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PC gaming has natural ebbs and flows. There are years that absolutely blow me out of the water and ones that fade into the mists shortly after they’re gone. Looking purely at new releases, I was starting to feel like 2024 might be the latter. There were some real standouts, like Metaphor: ReFantazio and Tactical Breach Wizards, but compared to the stacked year that was 2023—which included Baldur’s Gate 3, Jagged Alliance 3, and Against the Storm—it didn’t quite match up for me.
That is, until I started looking at what I’d actually spent most of my time playing last year. It was mostly games from pre-2024 that had gotten DLC or other big updates. And man, those updates taken together really tell the story of a year to remember.
Stardew Valley, which has never charged a single additional penny beyond its one-time price of admission, received the gigantic 1.6 update. It brought new seasonal festivals and events, including winter outfits for all of the townies, a new farm type, a new progression system, tons of new dialogue, new crops, a new fish to catch… It’s a lot! Especially considering creator Eric Barone previously said 1.5 would probably be the last “big” update to this game that’s turning nine years old this year. I already have well over 200 hours in Stardew across multiple platforms, and especially if this is the year I finally break down and get a Steam Deck, I expect I’ll put in at least a hundred more.
World of Warcraft, which I’ve been playing since the beta in summer 2004, turned 20 and put out what, for my money, is probably its best expansion ever. The War Within saw heroes who have been with us since the 2D RTS days like Khadgar and Alleria Windrunner take the lead in a compelling storyline that finally rinsed the taste of Shadowlands’ bizarre and sometimes comically nonsensical A-plot out of my mouth. The new subterranean zones are fresh and unforgettable. And delves finally offered a way for people like me, who don’t like other people but do like significant challenges, to get endgame geared through demonstrating our solo skill and class mastery.
My dearest darling Crusader Kings 3 finally added the ability to play as poor people with the Roads to Power expansion. As a wandering adventurer, you can travel the world and become renowned as a scholar, a mercenary, a preacher, or even a jurist. Thrilling stuff! No, I’m serious! No, wait, come back! In all honesty, my dream for Crusader Kings as a franchise is for it to become an open-ended medieval RPG where you don’t necessarily have to take on the role of a high-and-mighty noble if you don’t want to. And it still has further to go yet. But it’s well on the way by now.
Elden Ring, one of the hands-down best games of all time, received one of the hands-down best DLCs of all time with Shadow of the Erdtree. From Software brought us a new land that’s big enough to be its own Souls game from 10 years ago, an absurd number of new weapons including letting you become a martial arts master, a new progression system to keep things interesting, and some truly brutal and memorable boss fights. There was some controversy about it getting nominated for Game of the Year awards. But when a DLC brings this much to the party? I don’t really object.
Baldur’s Gate 3, the best game of 2023 itself, even got a battery of significant updates, with everything from new subclasses for every class, to expanded evil endings, to improved romance scenes, to Act 3 performance optimization and hundreds of bug fixes. The version you could play on day one was so incredible that it’s hard to believe how much better it is now. And all for no additional cost.
Cyberpunk 2077 got another significant update, including massive performance gains for Arrow Lake CPUs. Hell yeah! You know, I wish that was a headline patch feature more often. I love it when devs simply drop a patch that gives me more frames, or lets me turn some settings dials up. I’m here for it. And compared to how it was at launch, Cyberpunk continues to prove that you can’t count a great game out at the first bell. In the state it’s in now, I think it’s indisputably one of the best RPGs ever, and I put another few dozen hours into it happily with a fresh Edgerunner build.
And finally, after quite a long wait, we got our hands on Build 42 for Project Zomboid. Laying the foundations for the post-post apocalypse, the addition of trades like blacksmithing and animal husbandry, tons of new crafting recipes, and a farming overhaul, Build 42 wants you to be able to continue rebuilding society long after the initial years of looting supplies from malls and hardware stores are done. A significant map expansion and the addition of skyscrapers and randomly-generated basements have also gone a long way toward making one of my favorite PC games of all time feel new again.
2024 wasn’t really a slow year. It was just one where the veterans showed up the rookies.
Even some of my favorite “new releases” of 2024 were games that had been in some form of Early Access for ages: Caves of Qud, Shadows of Doubt, and Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. That’s becoming a familiar story these days. Maybe it doesn’t even make sense to talk about a given year purely in terms of which games finally made it to 1.0 during its tenure. In all of the above cases, you could have gone and played a version of that game that was mostly the same in 2023, or maybe even the before that.
That’s really one of my favorite things about PC gaming, though. Even in a year when all new releases mysteriously disappear, a lot of your faves would keep getting better. There would be plenty of reasons to revisit them, and you could probably keep yourself occupied just with what’s already sitting on your hard drive.
So no, 2024 wasn’t really a slow year. It was just one where the veterans showed up the rookies. And I can’t really complain about that.
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Kurt Indovina
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