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New Year’s gaming resolutions we’re definitely going to stick to

Like the frost on the cars and ground this morning – and the inside of my single-glazed windows in my flat! – a new year has arrived. It’s a time to take stock and look ahead and think what might be, and then run back into bed and hide under the duvet covers and refuse to come out. It’s a time to plan and to begin aspirational journals you’ll put down and forget about and never find again. A time to tackle the gaming backlog you keep talking about, fully in the knowledge you’ll probably double it this year. It’s fresh-slate time, promise time, all done in the hope you’ll look back next year and discover you did something you intended to do. So, what do you want to do, from a gaming perspective?

Here, we look back at our gaming resolutions from last year to see how we did, and then we set some anew. Are you brave enough to commit yours to writing?

Jessica

I wanted to pay more attention to indie games last year, and while I certainly played more of them than I did in 2023, I apparently had a secret ambition to start more massive RPGs than ever before. It was hard to squeeze in time for those indie horrors and puzzlers when games like Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, Metaphor: Refantazio, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard were all stealing 100-hour playtimes from me.

13 horror games we’re looking forward to being scared by this year.Watch on YouTube

This year, I want to dial back the inventory management and take a bit of a breather, immersing myself in more peaceful landscapes. Spending so much time exploring Infinity Nikki‘s cutesy, fairytale-esque world has made me realise that whether it’s a four-hour indie, or another 100-hour monstrosity, the time I spend feeling relaxed in one game is far more valuable than trying to work my way through a list – even if I am still looking forward to playing those games eventually.

Is this my way of giving myself a pass to just play Infinity Nikki this year? Maybe. But as long as it keeps its silly, mellow vibes that keep me feeling happy, I don’t really mind if I’m missing out on the latest Game of the Year contender.

Tom

My new year’s resolution is to become less of a completionist. I think it’s becoming a problem. When I play games, I like to finish everything I can before moving on to the next area. I’m playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle right now, for example, and I’m really keen to get out of the Vatican and back to the jungles and deserts that await. But I can’t. Something inside me is making me hunt down photos of cats, and finish side quests and eat all of the biscotti I can get before I go. And that’s great – it’s a sign I’m enjoying a game that I want to be completionist – but the longer I linger, the more frustrating it can get that I’m not somewhere else already.

As I look to February and a likely 100 hours sneaking around feudal Japan in Assassin’s Creed Shadows – a game that will probably be stuffed to the brim with distractions and collectibles, and whatever the feudal Japanese equivalent of biscotti is – it’s a resolution worth making, I think. Ignore your bulging quest log, stop scouring for that last little thing. It’s time to move on and get to more of the good stuff.

Marie

My resolution for last year was to complete the main story of at least three games I’ve not completed yet. Did I reach that goal? Technically no I didn’t, but I’ll give myself credit for coming close with two stories completed.

This year I’ll be less strict, and less ambitious, with my resolution. I’d like to find myself returning to games that have previously brought me joy, specifically time-management or life simulators like The Sims 4. I spend most of my time on consoles with bigger games, mainly live services and RPGs, so it’d be nice to get back to the kind of PC gaming I used to love in games like The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon. There’s something I find infinitely relaxing about managing the smaller details in those games (my parks are usually free with very expensive merchandise…).

Does this count as a resolution if it’s so vague? I’d like to think so.

Chris

This year I’d like to play more games with other people. Specifically with my friends (my partner couldn’t give two hoots about gaming and frankly I love that – it’s nice to have our own hobbies!). But as my old group of friends has got older and busier and more spread out, gaming has been the best way to keep in touch with them. I fell out of the habit a bit in 2024 with all the usual, cloying tendrils of modern life getting in the way. This year, I’m going to reserve a little window of time, even if it’s every other week, to check in with mates and play something together. That something will probably be one of the games we’ve been playing together, over and over, since we were spotty little teenagers, rather than anything new or exciting. But that’s kind of the point.

Victoria

Last year I resolved to play The Sims more honestly, with no cheats greasing my hypothetical wheels to the top. Did I manage it? Well, not exactly. I tried. Hand on heart I really did. But the allure of spamming that money code is just too dang strong. I like being rich in The Sims, with all the hot tubs and space rockets that come with it. I don’t like waiting for my characters to come home from work, for them to then watch shows on a crap TV which is always at risk of breaking. So while things started off well enough, I soon gave into temptation and deployed the motherlode code. I have no regrets.

Nine open world games we’re excited about that are coming in 2025.Watch on YouTube

As for this year, I am actually still a tad undecided. Since starting at Eurogamer, I have broadened my video game horizons tenfold, and in the last couple of years I have played more indies and other games than I ever would have. Last year, my personal Game of the Year was actually I Am Your Beast, and there is no way I would have given it even a glance a few years ago. But I absolutely loved it.

So I guess I’ll do a similar thing again: resolve to keep trying games that may not initially sound like my cup of tea. Perhaps like last year, I will be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Katharine

I made a resolution last year to finally play GTA 5. Did I play GTA 5 last year? Did I heck. There’s probably not much point in trying to do so now ahead of GTA 6 coming out if I’m being honest, but the GTA series as a whole has always been a bit of a blindspot for me, as have Rockstar games more generally. I just never quite have the time to dedicate myself to them properly, you know!? Maybe I’ll resolve to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2 instead this year – the setting and tone of it is much more appealing to me as a concept than GTA, and I’ve always admired the horses in it as well. Honestly, nobody does horses quite like RDR2 does.

Bertie

I did it; I can’t believe I actually stuck to a resolution. Last year I said I’d start streaming and I did. I joined a Dungeons & Dragons group called Chaotic Questers and began streaming roughly once a week on Twitch. We even went to a castle on the Scottish border for a weekend, to record there, which was fun, especially when our car broke down for good on the way back. It’s been quite an adventure getting to know and understand the world of streaming from the inside, and it has increased my respect tenfold for the people who do it. Standing beside the M6 near a gang of cows – they were threatening, actually – while waiting for the RAC to appear was quite an experience too.

Oh, and while I didn’t manage to start my own personal video game stream, my partner did, so that’s probably worth half a point? I also didn’t manage to run a tabletop RPG, though D&D formed a central part of my gaming year. I’m still reading TTRPG books, though, and tinkering away on my own campaign, so I came close. Another half-point?

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This year, I’m being more specific. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it but I’ve never properly played through a From Software game. I’ve dabbled in them – in Demon’s Souls (the original!) and Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Elden Ring – but I’ve never persevered for fear of being too aggravated by a game late at night. But I realise – Path of Exile 2 helped me realise – that I actually relish a combat challenge, so this year I’m seeking to change things. I promise to beat five bosses in Elden Ring, and you can hold me to that. And I’m phrasing it that way so I don’t baulk at the prospect of beating the entire game, though that is my eventual goal, of course. I’m determined to do this – so determined I’m going to start tonight before my determination wanders, which it has an annoying habit of doing.

That’s it. Nice and simple. Beyond that, I’m going to challenge myself to play games in genres I don’t normally, but that’s a much more vague thing to pin down.

Lottie

I’ve been playing RuneScape for more than half my life, which makes it my most successful relationship outside of my family. Considering this, you’d expect I’d have long maxed out my character’s levels. Well this isn’t the case. See, I’ve been sitting at Level 88 Herblore for the last seven years. In fact I don’t think I’ve gained more than 10,000 XP in the skill during this time.

The issue is I just detest training Herblore. Outside of mini-games, the process is so tedious. Get herb, clean herb (yes, you have to clean it first), get second ingredient, buy vials, fill vials with water, put ingredients in, most likely empty vials so you can do the process over and over again. It just takes forever.

Yet, that Level 88 has been burning a hole in my eyes over the past year so, in the grand year of 2025, I shall attempt to reach Level 89 Herblore despite the pain. (And no. I won’t use XP lamps. Don’t bring such nonsense into my house.)

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A new year treat: Snowfall in Los Santos

Somewhere along the line my family got into the habit of a New Year’s Day wander. Generally we’d set off along the coast, which is only a short walk away in itself. We wouldn’t head far, and there’d be no objective in mind. It was just the perfect way – chill, airy, bright – to begin another twelve months of whatever the world had in store for us.

This year, we awoke to a storm: rain falling, fences buckling. A wander was out of the question. But then faced with the prospect of a grey day indoors, my wife fired up GTA Online.

And behold! Los Santos was covered in snow. Flakes were falling through the night sky, the palm trees were casting strange wintery shadows, and the whole world around Pillbox Hill was covered in white. Los Santos felt clean and weird and it had that theatrical calm that real snow can bring to busy places.

Here’s a trailer for GTA 6.Watch on YouTube

Ultimately, this was as good as a wander. Instead of rambling along the coast, we spent the afternoon bombing around in a series of cars my wife called in from Johnny on the Spot. And eventually we scored a moped and settled into delivering pizzas. What a weird game this has become: thirty minutes spent knocking back and forth along familiar streets, stopping in doorways we’d never noticed before and earning $43k for our time. In Los Santos, delivering pizzas involves some serious bank.

But that thought: what a weird game this has become. Over the years, GTA Online has moved from being something terrifying and intimidating into something that feels a bit like Animal Crossing. If you time it right and if you end up with the right people, you’re not getting headshotted or blown out of the sky. Instead, you’re going for a cheery wander in a landscape you’ve come to know well, come to feel like you have some kind of stake or ownership in it. We drop into GTA Online these days not to do anything specific – generally not to do anything at all. We head in for the same reason I sometimes wander into the garden. Just to hover in a middle-aged way and look around.

Flying towards a snowy Vineland sign in GTA Online.
Flying over a snowy Los Santos in GTA Online.
Image credit: Rockstar

This turned out to be the perfect way to prepare for the new year: the place was familiar, but the snow made everything fresh and unexpected again. You don’t get much more January 1st than that. And later on that day when I checked into Animal Crossing, which has also been white with snow for the last few weeks, I thought: these places aren’t that different really. Or at least, they don’t have to be that different.

But there’s something more. Something about the way that games have changed as they’ve moved online. I remember years back my friend got an Xbox 360 before Christmas, the year it came out. I headed over for an evening to see what the new machine was like, and he had Kameo running, but all the pixies and fairies and whatnot were wearing Santa hats. He explained that they’d done a patch just for Christmas: this was a game that had come out earlier in the year, and yet here it was acknowledging that we had reached a certain point in time when Santa hats were suddenly appropriate.

Flying over a dark snowy hillside in GTA Online.
Flying over a wintry hillside in GTA Online.
Image credit: Rockstar

I felt that same shiver of newness when we loaded up GTA Online and found snow everywhere. Here was a place, but a place moving through time in its own way. I’ve known LA all my life, but I’ve never seen it in the snow. What an odd privilege. Happy new year, all.

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Red Dead Redemption PC tech review: the best way to play a stone-cold classic

Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption has finally been released on PC after a port from British studio Double Eleven – but has it been worth the 14 year wait? We’ve tested the game extensively to find out, looking at how RDR improves on the original console release and even how it plays on retro PC hardware.

Given how much time has passed since the original release, a big aspect of this PC version is preservation. After all, PC is a forever platform where games can live on for eternity, but first impressions of this port aren’t great. There are multiple layers of DRM here, requiring both a Steam login and a login on Rockstar’s own launcher, a weird requirement when the port doesn’t include the original multiplayer on any platform. I have confidence that Steam will persist well into the future, but the Rockstar launcher? I’m not so certain, and that complicates the legacy of the game.

Beyond this complaint, the game’s technical execution is on point. There are a good range of graphical options and a very quick shader precompilation step – yup, this is a DirectX 12 release. I think DX12 is perhaps excessive for a game originally built for DX9, but there aren’t shader compilation hiccups during gameplay and the game normally runs smoothly.

Red Dead Redemption finally hits PC – but is it any good? Here’s the full video from Alex. Watch on YouTube

The mouse and keyboard controls here are also generally fine, though the game is set up to require rapid taps of the sprint button to speed up on foot or on horseback. That sprint button is shift by default, so your first time playing the game is likely to summon the ancient sticky keys popup – and I feel that rebinding the key or setting it to work when held instead of tapped would have made sense here. You’re free to rebind the key yourself or disable the sticky keys feature in Windows, but it’s still a weird decision. Mouse aiming is at least significantly better than the console equivalent, and I found it easy to aim and land shots that I would have struggled with on a controller.

The game’s graphical options are the best aspect of this port, with support for arbitrary resolutions, different aspect ratios and frame-rates up to 144fps. (A mod is available to unlock the frame-rate completely, so I think this should be in the game by default – even if it comes with a warning that higher values are untested and may come with issues.) Playing the game in ultra-wide is brilliant, thought cutscenes play out in 16:9 – understandable given the significant animation retooling that wider aspect ratios would require. You can also play at 4:3, and the game’s aesthetic jibes well with a CRT if you happen to have one on-hand. 8K is also possible, though given the limited texture and model resolution, this is largely only benefits anti-aliasing.

Beyond this, there is a dynamic resolution system, a choice of multiple upscaling options, frame generation, and scalability to reduce settings from ultra to improve performance on older systems. We’ll get into performance later, but pretty much any modern CPU and GPU can run this game maxed out with few issues. That means a significantly better experience than the original console release, in terms of not only frame-rate and resolution, but also in terms of draw distance. There are relatively few LOD transitions and much less pop-in, which is a wise choice of the abundant CPU/GPU resources on most PCs. The only obvious place for further improvement is in local shadow LODs, with point or spotlights looking similar to the console release, but this is a minor quibble.

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The porting team also did great work increasing shadow quality, with fewer artefacts, more temporal stability and better filtering – including contact hardening shadows for a softer and more realistic look if you prefer. There’s also higher-quality post-processing effects, including motion blur.

In terms of performance, the game runs at 4K 60fps on a low-end RTX 4060, while an RTX 4090 PC can run the game at native 8K with DLAA at 80-110fps. The game is actually more CPU-limited with ultra settings, given the extremely high draw distances, so the modest Ryzen 5 3600 processor can sometimes dip below 60fps in towns where object density is at its highest. Frame-rates are around 100fps in more rural areas, and there’s always the option to reduce LOD range below ultra or enable frame generation to keep frame-rates consistently high. High-end CPUs like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D or 7800X3D run at more than double the frame-rate of the Ryzen 5 3600, so an easy 120fps in cities and over 200 in open areas.

Given how well this game runs on modern hardware and how old it technically is, I thought it would be interesting to test it on PC hardware available around the same time as the original console release in 2010. I started with the DirectX 12 capable GTX 570, but this doesn’t meet the game’s (arbitrary) 2GB frame buffer limit. I tried the GTX 670 next, but the Core 2 Duo E6600 took six minutes to get to the menu and three minutes more to get into the game, with diastrous frame-rates. Upgrading to a Core 2 Quad Q6600 made for snappy menus, but the game still struggled to deliver any semblance of smoothness at 720p 30fps, with huge frame-time spikes.

comparison between level of detail settings on red dead redemption on pc vs ps5 back compat
The substantially longer draw distances and reduced pop-in are a hallmark of the PC release. | Image credit: Digital Foundry

The CPU is certainly underdelivering here compared to console hardware of the same period, but perhaps this could be attributed to too little system RAM (4GB), too slow PCIe speeds, or maybe the old GPU simply doesn’t like a modern DX12 implementation. Either way, though Red Dead Redemption came out on Xbox 360 and PS3, the PC port just isn’t happy on contemporaneous PC hardware.

There are a few issues you’ll notice on more modern hardware too. The game’s colour reproduction seems different to the console release, even when set to a console-style limited colour range, and I’m not sure why. Some sunlight and shadows are also missing in cutscenes on PC, which seems like an obvious bug. The HDR implementation is also reportedly quite poor – perhaps a similar SDR-in-HDR-container implementation as we saw with RDR2.

Given that it’s been 14 years, it’s also a little surprising to learn that the game costs $50. However, that relatively steep asking price feels about right, given that the remaster hits the mark in terms of performance and graphical additions. The game scales beyond the console release and offers some nice options for high-end and low-end PC hardware alike. The use of the Rockstar launcher feels like an unnecessary bit of friction though, and a complication for future preservation efforts. There are also a few bugs that I hope will be fixed by the team at Double Eleven. Overall though, this is the best version of the game available and well worth playing if you love the series and/or missed the original release back in the day.