What are your 2025 gaming resolutions?

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Image above fromSky’s Workshop on Steam, “Happy New Year! (1969)"(Image credit: Valve / Sky on Steam Workshop)

TF2 characters smiling and wearing party hats

Against all odds our planet has made yet another shaky yet successful trip around the sun and it’s The Year Of Our Gaming 2025. Each year is a chance for a new beginning, even in gaming, so let’s quickly clean the stink of 2024 off us and start fresh. Scrub away the memory of the Borderlands movie. Sweep up the broken shards of XDefiant. Wash the death shroud of Concord, run it through the dryer, fold it neatly, and stick it high up on a shelf in the closet.

It’s 2025 now, so let’s at least pretend this year is gonna be different, while also pretending we’re going to be different, too. Making New Year’s Resolutions is a time-honored tradition where we make a list of the things we want to change about ourselves, then make those changes, then quickly revert back to exactly how we were about a week from the end of January. Or maybe this year isactuallygoing to be different? For real this time?

Play more finite games (for my brain’s sake)

Maybejust onemore attempt at making Sardinia a globe-spanning power first, though.

Spend more time with single player games

(Image credit: id Software)

Doom: The Dark Ages screnshot

Jake Tucker, Editorial Director, PC Gaming Show:I’m not sure when it happened, but over the past few years I’ve started spending most of my gaming time in huge everlasting games with my friends. We’ll fight for loot in Escape From Tarkov, complain about vision and the lack of it in Dota 2 or even just play hundreds of years of Crusader Kings 3, working together to create the Holy Roman Empire before we start fresh and decide that this time we’re going to take care of that whole iranian intermezzo thing.

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Play Outer Wilds before my friend actually kills me

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer:It has been over three years since I made an agreement with a friend to play through Outer Wilds as long as they watched Arcane, given neither of us could shut up about either. I regret to say, dear reader, that I have notplayedOuter Wilds, despite knowing it’s a milestone of a gaming experience. Despite knowing its groundhog-day, desolate, existential hope-ennui is my exact kind of freak. I even bought the thing, and streamed my first play session to this friend. I installed it on my new PC! Did I play it? No! Do I know why? Also no! I have the eerie feeling that my days are numbered, so I am going to play this game before they actually just come and kill me. If I do not, my death will be deserved.

Play a baseball videogame

(Image credit: Metalhead Software)

In a gross display of hubris, one of the cartoonish ballplayers of Super Mega Baseball 4 points his bat skyward.

Morgan Park, Staff Writer:I’m a lifelong sports ignorer who decided to get really into baseball at 27. It’s been so much fun (especially because the closest team to my front door is also the best team), but now it’s the offseason and I have nowhere to put all of this baseball enthusiasm. I wanna try MLB: The Show, but it seems kinda hardcore and there’s no PC version. There’s also Super Mega Baseball, which senior editor Chris put me onto, but that one almost seems too simple.

Maybe I’ll try a baseball management game like Out of the Park Baseball—at least that way I don’t have to be good at the game of baseball, just pick a cool team and sim the games. (If you’re in the know on baseball games, shoot me a line and set me straight!)

Get into Final Fantasy 7 modding

Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor:I’m a real fussbudget commafucker when it comes to translation quality, and Final Fantasy 7’s isn’t good enough for me to stick with even though I’ve tried to get through it a couple of times. This year, I’m going to download theShinra Archaeology Cut, a mod that replaces FF7’s clunky English text with something that won’t make me want to rip out my eyes, and give it another chance. I might try some other mods too, because finding out just how radically I can mess with a game other people consider an untouchable classic is half the reason I bother with PC gaming.

Try being an MMO guy

(Image credit: Funcom)

A vast landscape with a crashed spaceship in Dune: Awakening.

Chris Livingston, Senior Editor:For me, MMOs are like kids: I don’t have kids or like kids or want kids, but sometimes I wish I was the type of person who did. I kinda want to give an MMO a real try this year: not just jump in and do 50 hours of fishing and then bail, like I did with New World, but really get stuck in for the long haul. Maybe it’ll be Dune: Awakening, which I’m genuinely interested in (mostly for survival and base-building), or maybe I’ll finally give TESO a real chance, which at least I have a foothold in from playing Skyrim and Oblivion to death. Old school Runescape? GW2? Somewhere out there is an MMO I’d like, I can feel it. I’d like to find it in 2025.

Get good at League of Legends

Play more weird indies

(Image credit: Raw Fury)

pixelated fantasy characters standing on rock in ocean fighting monsters

Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor:I love a freaky, niche, Cruelty Squad-ass FPS or an overambitious low-fi RPG, but I didn’t play nearly as many in 2024 as I had in previous years. Then I finally booted up retro RPGSkald: Against the Black Prioryon my Steam Deck over the holidays and it shot to near the top of my personal GOTY list. I want to take chances on more games like Skald in 2025⁠—unless I fall victim to the twin siren songs of Balatro and Path of Exile 2.

Learn to make a game

Paul Broughton, Social Video Editor:I’ve been playing games for so long that I keep finding myself more frequently asking the question: Games, how do they work? After an ill-fated attempt to make a 2D platformer that made it to one incredibly basic level and a 3D puzzler that saw the collision detection blue-screen my PC, it’s about time to build something in earnest. Will it be good? No, probably not. But will it be fun? The process should be, I hope.

Learn how to use a controller, even though controllers suck

(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree DLC screenshot

Andy Chalk, NA News Lead:I made a resolution in 2022 to play Elden Ring with a controller, and I got it half done: I played (and loved) Elden Ring, and gave up on the controller after about, oh, maybe 20 minutes of frustration and thumb cramps. Look, controllers are awful. They lack the speed, precision, and flexibility of a mouse and keyboard, they’re uncomfortable as hell, and I dislike them just as a matter of principle: I’m a PC gamer, dammit, and I shouldn’t have to put up with inferior input systems just because Nintendo whipped up a half-assedthing40 years ago and everyone threw money at it.

It’s a doomed effort, but an effort will be made.Andy Chalk

It’s a doomed effort, but an effort will be made.

But I’ve never entirely shaken the feeling that I should at least become functional with one, because—well, I don’t know why, really, and that’s a big stumbling block. But since I do own one—a Logitech F310, purchased on impulse some years ago to use with Klaus, a game that recommends a controller even though it’s perfectly fine with a mouse and keyboard—this will be the year I make an honest effort to figure it out. It’s a doomed effort, but an effort will be made. That’s as high as I’m setting the bar for 2025.

From ourforummembers

(Image credit: Larian)

Lae’zel, face covered in blood, stands in the Astral Plane

ZedClampet: I want to branch out into a new genre or two. I traditionally play survival and various simulation games, but I’d like to expand that this year. I used to play a lot of cRPGs, so it’s possible I could get back into those, but I’d like something with a little more action that challenges my slow brain and reflexes like, maybe, twin-stick games.

Alm:I only have a cliché resolution, and that’s to buy less new games and to dent my backlog. Civ 7 is a definite pick up though.

mjs warlord: My new years resolution is to cut down my gaming hours and try and remember where my bed is.

Johnway: Try and buy fewer games. I should reduce my Steam collection which continues to balloon in size. its a losing battle tbh as i find games on offer too good to pass up, i snap them up in bundles or i get them for free.

BeardyHat: Same as Alm and Johnway and that’s to spend less and play more that I already have. My library is over 1000 games at this point between Steam, GoG and Epic, plus I have heaps of retro console games I’d also like to play. So if I could spend less than $100 for the whole year, that would be great. I spent like $450 in 2024.

I would also like to endeavor to play more games with my kids. I’m a solitary gamer and have been for a majority of my gaming life, so I’d like to try and be more amenable to playing games with them, even if it’s only 30 minutes at a time.

January’s Ghost: Honestly, spend less time playing games. I have other things I want to do that take more work and focus to progress and while I love gaming, it is too easy to let it dominate your free time.

I also want to play more games with friends. I have a game of Crusader Kings 2 going with three friends and I want to make sure that doesn’t get forgotten, but I also want to try inviting people to play local multiplayer more often. We had a friend stay over during the holidays and we ended up playing a bunch of games together and I’d forgotten how nice it can be to play together while sitting in the same room.

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Play more finite games (for my brain’s sake)#

Spend more time with single player games#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Play Outer Wilds before my friend actually kills me#

Play a baseball videogame#

Get into Final Fantasy 7 modding#

Try being an MMO guy#

Get good at League of Legends#

Play more weird indies#

Learn to make a game#

Learn how to use a controller, even though controllers suck#

From ourforummembers#