This week's highs and lows in PC gaming

THE LOWS 

Tom Senior: No platformed

As we celebrate the upcoming release of the Master Chief Collection on PC, and welcome Quantic Dream games onto our platform, let’s pour a drink for the platform exclusives that we’ve yet to see on PC, and may never see. There’s last year’s God of War, which was a gorgeous third person action game that saw Kratos invade Norse mythology to escape memories of murdering all those Greek gods. I played it to death and expected some DLC, but apparently that’s been shelved. Presumably a sequel is in the works.

But most of all playing Sekiro this week makes me want a PC port of Bloodborne. I don’t want it to come to PC just for the prestige of it, I just really want to play it at 60fps. The PS4 pro adds some fancy supersampling, but for a third person action game of that calibre the extra framerate would do wonders. I’m already having the Bloodborne vs Sekiro debate in my head, and even in the thick of Sekiro, I still miss Bloodborne’s extraordinary world. The Maria fight in The Old Hunters seems to be a starting point for many of Sekiro’s fights. For me it’s still one of the most memorable fights in games, and PC gamers deserve to experience it.

Fraser Brown: Fizzle

Battlefield 5's battle royale mode is out now. It's got tanks and helicopters, and both of those things seemed initially exciting, but it looks like I've actually—for real this time, no take backs—run out of enthusiasm for battle royales. Even Apex Legends, which is the best put together of the lot of them, has been absent from my evenings for weeks. The diminishing returns have been diminishing faster for me, and if I'm going to play something really repetitive, I want to at least be able to relax while I'm doing it. I definitely don't want to be frantically looking for the next streamer aiming at my skull. 

More than battle royales not really doing it for me anymore, I've come to realisation that I'm just never going to be good. I'm a slow, weary guy and everyone else just seems to be getting better. And unlike lots of other games, being bad or even just mediocre at battle royales kinda sucks. You just spend a lot of time getting shot by teens. Even drinking doesn't make it fun. So I'm free! At last! I can be rubbish at games that make me feel good about myself. How's Sekiro? 

James Davenport: Season passed

I'm done traveling for a bit, which opens up room for evening battle royale again, but, like Fraser, I'm not feeling it anymore. Apex Legends' battle pass is a bland, linear grind for the okayest cosmetics. Fortnite removed the health buff from kills in the latest patch, which coincidentally removed my interest. Battlefield 5's Firestorm plays like a stable PUBG, but does next to nothing to stand out. 

I'm ready for a break. Back to Sekiro, maybe followed up by my first go at Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, eh?

Tyler Wilde: Royally screwed

I've also been playing Battlefield 5's battle royale mode, and though I might like it more than Fraser, my experience did illustrate why I eventually lose interest in BR games. After one bad start, I decided I just wouldn't bother gathering any loot and see how it goes. It was just for a laugh, but I came in second. 

As I said in my account of that and my subsequent knife-only attempts, I don't think my success really proves much, except that not dying still feels like a strange measure of success. There are lots of ways not to die, most of which aren't very fun, and my instinct in battle royale games is to go the unfun route by taking as few risks as possible (though not normally to such an extreme). I still like each new BR game for a while, but I don't know if I'll ever become an Apex fiend like Evan, who just runs around killing everyone. How does he do that? I will never know.

Chris Livingston: Survival of the Sixest

I'm not quite feeling Fallout 76's survival mode, which is the new PvP version of the game that is pretty much only PvP, all the time, always. Granted, it's just in beta and it's only just arrived so everyone is running around trying to kill each other and doing nothing else. But I still sense there are going to be some big problems with the mode, considering any given server can contain level 1 characters and level 600 gods. 

It's not a formula for success when you're mixing some fresh-out-the-Vault pipsqueak with a rusty pipe-pistol and a dude built like an invisible tank that's impervious to explosive damage. Hopefully, there are some major tweaks for survival mode coming down the pike. As-is, I can't really imagine playing it much.