing or the many, many spiritual tributes to it. It inspired the creation of the new alien film. So, so scary is it? And it’s deeply PC and it relies on this, not scripted cutscenes, which are pretty rare in this game. But this incredibly clever AI for the Xenomorph. Not that they call it the Xenomorph during development. They banned that term because they labeling the monster gives you some power over it, and they wanted to reinforce the powerlessness that you feel in this game. And yeah, that’s something you feel throughout. You feel completely responsible for making yourself safe and feel quite unable to do that a lot of the time. All you have are these kind of stealth systems to lean on and gadgets that you can cobble together and check out and desperately crawl into another corner and make some progress away from the alien. And in doing so, you develop this kind of incredibly intimate relationship with it. Even though it’s your enemy, it feels like it’s you and the alien pretty much throughout this game. And yeah, it’s just an exquisite world building, incredible attention to detail, feels exactly like that first movie, but also, you know, manages to expand it out convincingly into a whole. And great, great gun feel, Jeremy, of course. A great gun feel. I will say about the guns in this is that they, they’re terrifying to use. They’re quite unlike those in other first-person games. Every time you fire a gun, it makes a horrible snap. And it feels like you’ve made a terrible mistake, regardless of whether or not you felt you needed to use it. And you’re conscious that the alien may then be bearing down on you as a result of making a loud noise. So it has a very particular flavor. And yeah, very PC-induced. I love this game. It’s come up a few times in the pod with Andy most recently, of course. Yeah, just sort of like doomed by its critical reception, despite being much loved over time. I think it was a game, a challenging blockbuster at a time where blockbusters were not necessarily challenging. And time has been very kind to it. Anything to add on this one, Matthew? I think that they should have marketed it as the shooter. It clearly is. Yeah, it’s like it does everything you wanted aliens, colonial means to do in terms of first person shooting. Just needed a bit of Michael B in action. And then I think it would have been. Yeah. Okay, good. I’m regretting this already. Well, the shit talk is part of the draft experience, Jeremy. So it’s funny how different the tone is of this half of the episode to the first half. It was so quietly reverent and sort of like gentle. And now it’s just gone. I’ve gone full shit lord for sure. And even Matthew, I think, has a little bit. So I’m dipping a toe in the shit lord pool. Yeah, fair enough. My next pick is a little game called Elsgold’s Five Skyrim, lads. It’s a first person RPG developed by Bethesda. I’ve already talked about this, but Skyrim feels like a king pick for RPG. If I’ve got to go up against New Vegas and The Witcher 3, then Skyrim it is. So we’ll loop back around to you, Matthew. Okay. Trying to think if there are any major, major, like crucial big hitters on the board. I think there’s loads left. Yeah. You’ve got that tricky multiplayer category as well. So there are some things where I wonder if their online mode, like Rare, is separate. Right. And… Seems you really know well from the sound of it. Well, like, so here’s the question, and it kind of gives the game up a bit. Is GTA Online a separate thing to GTA 5? No, they’re the same thing. And you’ve got a shitlord token to cash in, remember? Okay, well, I used my shitlord token for GTA 5 for a multiplayer game. Interesting, okay. I mean, obviously, I can’t really talk about the single, but, you know, we’re here to champion the multiplayer element. I mean, I think we all know what the single player element of GTA 5 is like, and I’m not going to bore you for the umpteenth time about how I like driving along the coast, listening to Baker Street, because we just don’t need that on this podcast. Um, multiplayer, oh, multiplayer, GTA Online. Sam played a lot of it, and he always made it sound really exciting. I was very frustrating from all the endless loading screens. Did I make it sound exciting? I thought it was quite, it was a little bit gruelling, to be honest. A little bit gruelling, but you always made it sound like when it really came together and like you managed to get all the correct parts and do the kind of heists, it felt really exciting. Yeah. I mean, I like having GTA V on the list generally, because I don’t necessarily go, oh, we’ll think about it as an online game. Or a PC game necessarily. It’s hugely popular on PC. It is, but it’s hugely popular everywhere, right? That’s the thing with GTA. I mean, the thing is, if you saw what I also have written down for multiplayer, you’d be like, well, of course GTA V is right, because I’m like, do I take GTA V or do I take Spy Party? Well, why don’t you just take like Overcooked or Towerfall Ascension or something like that? Like there’s loads of games you could have taken. You’ve picked GTA now, you can’t go back. Yeah, I’ve picked GTA. I’ve played my bullshit token. I think GTA V, I think people like it. I think it’s a big hitter. There’s a lot of brand recognition. Do I personally think it’s worth wrestling with that online experience? No, but billions do. I mean, it’s made billions, millions do. AKA people love it. People do love it. The finances are there. We know that people love it. Oh, that’s so funny. I had some really good moments of GTA Online. I have racked up more than 200 hours of it on PC. There we go. I played through all the heists twice. They were really good fun. The later heists we’ve added are a bit more, bit more grueling, but they have their moments too. The moment to moment economy of it feels a bit mobile gamey and taxing on that and like taxing time wise. But the fundamental experience of stepping into a GTA world with your pals is great. And especially when it comes to things like the yearly Christmas snow thing they do, where they cover the entire map in snow, which is such a great touch. Just going in there with mates and then chucking snowballs at each other, having a great time. Then someone who’s cheating will drop a fucking tank or a helicopter on you or like trap you in some kind of cage like device, which also happened to me in this game. But the good moments are good. So yes, I will say though, I don’t necessarily consider this PC experience just because it launched so much later on PC than it launched on console. But a pick is a pick, Matthew. A pick is a pick. Any thoughts on GTA Online, Jeremy? I think it is its biggest value is probably is an alternate world. As Los Santos, one of the best urban worlds ever made, that you can just kind of visit indefinitely and always be something to do. In another sense that it is just sort of GTA 5 with a load of annoying crap in your way. This pick also gets you GTA 5 without all the annoying crap in your way. That’s right. Yeah. Oh, man. GTA Online. I’ve not had an awful lot of fun with it myself. I’d like to get into. It’s demanding. It’s demanding and the sort of low-level missions are pretty miserable. They have some pretty arcane rules. You can be fucked up by other players in a thousand different ways. I will say on PC, I think is, so I’ve heard, is the only place you can play it with somewhat reasonable loading screens. A fan solved that for them. Yeah, they did. And they just incorporated it on consoles as loading screens are still horrendous and flat out in the game for me. Even in the PS5 version? Yeah, it’s fucking shit. Really? Oh, man. I thought that’s why they released it on PS5, so they could use an SSD to sort it out. I think it’s all like a network-y thing that’s going on. The loading times were so bad. It was just like asking ourselves, is it done for? Do we have to reset the game from scratch? Like at least twice a night when playing it, because it took so long to load. This is your pick, Matthew. And people love it. People love it. It has nonetheless been very successful, but so was Donald Trump. People love him. Some people love him. Okay, your next pick, Jeremy. I’m having some choice paralysis now. I think I’m going to go to multiply. I don’t expect either of you will be picking this, but Hunt Showdown is the one I’m going for. You know, it’s made by Crytek, the Frankfurt team who made Far Cry, the first one and all the Crysis games and all that DNA is in there. Like it’s a stealth shooter with a really dense. What I want to say is like a single player atmosphere, like it really feels like there’s an awful lot of, you know, you get this kind of Louisiana swamp land, really distinct kind of play scape. You have all these monsters that live within it. You have to learn that kind of behaviors and their tells and how to not make noise and get yourself fucked up just moving through this space before you even think about other players. You know, not noticing when there’s like a gaggle of crows. Someone’s definitely going to correct me on the collective term for crows. That’s something people love to do, isn’t it? But yeah, like, because if you disturb some birds, they’ll fire up into the sky and that will be, that will give away your position to another team. Yeah, murder of crows. Murder of crows. A murder of crows will get you murdered in this game. And yeah, and there’s something wonderful about the fact that other players are kind of in the background, like it’s an extraction shooter that doesn’t fill its map with too many players. You’re really kind of on the lookout for them and you’re second guessing, okay, if I beat this, if we beat this boss and take the trophy from it and try to extract, will we be ambushed on the way out of this horrible rundown, you know, meat storage facility or something? And that’s really the kind of fundamental question that powers Hunt. You never know how many players are left. You never know how much of a risk you might be taking. So much of the game plays out in your head. It’s just like a fantastic rather psychological shooter. And really a multiplayer game for people who love single player games, many of whom I think are back page listeners. So it’s a recommendation, folks. Nice. Always meant to play this one. Played it in its very first form when it was at like hands on at E3 in 2015, 14, something like that. With Evan Larty on PC Gamer, who would later become one of its biggest advocates. It did just seem really exciting. I’ve always meant to give it a proper go. And the fact that it has persisted in this age where people are so fickle about online games and where online games rise and fall so quickly does speak to its quality, I think, even if people are shitting their pants about some UI changes on the Internet. But whatever, we don’t care about those people. So yeah, good pick, Jeremy. Right then, loops back to me obeying the proper turn order this time. I am going to take my free pick to Disco Elysium for the simple reason that I think having that and Skyrim covered off are like two ends of the RPG spectrum and they complement each other really nicely. Haven’t got an indie game in this list yet either. This launches in 2019. It is, I’ve not finished it. I have played about three to four hours of it. You are a hungover amnesiac detective who stumbles into, is trying to solve a larger mystery, but also stumbles into lots of mini scenarios where basically like the voices in his head are talking to him, the different skills represented as different personality traits represented as like different voices in the game. One of those games that seems like it could have been so self-indulgent, kind of like wank. When I’ve played it at preview, I did wonder if it was going that way, and then turned into something that people were absolutely besotted with and a really unusual spin on an RPG. The whole thing ended in tears ultimately, behind the scenes. But it persists as like a beloved game, a much talked about game. Yeah, truly one of the stickiest RPGs of this era. So yeah, feels like a good free pick. Any thoughts on this one, Matthew? Yeah, I really like this game. I think I’m maybe one of the few people who really likes it purely as a detective game and sort of rolls my eyes at some of its intellectual excesses. I think it is quite overwritten and quite a bad hang a lot of the time. If this game was a person, I would not want to hang out with it. I do like the mystery. I like the interconnectedness of the world. I like that how all this random stuff that’s going around around this town does actually kind of combine and is kind of all impacting each other in a weird roundabout way. I won’t lie, I do find it a tiny bit tiresome. I prefer my art a little simpler. Yeah, fair enough. Jeremy, do you have any take on this pick as well? Yeah, I’ll need to say I guess it really like it taps into that end of the RPGs that was you know, Planescape Torment and really sort of dialogue driven and choice driven and it’s you know, it’s a very PC thing and it deserves to be represented. Yep, okay, good stuff. Then we loop back around to you, Matthew. And again, I did say good stuff about my own pick there. So yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine. It is good stuff. People love it. So I will go for tactics or strategy. I am going with Shadow Tactics, Blades of the Shogun. I would have liked to have done Desperados 3, but it’s 2020. It just slips outside the window. But I think it’s nice to represent MiMiMi, who did excellent work in the real time tactics genre, riffing on games like Commandos or the original Desperados. This is a kind of ninja fantasy version of that, where you direct a party of very uniquely skilled ninjas around these beautiful isometric maps, setting up collaborative takedowns where you can’t quite pause time. I think that’s actually the advantage Desperados has, is it has an outright pause where this time creeps on always, which makes it slightly fiddlier game. But the idea that you can slow time right down, line up multiple actions and then trigger your squad all at once to ambush a party or distract one guard while you take down his friend while he’s looking the other way, things like that. I just think the skills are really fun. Like there’s a version of this where you could almost make the case that it fits into the immersive sim category, such as the interplay of the skills and the kind of problem solving with those abilities. I think it actually does tickles the same part of the brain that enjoys problem solving and the kind of what if, and then seeing how you can execute it. But I’ll keep it in this genre where I think it properly belongs. Also, I’m not a big strategy head, so a lot of other things go a little over my head in this category. So Shadow Tactics, it is. Yep, good choice. I did think you would pick this for this one, which is why I didn’t rush to pick a Tactics or Strategy game. I felt like this was in the post from you. Just really light, really beloved, and I think very slowly accumulated the credit it deserved. And then it feels like, as Mimimi was at, it’s like kind of creative Zenith and the peak of its audience appreciation, it ceased to exist, which is really heartbreaking and a bad sign of where things are at. But this game exists as a kind of like, yeah, amazing kind of spin on that classic commando style formula. I think in the same way that XCOM comes back and absolutely masters the genre it’s part of, I think this does the same, you know, like anyone going forward or working in this space is likely to take big interface lessons from MiMiMi. I mean, there’s that Sumerian 6 that came out this week, which is very, very MiMiMi influenced. So, OK, well, that’s a good choice. Jeremy, did you dabble with this sort of strand of games at all? Feels like your wheelhouse. Yeah, I think it would be, but I haven’t made time for them yet. And I feel a little bad not to have contributed to that. It’s on you. It is on me. I killed me, me, me. Yeah, I know that at a certain point, I’m going to get into these games and think, damn, I wish they were still around. But yeah, I haven’t made time for them yet. But yeah, strong pick. Good stuff. Right. It comes back to me, but I’m going to give the listeners for their benefits are just so many fucking picks in this draft, a little recap of where we’re at. So, this is a chronological order. Is it you again now, or have we jumped again? It is me, yes. Okay, good. I wasn’t playing a trick. I lost track. No, you’re right. No, it is Jeremy. It is your turn. But anyway, I’ll recap and then we’ll come back to you. God, I’m so fucking bad at this. Maybe because I’m so used to doing this with Matthew. Yeah, a third person’s really knocked us off. It really has, clearly. Okay, I’ll just recap the picks then, Jeremy, and I’m glad you intervened there or otherwise I would have shat the bed on this yet again. Right then, so first pick, Matthew, Witcher 3. Second pick was Jeremy with XCOM Enemy Unknown. Third pick was also Jeremy with Dishonored 2. Fourth pick was me, Doom 2016. Next up was Hitman 2, also me. Matthew then picked Outer Wilds. Jeremy then picked Divinity Original Sin 2. I then picked City Skylines. Matthew then picked Stardew Valley. Jeremy then picked Fallout New Vegas. I then picked Portal 2. Matthew then picked Dead Cells. Jeremy then picked the Pulse-Pounding FPS, Alien Isolation. I then picked The Elder Scrolls V, Skyrim. Matthew picked his favorite game of all time, GTA Online. And Jeremy then picked Hunt and Showdown. I picked Disco Elysium, a game I’ve not finished. And then we just wrapped up with Shadow Tactics there with Matthew. So back to Jeremy. I picked Grand Theft Auto V. Well, okay, yeah, fine. Is that what you want it to say on the… Yes. I see. Okay, no worries. It does not say GTA Online. But that is technically what you picked, wasn’t it? But I asked if it was part of GTA V and it is. You’re getting this on the technicality that you can’t launch GTA Online without passing through the menu of GTA V. I’m just saying it was part of it. He’s got us there, Jeremy. And I played my bullshit token. Yeah, you have. And I’ve still got mine to play. So keep that in mind going forward. What’s your next pick, Matthew? Jeremy. Next pick, Jeremy. Turning to simulation and management. I mean, there is a real bullshit pick I’ve considered for this, which was Death Stranding. Of the strength that it won PC Gamer’s Game of the Year in 2019 and has a really deep simulation. I argue it’s more closely related to Mud Runner than it is to Mud Gamer. Why are you proposing? He’s a human truck. Dog, that’s a PlayStation game as well. I just want to point that out. That is a PlayStation game. I’m not doing it. I’m going to go instead for PC Gaming Heartland Pick, American Truck Simulator. Great choice. These games really sort of like embrace mundanity as a plus. You know, the sort of anti-action games. They are about just making sensible choices, driving sensibly, taking lovely routes through. I think I started in Roswell, which was the furthest east the map went at the time I played it. I drove west all the way to San Francisco. You know, I enjoyed all the landmarks. I matched my music to the states I was passing through as I went. Just a really wonderful vibe to kind of about yourself in and, you know, see, you know, the backdrops of movies that you recognize as a British person, always looking outward at US culture and geography. You know, it comes from that very PC thing which has trundled along in the background forever of just like ex-job simulator. You know, that was a thing that maybe the German market kept alive through the noughties, but now… They sure did. Yeah, big proper numbers now on Steam. And is, you know, a mainstream concern. You know, a game called Space Tripper just came out, which certainly wouldn’t exist without Euro Truck Simulator and American Truck Simulator. Yeah, I mean, if you want extra mundanity, play Euro Truck Sim, because that really captures a sort of grayness of Britain. But American Truck Sim really gives you that extra sort of, you know, thrill of passing through Vegas and all of these kind of landmarks that you recognize, while also just kind of kicking back and having a nice time. Yeah, good choice. I had Euro Truck Simulator too, and Kerbal Space Program is my backup for this category. And they’re both like, yeah, I think it’s I think it is good to pick something that’s just super like Heartland Simmy in this space. I think that’s just right for the draft. Yeah, I think if I had picked Death Stranding, I think people seeing that list would revoke your PC dweeb license. Yeah, that’s it. You’re never getting back. Never get it back no matter how many pieces you wrote about immersive sims, Jeremy. So that’s, it was a good choice. Okay, good stuff. That’s a fine pick. I keep saying that about Jeremy’s picks, but not Matthew’s. I promise it’s not psychological. We’ve got history. That’s fine. Let’s not pretend we don’t. Yeah. All right then. My next pick then in the correct order this time. Time to play my bullshit token. Guess what launched in early access this decade guys, but then comes out for the full release, the next decade is Hades. So that is my pick. No, come on, come on, come on now. The game is available in this decade, it counts. It’s like 2018, it launches on Epic, and then it’s out in 2019 on Steam. That is an early access launch, I’m afraid, and that counts because that’s where the game is first available. I wish I had clarified if we’re going on date of launch or get date of release. That’s fine, I’m not going to argue with it, but I should have asked. I should have asked. Okay, yeah. So is that considered a bullshit move too far? What do we think, lads? I think I established bullshit moves with some ones that are, and yeah, I mean, it’s very malleable. It’s also true to like what early access releases have been like on PC. You know, some games were massive when they launched in early access and people got bored of them by the time they actually launched and some of the other way around. So, you know, people were excited about Hades the moment it aired, so I think that is fair. I’ll allow it. Yeah. Okay, good. I love it when everyone has to groan at a pic because it’s just too good. So I guess I should explain what Hades is. One of the best roguelite games ever made. It’s certainly the best game made by Supergiant. It’s an amazing blend of Diablo style combat with a great narrative wrapping of Greek gods, brilliant character design, great writing, and just a fantastic logic for each loop and loads of variety from the different weapons that you unlock. We just talked about it on the XL episode, in fact, in our picks of the best third-party games you can play on Nintendo platforms. Hades obviously closely aligned with Switch, but also undeniably the momentum comes from PC, and it’s absolutely massive on PC. You can play Hades 2 right now on PC. So it is its home in a lot of ways. So yes, no regrets there. I did also think about the Bohemia Interactive strand of games from this time, though. I thought about DayZ and Armour 3, which working on PC Gamer, I had great experiences with both those games. They definitely would have taken me more into like that, I guess, Heartland PC territory. But at the same time, I just think something that I genuinely love makes more sense. So I think you know our listeners. Our listeners are more Hades than they are Armour. Yeah, okay, well, yeah, that is also true, perhaps. So we move on to your next pick, Matthew. Free pick one, I’m going to take Return of the Obra Dinn. Nice. Like Outer Wilds, another of my top ten games, the greatest detective game ever made, in my opinion. The only game that really makes me feel like a detective in that I’ve stepped into these crime scenes, hoovered up all the information I can see, and from the information in your ship’s log, to the sounds you hear, to the tiniest details, you know, a particular sock sticking out of a hammock, or where someone appears to be going in one scene, and hopping back through time to sort of chart their movements around the ship. I thought this was just incredibly clever. I still don’t really understand how Lucas Pope held all of this information in his head. It seems absolutely wild to me that one person could have made this thing. Put that aside, and just the creepy visuals of it, this sort of dithering effect, these moments of horrific crime frozen in time, combined with these like, demented tunes played on ship’s bells is so atmospheric, so striking. I absolutely love it. I don’t know if this game ever really broke through to the mainstream, but a lot of people who have played it is one of their favorite games, so I’m going to gamble on that. I think it’s a good pick. It’s a very Matthew Castle pick as well. Yeah. Again, I think it just launched with, there was just the one review on Eurogamer from Chris Donder, the game of five stars, and then it just critically was just celebrated from the off. I think it’s a good choice. I just played a bunch of it this week. Do enjoy listing out for a Scottish accent and be like, oh, that must be one of the two Scottish guys. That’s like very much the experience of playing this game. I wonder which of these guys with a little hat, this is, which of the mates this is, and which of the three women is this? Those are the kinds of questions I was asking myself this week. As I played it, role played it as a shit morse. That’s basically what I did. So yeah, great pick. Jeremy, do you play this one? I haven’t played it. It’s certainly one. I have a feeling that I’m going to fall for. Good choice. So Jeremy, we come back to you. Firmly into Heart Pick territory now. I’m going to go with Vvvvv, as it’s written, or V as I believe it’s pronounced. I’m going to take that as indie game. So this is the Terry Kavanaugh Platformer. He’s a developer who was one of the first big indie developers, and at least as far as I was concerned, and has a real knack for minimalist design that just does everything. He needs it to without any extraneous nonsense. This game is maybe three to five hours long. It’s about, I think, as the spaceship crashes and you’ve got to fix it, and you move through these very, very abstract, tight landscapes. You know, some of the enemies, I think are just symbols and stuff like that. And there’s lots of spikes and whatnot. But it doesn’t tap into that kind of like 80s platformer thing of just like player cruelty, which I’m not interested in. What it did really introduce alongside like Super Meat Boy around at the same period, although it was more of an Xbox hit, is the sort of micro challenge structure where checkpoints were really close behind. So you could enter a little gauntlet of spikes and whatnot, and it would feel impossible. And then within five minutes, you would have completely mastered it and feel amazing because you were able to just repeat it over and over very quickly. Its central unusual kind of jumping mechanic was just like a gravity flip. So, yeah, whenever you hit the space bar, you hit the ceiling and then you hit it again and you fell to the floor. So that’s what’s unique about how it plays. It’s also completely unique in how it looks. Very sort of bright colors. And the soundtrack is exquisite. It’s playing in my head right now. I can never forget it. I’m not really a big chip tune guy, but this is a really sort of like smooth and emotive and playful form of chip tune that a lot of people still listen to that soundtrack to this day. And I just know whenever I play this game at least three times, whenever I play it, I know that I’ll be feeling real joy within 30 minutes. And there aren’t that many games I can say that I thought. Yeah, good pick. I don’t know anything about this game. Matthew, is this something you know anything about? Yeah, it was on 3DS or so because it’s so visually simple. It could be there too. And yeah, I really liked it. There was a guy on our team, I think it was Tom East, was absolutely obsessed with this. And yeah, it’s just really, really pure, but super focused. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, interesting choice, Jeremy. And I’m glad you’ve laced in a few heart picks. I think it’s important to do that. I give the list a bit more shape, so that makes sense. I forgot to mention, there’s also a quirk where the character expressions are also a binary flipping thing from like happy face to sad face. And there’s something weirdly like emotive and affective about that. We go, oh no, and the face just flips upside down. It’s fantastic. That’s good. Yeah. Those are basically my two moods. So pretty much captures the range of the human experience there. It’s my mood before and after someone picks Alien Isolation as a shooter. Big smile and then big frown. Or Hades for early access. All right, good stuff. Back to me then. Right. Time for an absolute heavy hitter in Category 7 multiplayer. Fucking Rocket League, lads. I mean, ah, so good. I’m surprised this didn’t get picked, actually. This, when it launched in 2015, was like an instant phenomenon, propelled in part by it being free on PS Plus for PlayStation. But on Steam, it was absolutely enormous out of the gates as well. It was just the right game for the moment. The concept, lads, is what if cars played football? And what if the ball exploded where you scored? And then you watched a replay of it every time. And the only people who could skip the replay were the players who’d scored, leading to many instances of shitlord players making you watch in slow motion them scoring the goal they just scored. A classic online rage-inducing and often magical experience. Rocket League was amazing. I’m surprised it’s kind of like taking these different shapes as a long time games of service thing. It felt like it was such a sort of like, I think it is like really evergreen. I played it for over a hundred hours on Steam and then probably about the same on PlayStation. Just really, really got into it. What you can do with the physics of the cars and the huge ceiling for mastery is what makes it a great multiplayer experience, I think. But yeah, there’s like 12,000 people playing on Steam right now. You can’t even buy it on Steam anymore. It’s an Epic Games freebie. You can play on any platform pretty much and it is free to play. So that’s very generous. I think the various ways they tried to complicate over the years haven’t necessarily made it better. I think it’s always, always at its best when it’s just a straightforward square arena, sorry, cube arena, and then you just fucking, and then you just kind of go at it without any kind of like novelty stuff, like a hockey puck or whatever. But yeah, a brilliant multiplayer experience for the defining multiplayer game from this decade. Thoughts, Matthew? I wish I’d picked this. I had written this down, Pick This to Upset Sam, and I now regret not picking it because I thought, oh, maybe he hasn’t played it for a while and it doesn’t mean as much to him anymore, which is why I bottled it and picked a classic multiplayer game, Grand Theft Auto V. Yes, so, yes, annoying, shithouse-ery, avoided slash missed. Well, I was going to pick that or Apex Legends, so I had a way out. Well, that’s the thing, see, I was trying to work out how I, I was thinking if I could get both those games, I bet that would really nobble him. It was only worth doing if I could get both and I couldn’t see how to do it. You would have wasted your two free picks trying to ruin it for me. That would have been quite funny. Jeremy, do you ever play Rocket League? Does it feel like your sort of thing? Cars and footballs? Very Jeremy Clark sort of, isn’t it, Rory? Wrong Jeremy, basically. Wrong Jeremy. I wouldn’t have thought of it because of that. It’s such a famous PS Plus success. But you’re right. It’s the one-two punch that made that work. It exploded in awareness through PS Plus and then the sales came through PC, I imagine, is how that worked. And yeah, and has had a huge audience ever since. I know it was, yeah, I know it was, it’s really your sort of defining live service game personally, right? And it’s not one I’ve touched at all. So, I mean, that is very true to PC games that like, a friend’s everything is something you just don’t know at all. That’s how I feel about so many of the CS GOs and Dota’s of this time that, you know, or League of Legends, like you say, those are games that I am, well, I think CS GO I do understand the appeal of and fundamentally like the mechanics of. MOBAs I never even pretend to think they’re good and I never will. So that, yeah, so you’re right, Rocket League is definitely my game. Apex maybe surpassed it more in recent years, but yeah, it’s true that it was a huge moment for me on PC this game. So yeah, we come back around to Matthew. For shooter, because the two classic shooters Doom and Alien Isolation are already taken, that really forces me. No, I’m going to go Metro Exodus. Oh, nice choice. Which isn’t like a, you know, all guns blazing shooter. It’s probably closer to the Alien Isolation end of the scale than it is the Doom end of the scale. It’s a game, you know, a world, a post-apocalyptic world where guns are incredibly important and are what will keep you alive. But also ammo is incredibly precious, incredibly sparse. You end up thinking about your guns a lot and customising them to be stealthy or be very dangerous. So it is, you know, crucially a game about weapons. It’s unlike the other Metro games, which were largely set in the Metro tunnels in, you know, a corridor shooter in that it’s all set in the underground. And this breaks you out into the sort of open world, sort of wide linear hub areas, sort of swamp, a desert and a kind of autumnal forest retreat. But the kind of mix of the kind of core story line pulling you through and the kind of weird stuff you find around the edges, I thought was really well balanced. You know, it isn’t a open world gaming that you’re ticking loads of icons off a map. It’s still like a 20, 25 hour campaign, but it’s got this real focus to it. I just thought it sold you on what happened to the world at large better than the previous two games where you are sort of stuck in these tunnels and you get to see the communities there, but you don’t necessarily get like the wider picture. And I thought the way it kind of balances sort of freedom, but also has like one eye on set pieces, maybe kind of closer to the kind of Valve model of story led, set piece led first person shooter was really, really satisfying. It has one of the best sniper rifles ever that you get in the desert. Just the sound of it echoes across the landscape for what feels like minutes, only it’s like 10 seconds. But when you hit someone with one of those bullets, it’s about as good an impact as there is in a game. Yeah, I really, really love this. Yeah, this whole series launches during this decade and it is like, it’s sort of like, let’s say them for a game is doing the Valve thing. Well, Valve stops doing it, and doing it to such a high bar. Yeah, so I really like this series. I’m glad it’s represented here because I definitely think it’s a PC powerhouse in terms of how it uses the hardware, how it looks, spectacular looking games, great world building. They also have that edge of AA to them. I think it makes them quite appealing. They do have the sort of scale and polish of AAA in a lot of ways, but there is like a AA kind of like feel to them. It’s like a vibe. It just because the concept is just not mainstream at all really, and yet it has found its audience. I think all three of these games are great. Loved Last Light as well. What do you think of this, Jeremy? I remember at the time on PC sites, it felt like Valve had vacated this space and we’d have conversations and write articles about who the successors were, and it felt like Metro was a name that came up a lot in that kind of sphere. Not many sort of mainstream shooters you can point to and go, that has a very PC spirit and rather than, you know, a kind of multi-platform one, but this is definitely one of those. Yeah, good choice, Matthew. So Jeremy, what’s your next pick? I’m really like torn at this point between stuff I think will go down well and just like wanting to, wanting to talk about some games I loved in this period, so. What a dilemma. It is a dilemma. Do you want to win or do you want to leave with a sort of some self-respect? That’s the question. Well, yeah, I mean, I should have ditched my self-respect by picking GTA Online for GTA 5 early dawns and then I wouldn’t have to still be worrying about that. Yes. Other people taking shots at Matthew. I think I’m going to go with this one that sort of splits the difference, which is, say, the Spire. Oh, that was my pick for one of these categories. That was a good choice. It feels like it fills a hole I haven’t got in, you know, my other picks here. Like, obviously, roguelikes were enormous in this decade on PC, and so were card games, and this is the one that combined them in the most delicious way. Like, the problem I always had with, you know, I remember playing Hearthstone before, like in pre-release period and really enjoying it. But then as soon as it became, reached this mass audience, it then became like, oh, you have to, you have to play with all these cards as a starting point because otherwise you’re not going to be competitive. And I kind of hate that. I like muddling through. I like figuring out combinations myself. I don’t like the internet doing it for me and having to Google lists about how I should be playing. And I think something like Slay the Spire, really it gets you that pleasure of shuffling and figuring out your deck as you go. That’s happening every single time you play a run in this game. You can’t control what cards are going to come up and become available to you and what opportunities you have to ditch others. So it forces you to experiment with different combos. And that’s really like key to its longevity and the pleasure of it. There are loads and loads of games that exist purely because this one does. I’m quite fond of the Gwent version of this as well. So there’s, you know, there are a lot of games you can thank Slay the Spire for. Monster Train and Banger. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is still considered like the high watermark of this type of game as well. Like it has held on to that in terms of like its longevity and its depth and it’s and the ways it can play out in a way that like a lot of these games are just not quite as evergreen. So it really is the king of that that type of experience. So at least on this kind of like particular kind of like card turn based front. Yeah. So that makes sense. Good choice. You ever play this on Matthew? I’ve only like dabbled for like an hour or two. It’s hard isn’t it? It’s tough. Also just one of those things where you can feel something. You’re like, oh no, I’m going to have to give this like 20 hours to get my head around it. The answer is yes. Yes. I didn’t have 20 hours to give. It’s a great toilet game, but definitely one where your wife might start to question why that we took quite so long. So it can cause issues. Toilet game after a holiday gone wrong, perhaps. Yeah, good choice, Jeremy. Like I said, what category was that for though? You didn’t say which category it’s for. Sorry, free pick. I think I’ve still got two free picks to go, so that’s one of them. Comes back around to me then. So there are still loads of indie games left from this decade to pick. Not a big surprise to people, I’m sure. So Category 4 indie game, I’m taking Hotline Miami. I felt like my list needed a little bit more in the way of like immediate beefy action. But Doom 2016 ticks that box nicely, but it’s good to have a bit more of that. Top-down shooter slash melee combat game, score attack game as well, basically clearing out floors as quickly as possible, throwing weapons, picking up new weapons, and just generally trying to keep guards on the ground while you’re dealing with other guards who are rushing towards you, avoiding gunfire, using masks to augment the experience, to give it these different parameters, to extend the longevity of the game. Perfectly self-contained, gloriously readable, sort of like a synth-wavy graphics. If anyone’s ever played the game The Hong Kong Massacre, which is very much in this vein, it is so unreadable because it’s just, it’s got this realistic art style. Your eyes cannot pass in the same way. And you realize how Hotline Miami makes something that seems quite simple, actually kind of perfect in its execution. Everything, every decision they make is spot on for it. Yeah, I think this was like one of the defining indie games. It’s kind of like one of that movement that happens on PC in this decade. Hotline Miami is such a key moment in that. I think it’s really stood the test of time. More so than its contentious sequel, which I’m also quite fond of. But this feels like the right pick for this category to me. Thoughts, Matthew. The exact opposite of Outer Wilds. My pick in terms of vibe and energy. I do love Hotline Miami. I played it on Vita. I don’t think I’ve ever played this game sitting down at a big screen, so I don’t really know how that lands. In my head, I always kind of tied this to the portable experience, but maybe it hits differently played on a desktop. Launched on PC first as well. It was out for a year earlier. Also, you can control the cursor in a way that you can’t really on a pad. Like on console, you have to rely on auto-lock basically, but on PC you have full 360 mouse controls, so it gives you just way more precision. That’s kind of the difference, really. Well, I’ve got no arguments with it. I love it as a game. Yeah. What about you, Jeremy? Did you encounter this one? Yeah. I’m sorry. Just to pull you up on one thing there, Matthew, it’s called The Outer Worlds, the game, the pick you referenced. Just to avoid any potential confusion for our listeners. A cheeky bit of gaslighting there for a draft. Yeah. Hotline Miami. I also played on Vita in a hotel room in Iceland. Very distinct memory. Very good memory. Fantastic game. Lots of games that use that format now, particularly in, you know, Devolver’s Catalogue Sins where fast resets, quick deaths, and you’re sort of figuring out a pattern for how to kill everyone in a room or a set of rooms. And that’s a very, very satisfying formula. This one did it first and probably still best. I do love it, even though Slay the Spy would have probably picked if I had fewer sort of like gentler slower games on my list. So yes, on we go to Matthew’s penultimate pick. So for immersive sim or stealth game, I’m going to pick a game. I’m going to say before I pick this, Samuel’s going to try and make the case that this is a console game and shouldn’t be thought of as a PC game. But it’s on PC so it’s fine, it’s Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain. Yeah I do think of that as more of a PlayStation game. Yeah I love what you’re doing, the prosecution is going to try to say. Are you going to try and convince you this has no place on PC even though it is arguably well it is the best place to play it from a tech level? Would you concede, that’s not true, it’s 60 FPS on PS4, but would you concede that this is at least a multi-format game in its overall perception Matthew? Yeah but I would say that for several games on this list. What GTA? Well I think Doom’s a multi-format game. It is, I mean Doom’s history is on PC. It sure is Jeremy. Metal Gear Solid 5 is an iconic PlayStation game, but I think Samuel you might have given away this high ground with Rocket League to be honest. I feel like that is quite strongly associated with PlayStation. So it’s all coming out now. I don’t know. Rocket League’s got over half a million reviews on Steam. I refute that characterization sir. But I also did push for Metal Gear Solid 5 to win PC Gamer’s Game of the Year 2015. Well, that’s the thing, you know, and maybe it was going over some top 10 lists from the last few years that kind of put this in my mind. I was like, well, if it’s good enough for PC Gamer, then it’s good enough for me. I love this game. I would have picked Hitman 2 for this for sure if I hadn’t screwed that. But Metal Gear Solid 5 is an incredible stealth sandbox. Feels more PC, not it feels more PC than it feels console, but then the other Metal Gears, it makes sense as a, as a kind of PC game to me. A huge game that you can play endlessly going into these missions, bringing new gadgets, bringing new allies, new tool sets to sort of see what you can do and how you can approach these situations. One of the most sort of expressive Stealth Heroes in terms of move sets and just what you can do with them. Some people moan about this game, some of the hardened Metal Gear fans that it kind of loses some of its inherent Metal Gear-ness in the lack of like endless interruptions and a relatively sparse story throughout. But what it does lean into is Kojima’s like eye for incredibly responsive action games, games where every outcome has been thought of. And if you can try something, the game will kind of respond in some way, which in this more open world sandbox is just, the amount of things you can discover and the amount of things you can try is so much bigger. I think it really taps into the, that the kind of playful game designer side of Kojima probably better than anything else he’s ever made. And that sense of experimentation and discovery is still really exciting. Like, you know, watching what people still do in this game and kind of pull off in this game is amazing to me. And you can shoot men and animals and attach them to balloons and then pull them to an oil rig, which is just an inherently funny thing to do. I think, yeah, the thing to say about this is we probably made this point before, but this is where MGS5 has the PC stealth credibility as well. It can stand toe to toe with the likes of, you know, the modern-day SX games and Dishonored and in its psyche. Yeah, like the play expression, like you say, but also the different ways you can play with enemy AI, the different tools they throw into the game as it extends long past its original story conclusion. And yeah, it is a masterpiece for sure. And yeah, it’s only sad that we just got one, well, I guess you count Grand Zeros, we’ve got two, but we just got one game in this mold. And then Kojima pulls out with Konami and we never see another one in this vein, unless you count Survive, which I don’t. So yeah, there it is. So that’s a good choice, Matthew. I don’t think it’s the most PC pick, like I say, but I think it is, it’s not, I think it’s like less out of place on the list than GTA is. Yeah. I don’t think either is violently shitting his pants, but. Hey, we’re all doing our best to win this election, so I understand. Still better pick than the Outer Worlds as well, which I know you’re a big fan of, so yeah. OK, Jeremy, we come to your final pick, I believe. Yeah, I just want to remind listeners of how they laughed when I mentioned Death Stranding, when taking Metal Gear V into consideration. I’m literally just flipping between perspectives here. You were saying Death Stranding was a simulation game, and you likened it to Mudrunners. That’s the thing I was laughing at. And also, it also did launch on PS4 first, whereas MGS V launched simultaneously on PC and PS4. So there’s at least that, you know. Whatever his name is, some port of bridges. He is the truck, by some by it, and he is the truck. No, I get it. I get what you were saying. You just made me laugh. Be the truck, Jeremy’s ad campaign for Death Stranding. I don’t really even stand against Metal Gear V. I’m just swapping between viewpoints, like costumes now, to try and damage you both. It’s just fun, isn’t it? Fun doing that. It’s very enjoyable. It’s always good to have three people. You just get a different angle on shit house-ery. That’s well worth it for that. What’s your final pick, Jeremy? It’s my final pick. I’m going to pick one that I don’t think I’d review. I don’t think it’s in danger, was ever in danger of being stolen, but it means a lot to me, and that is Ultima Star. Which category is that? Free pick. Free pick 2. That is a bunch of ensemble veterans who’ve worked on Age of Empires, and most recently Halo Wars, set up an indie studio, Robo Entertainment, and they built this brilliant hybrids tower defense thing, where you’re defending a central point from waves of orcs, trolls, and what have you. It’s in a beautiful spot in the brain where it’s deeply tactical, like where you place all your flip traps and like, okay, this is going to coat the orcs in oil, and then this is going to set fire to them, and then they’re going to be flipped back over those traps, so I get a second run through from them. That’s going to finish off these ones. There’s a lot of high-level strategy involved, but also once the wave starts, you’re not going to win unless you get stuck in yourself in a third-person action capacity. So you’re really sort of balancing these, you flip back and forth between these ways of playing, and then even as you’re doing your third-person fighting, you’re getting kills, you’re getting points, which you can then use for construction. So you’re throwing down traps and new walls and stuff, to kind of chicane the creatures and desperately contain the problem while you’re also thinking about the combat. So it really is like a true hybrid that, you know, nothing else I’ve played on PC does that in quite the same way for me. And I enjoy that more than playing a straight RTS, personally, you know, it is, it just sits in a perfect and unique spot. And yeah, there’s just something magical about like every time you play a level, you build up all these traps and these walls and everything else and then it’s washed away before the next one like Sound Castle on the beach. There’s something very special about it to me. It’s a very Jeremy Peel pick. I confess to not having really played this one. Matthew, I don’t know if you’ve ever given this one. I haven’t. The only person I’ve ever heard talk about it is Jeremy. So this all tracks. Yeah. What a trademark to have with your name on it though. I guess so. Yeah. It was like a Steam fixture for quite a while there. Like the sequel had a great co-op mode as well and it was often in the sales. So during that kind of early period of Steam, it felt like it was a big name, but less so now certainly. Yeah. This has filed away in my head under the same category as games like Torchlight and Trine, where I’m like, I know someone plays those games, but I don’t know who any of those people are, but possibly Jeremy Peel. That’s kind of like the way they filed away. But yeah, I’m pleased you picked something that’s very you, Jeremy, in this craven attempt to grab blockbusters going on elsewhere in the draft. Who’s that aimed at? I don’t know, actually. Myself, I’m not sure. But I like that pick regardless. So we come to my final pick. So tactics or strategy? I’m taking XCOM 2. Now, I think that most people would probably say that this, combined with War of the Chosen, the expansion, the ads, dickhead villains basically who invade the maps in the tactical layer and then even try and mess you up in the strategic layer, basically form like narrative style, narrative kind of framed adversaries that you fight across the course of the game alongside like additional human factions, maps, all kinds of different additions, enemies to the XCOM 2 experience makes for the definitive XCOM game. But there’s definitely like a marked difference between this experience and XCOM Enemy Unknown. There’s definitely a kind of on the run element to the way the XCOM 2 plays out and a stressful kind of like, well, it sort of changes a bit in terms of how the kind of like counting down element works in it. But you are basically human resistance in a world where you lost the original XCOM Enemy Unknown campaign and have to kind of fight back against like basically this these combined like alien inhuman kind of like dystopian sort of like faction called Advent. A really interesting twist on the XCOM formula kind of sticks to the original sort of like trajectory of XCOM and them like changing up the kind of threat you are facing each time. Just a really kind of like wild and successful reinvention. Yeah, I think on paper, they don’t really cancel each other out as picks XCOM 2 and XCOM Enemy Unknown, but it is still just a definitive PC experience from this timeframe, unquestionably improved by that expansion. So Jeremy, what do you think of that choice? I loved reviewing this game at the time. It’s a very brave sequel. It has a very distinct feel because it has these more advanced stealth systems, but at the same time, as you release it, you’re often working against timers. So you’re kind of pushing forward while trying to take care and not quite managing to do both. The strategy layer becomes more of a board game and a successful one, I think. And yeah, with War of the Chosen there, you can see Firaps is growing in confidence in narrative and the path towards Marvel’s Midnight Suns. And that expansion really is like one of those that could maybe have been a sequel in its own right. So that’s great to have into the bargain. Yeah. So it was the second best selling issue of PC Gamer I worked on was the War of the Chosen cover, so I have a bit of affection for it from that as well. The Dragon Age Inquisition was the best selling one, if people were curious. Matthew, what do you think of this pick? I’ve played much more of XCOM Enemy Unknown than XCOM 2, never something I got hugely into. But I am eternally grateful to it because the War of the Chosen expansion gave us one of the most successful videos of all time on RPS, which was Alec Muir taking an incredibly long turn in that game that went on for 15 minutes. It slowly set in the background, ticking up views while he talked what he was doing on a very quiet microphone. So all the comments are just like, who’s this whispering genius? Well, that speaks to its strategic depth, but we both seem to have some kind of debt to it in terms of professional success or something like that. The other games have weighed up for this. So I thought StarCraft 2 was a humdinger pick, but not a game I have a huge amount of experience with, so I didn’t feel like the right choice. Into the Breacher game, I have loads of experience with, I thought about too, but there’s something about a grander tactical experience, rather than something more on the indie scale that felt right for this category, especially because it was going to be like indie picks versus bigger games, so it was a tough choice. So in general, actually, Blizzard misses out a bit in this draft. No Diablo 3, no Overwatch, but that just speaks to sensibilities of the men participating, I guess, so yeah. Matthew, what’s your final pick? My final pick, and again, you’re going to roll your eyes at this and say this is a console game, only it’s literally a console game, but it released the same day and I played it on PC. Just to mix things up, take it somewhere completely different, I’m going to take Forza Horizon 4 for my final pick. That is different, but very you. I love this one. This is the British Forza Horizon that kind of takes you from Scotland through the Cots worlds, kind of crushes all that into a little open world, introduces the seasons mechanic where every kind of real time week is a different season with different events tied to it and then the seasons roll on. So the kind of map changes and the kind of racing that takes part in it, you know, there’s a lot more kind of muddy off-road stuff going on in spring, say, and then in the summer you’re going for these like breezy drives, you know, through the countryside. It looks absolutely amazing. I wouldn’t say there’s anything inherently PC about it other than this is the era now where games that are on Xbox and PC from Xbox, you know, are basically the same often. You can play multiplayer across the two. They are functionally the same. But I just, yeah, I love the environment of this, the countryside thing. It’s just way more attractive to me than driving around the Australian outback, hurling cars off hills. Cross country is the discipline that they call it here, which is just like bounding like the war hog or a vehicle like it off all these British hills while kind of classical music played. It was just so much my jam. Also, you know, sentimentally attached to my first YouTube video on RPS that actually did numbers. And I was member just like, holy shit, I could do this. I could let this is actually kind of crack the algorithm. Maybe part of my affection for it is tied to that. But I insist, it’s just a great celebration of racing. Forza Horizon caters to people who just want to bomb around in an arcade style as well as the more simulated elements, if you like boring racing games as well. So yeah, it really speaks to me. Good stuff. Well, that’s the final draft pick. I won’t take any shots at Forza Horizon 4 because Matthew’s had a lot of strays from me and you. That’s all right, I can take it. No, it’s fine. I think it’s something a bit different. It does speak to this moment of everything, including Xbox games coming to Steam and taking off on there. It’s a great series in and of itself. It’s a very you pick. So yeah, no notes here. But that does wrap up the draft, which is good because we’re at the three hour mark recording. Oh boy. It’s a good episode though. It feels like it’s been a strong draft. I’ve enjoyed it. So let’s recap and then we’ll talk about how people can vote. So let’s start with category one and we’ll go Matthew, Jeremy, me in that order as we read out our picks just to make sure. We do it in the order in which I guess people were picking. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So category one is RPG. I’ve got The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt. Got Fallout New Vegas. I’ve got The Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim. Category two, tactics or strategy? I’ve got Shadow Tactics Blades of the Shogun. XCOM Enemy Unknown. I’ve got XCOM 2. Category 3 Launched in Early Access. Dead Cells. Divinity Original Sin 2. Hades. Category 4 Indie Game. Outer Wilds. I repeat, Outer Wilds. Vvvvvvvv. Or V. I’ve got The Mighty Hotline Miami. Category 5 Immersive Simul Stealth Game. Etukia Solid 5 The Phantom Pain. I’ve got Dishonored 2. Hitman 2. Cough includes Hitman 1 levels. Category 6 Shooter. Metro Exodus. Alien Isolation. It’s got guns. It’s got more than one. Doom 2016. Category 7 Multiplayer. Grand Theft Auto 5. No. Yes! We have to say online. Brackets GTA Online. Come on, man. Yeah, Grand Theft Auto 5. Brackets GTA Online. Brackets GTA Online. But Grand Theft Auto 5. Showdown. Rocket League. Category 8 Sim or Management Game. Star G Valley. American Truck Simulator. City Skylines. Category 9 Free Pick 1. Return of the Obra Dinn. Slay the Spire. Portal 2. Finally, Category 10 Free Pick 2. Forza Horizon 4. Orksmas Die. Disco Elysium. That felt like it took fucking 10,000 years. But good stuff. It was a great draft. And I very much enjoyed it. Thank you so much for joining us, Jeremy, and weighing in with your expertise. It’s been fun. Yeah, it’s been really good. I think because of the games in question, a public vote would be really interesting. So let’s do Twitter this time, rather than Discord. So twitter.com or x.com/backpagepod. Yes, none of us like the fucking platform, but they’ve got us over a barrel because they’ve got a poll feature. So that’s where you can go and vote. I will pin that to the top of the page, and then you can vote any time over the seven days from when this episode goes live. We’ll talk about the winner on a future episode, but it’s been really fun having you on Jeremy. So where can people get you on social media? Thank you. I’m on Twitter as Jeremy Underscore Peel, and if you’d like my thoughts, you can fund some of them on Patreon, where I’m Peel Perspective. You can pay a little over five for a month, and there’s a bunch of articles you immediately get out. So thanks to you now if you do that. Nice. Matthew, where can people get you on social media? I am at MrBazzle UnderscorePesto on Twitter, and at MrBazzlePesto on Blue Sky. The podcast is patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like to support us. This month, you get the top 50 third-party games released on Nintendo platforms. We just did that. It’s a fucking monster of an episode that’s available now. And later this month, we’ll have a podcast on Master and Commander and Gladiator. Quite embarrassing, but I think it’ll be quite fun. That’s the podcast. And like I say, BackpagePod, pin tweet, if you want to vote. I will also put all of the different picks into… Will I do that? No, I’ll do that after it’s gone live. You’ll see a screen grab of the picks at some point too, so you can refer back to it for information. But thank you so much for listening. Goodbye. Goodbye.