What are you playing this weekend?
No Man's Sky and Just Survive have gotten hefty patches—do you have plans to revisit them, or play them for the first time?
The weekend is here, and in part we can thank Ian McKellen's great-great-grandfather for that. According to this hot news from months ago, an ancestor of Sir Ian (the actor probably best known for playing a vampire in a Pet Shop Boys music video) lobbied for factory workers to only work a half-day on Saturdays in the mid-1800s. His campaign was successful, thus giving birth to the concept that maybe people shouldn't spend their every waking moment in either a hot noisy factory or in church.
Speaking of work: games! Games are constantly being worked on (in hot noisy game factories). Even after they've been released, work continues: just take No Man's Sky, which I'm going to be playing more of this weekend. It came out a year ago, and there's been another big patch that added new stuff, like the ability to see other players as round blobs of light (that's what we all wanted, right?). I was also tooling around and discovered a synthetic planet, which has given me a bit more impetus to explore and see what else might be hiding out there. Daybreak's zombie sandbox Just Survive also got a big huge giant patch recently, though it's in Early Access so you might expect that kind of thing from time to time. While I didn't care much for their new stronghold system, I still enjoy running around, looting, crafting, and exploring.
Big changes to games that have been around for a while can often pull you (or drag you or shove you) back into their embrace. Sometimes out of curiosity ("Did they fix that damn thing that annoyed me so much?"), sometimes out of excitement ("They fixed that damn thing that annoyed me so much!"), and sometimes just because we forget about a game from a while ago and the patch serves as a reminder to revisit it.
So what are you all playing this weekend? Any game you'll be returning to after a long break? Anything you didn't like and hope a patch has made better or liked a lot and hope a patch didn't make worse? Let us know in the comments below, and if you're a member of the PC Gamer Club jump into our Discord and find someone to play with. And don't forget thank Gandalf/Magneto's dad's dad's dad's dad for making sure you have a little extra time to play—assuming you're not working this weekend after all.
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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.