Trolling aside, we live the new Golden Age of PC Gaming

Yeah. Current PC gaming is similiar to how it was in 85-95 and that to me was the best period in pcgaming, so I'm really happy about the current situation.

Maybe on consoles. On PC? Nope. late 90s/early 00s were preety damn bad for pc gaming. There were still some high quality releases, but most of them ended with developer's bancrupcy and there wasn't much variety in releases.

Not going to necessarily disagree with TC. But there was some stagnation from 2005 - 2010/2011. I personally think the best times was between 1998 - 2004/2005. This was the period when PC saw it's biggest franchise and most innovative games, Half-Life, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, No One Lives Forever 2, Far Cry and then of course Half-Life 2. And now there is resurgence of PC gaming over the last couple of years. Steam has exploded over the last 2-3 years. Now, in a recent statistic it has more active user's than Xbox Live, which was supposed to be the Gold standard in console gaming. AMD's head of GPU division even stated during AMD's R9 GPU launch event that they expected PC gaming to grow over the next couple of years.

Which will be coming to the PC. And it will be a night and day difference on the PC, PC gamers will be able to play in FULL HD 1080P, with better textures, AA, AF and even in 4K resolution. They won't have to deal with blurry 720P 1990's resolutions with crappy AA and texture pop-up. And did I forget the countless hours of mods that will be available just like in GTA IV.

I think he means the frequency of the games that came out year after year that would require new hardware to play it maxed out. Crysis stayed King for 3-4 years. Whereas in the 90's to mid 2000's the title of graphics king changed on a yearly basis. For example, Quake running in Open GL running on a 3DFX Voodoo was the best looking game in 1996, next year Quake 2 running on 3DFX Voodoo or nVidia's Riva 128 was the best looking game, next year in 1998 Unreal was the Crysis of it's time. The title changed in 1999 when ID Software released it's Quake 3 engine. No One Lives Forever was the best looking game in 2000, followed up by Return to Castle Wolfenstein in 2001 which looked better then any game prior and then when Epic Released Unreal Tournament 2003 it blew away all the previous games in history in terms of graphics and then ID Software took back the graphics crown in 2004 when it released Doom 3. And then in 2005 Monolith took back the graphics crown when the released FEAR with soft shadows which even high end graphics cards during that time would struggle run the game with Soft Shadows on. So, as you can see in the span of 8 years the title of Graphics King changed 7-8 times. Not to mention the amount of new hardware you had to get every 1-2 year. We went from the Voodoo 1 to Voodoo 2, to the TNT 2 to the GeForce 256 as the Voodoo 2/3 couldn't do 32 bit color where was the ATI Rage 128/Fury and TNT2/ GeForce could do 32 bit color and if you wanted the best looking games you had to run the game in 32bit color with the best performance you had to dump your Voodoo graphics until the Voodoo 5 came out in 2000 which did in fact support 32 bit color. I could go on and on.

Whereas now, Crysis held the graphics king title for 4 years. Back then a game could barely hold on to the Graphics King title for 1 or maybe 2 years if we are being generous. And now days I could pretty much max out all games from 2007 prior till 2012 with my BIOS flashed XFX HD 6970 @1080P. That's almost 5+ years! That was unheard of back in the 90's till 2005.

Kickstarter = the savior of pc gaming tbh.

4/5 of my most anticipated games of next year are 'indie' games.

1. Wasteland 2

2. Pillars of eternity

3. Planetary annihilation

4. Prison architect

5. and dark souls 2... which the pc will have the best version of....

PC master race.

If this is the golden age, I'd hate to see PC gaming in it's dark age. It's Golden Age is nothing to write home about.

lol so true.

How could Xbox Live be the gold standard in console gaming when the PS 3 outsold the 360? Not fair to compare steam to one console. A consolite doesnt need xbox live to play Skyrim or many other popular console games. A pc gamer does need to use Steam for Skyrim and many other popular pc games.

But yes, pc gaming is growing and it's nice to see once console oriented franchises like Dark Souls making pc the primary platform.

PC has the most aaa/aa total and exclusive each gen.... (8.0-10.0)

I'd hate to see how console gaming was at any point in time if PC gaming is nothing to write home about lmao

dont bother with them, they've spent £350 on a device with no good games.... and wont have any for a good 6-12 months.

Xbox Live in terms of it's multiplayer platform as opposed to PSN. I don't know..some people claim it as such.

This. (minus the pc master race bollocks) :P

I can still have fun with many a AAA game but my most anticipated games and best games of recent years have all been indie games and Kickstarted games.

For the last year or 2 year my main loves have been Kerbal Space Program and DayZ (currently DayZ Epoch)

The games i am looking forward to the most (apart from the Witcher 3 :P ) are:

Carmageddon reincarnation - Kickstarter

Broken Age - Kickstarter

Wasteland 2 - Kickstarter

Planetary Annihilation - kickstarter

Elite Dangerous - kickstarter

Star Citizen - Crowd Funded/Kickstarter

Armikrog - Kickstarter

Pillars Of Eternity - Kickstarter

Torment: Tides of Numenera - Kickstarter

Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest journey - Kickstarter

Hmm im seeing a pattern here ;)

All these games without even mentioning the main games the lesser advertised games and all the indies

It always makes me laugh when I have people telling me I'm butthurt because I don't get "Insert name of generic Exclusive game here" with it's multimillion pound advertising budget and it's impossible to live up to hype, like they are not the exact same games we have all played year on year a million times before :/

I look at that list above and it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside and reinforces the fact that for me I have been gaming on the right platform for over 21 years and that likely will not change anytime soon.

Does anyone have any games they are excited for or any obscure/lesser known games to share which look like they may be something special?

Only if what you play is almost exclusively FPS games though.

This isn't necessarily a golden age. If anything I'd say the last real golden age of PC gaming was from about 1997-2004. Nearly all of my favorite PC titles came out in that timeframe and many of them were exclusive to the PC platform. This is most certainly a golden age for indie development at the very least however, that scene has absolutely exploded in recent years, especially on PC. Also while it's true that lately we've been getting some more lazily done ports with poor optimization, it's nothing compared to the dark age of about 2007-2010 or so, where pretty much every PC multiplat I played didn't even come with graphics settings other than resolution and Vsync. The PC gaming is dying comments have finally died down pretty much completely, which should say more than enough about the state of PC gaming right now by itself.

I don't think period of mass extinction of most of the classic developers can be considered "golden age"

I remember when Adrian use to make that great list of his. Then you look at the 2013 and beyond list, it's sad. Hardly any exclusives, less to care about. He even had to stop making it due to nothing left to list. Isn't that right sir? Of course it is.