RISE OF THE MACHINES
The world of PC GAMING is more alive than ever— with plenty to look forward to. By Wes Fenlon
In September 2011, I moved 2,500 miles from one coast of the United States to the other, leaving behind friends and family for a city where I knew almost no one. For some of those relationships the move meant a huge change: I went from seeing friends weekly to just once or twice a year. But for others it was an easy transition, because we already spent most of our social time playing games together online. open. We later had trysts with Battlefield 3, Terraria, Smite and Dungeon Defenders, all games we could pay just enough attention to, to keep our main focus on why we were ultimately playing together: To chat about day-to-day life on our homespun Mumble server.
We never lost touch or stopped playing games, but it became harder and harder to line up our schedules, especially with two time zones in between us. Then 2020 hit, and for the first time in almost a decade my PC gaming group was essentially my entire social life again. It’s been a hard two years in so many ways, but our Discord server has been a daily comfort—a place to vent, cope, and pass the time with videogames. The pandemic has certainly taken a toll on PC gaming, delaying countless games and smashing hardware supply chains to pieces. But it’s also reinforced for me what an incredible place PC gaming is in now compared to ten years ago.
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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