Might be going Intel for a rebuild soon, completely shuffling things from my current setup - ordered a 7900 XTX to replace the RTX 2080 because Nvidia's high end GPU pricing is just stupid. Need to do more research on the CPU side, though, as it's clear there's little point sinking more money in to AM4 at this point. Even the fastest chip I could get (and realistically cool in a mITX setup) can't compete with current mid-range offerings.
It's a shame Intel is only doing one more generation on the current socket, or I'd almost certainly go that route vs. spending what an AM5 setup will run. Ugh. $800 for CPU, motherboard and RAM hurts after splashing out $1000 on GPU, but that's the world we live in now.
On a somewhat more positive note, Starfield is fun if formulaic at first glance - Fallout 3 + No Man's Sky so far, absolutely crap optimization as is tradition for Bethesda. I've only got a couple hours in but like what I've seen so far. Hope they keep focus on environmental storytelling and it doesn't devolve in to completely repetitive drivel too quickly. Time will tell. Spending ~$100 after the conversion trick for 3 years of Game Pass Ultimate is proving to be one of the best gaming related moves I've made in years, that's for sure.
Not sure why I can't get in to Remnant 2, as I absolutely loved the original game and spent like 300 hours on it... The new map is just bad, for one. Performance is also terrible, as others have said, and "we built it with frame generation in mind" is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard come out of a game studio. Almost no one in the greater scheme has a RTX 3XX / Radeon 6XXX+ card at the point, so that's building for hardware that practically doesn't exist. Sure it looks good, but not near good enough to justify the load. Hopefully the new GPU will breathe life in to it for me, because as it stands I'm deeply regretting buying day one, and I never saw that coming after my absolute love affair with the first game.
Diablo 4 won't benefit from new hardware at all, and I can't see myself continuing to play more than another month or two unless they really speed up progression, raise drop rates, and make interesting changes with the next season - 99.99% of what I pick up is trash, even on the highest difficulty, and I have yet to force myself through the slog to level 100 on a single character. I usually make it to 50ish, where progression slows to an absolute crawl, get bored, and either start a different class or switch to another game entirely. I get it, the grind is part of the appeal for many, but all the fans who were there from the beginning are adults now, presumably with lives and other things to do, and you'd think someone would take that in to accout... But no. My highest right now is a level 70-something necromancer, and I'm having a harder and harder time justifying logging in. I knew from the start it wasn't going to be a "main" game for me, but I figured I'd at least see the end with one class before losing interest completely.
Once upon a time it was fun to sort through all the trash and feel like I beat the odds, but as I fast approach 40 years old it has become painfully clear Blizzard just doesn't respect me or my time. 2, 3, 4 hours of "play" and I /might/ see one piece of gear worth swapping out, and even that improvement is almost always incremental to the point of insult. Sure the builds I'm using aren't totally optimized, but I hate the idea that there are so few ways to play what should be a power fantasy sandbox "right" - I have zero interest in PvP, balance it separately for those masochists if you must but let the rest of us have fun how we want to.
Similar situation with Destiny 2, sadly. I've played off and on since release, bought every expansion - my opinion admittedly soured by Bungie deleting more than half the game I've paid them hundreds of dollars for over the years. Yes, I understand that most wouldn't be okay with 500 GB or whatever devoted to one game, but we should have a choice, not forced to watch as it's stolen from us but by bit. At this point I'll probably buy The Final Shape out of habit as much as anything, to see the conclusion of a years long storyline, but after the sad joke that was Lightfall they've all but lost me. It's painfully obvious the A team has been put on the Marathon reboot (if you can even call it that), and I have zero interest in PvP extraction shooters. It just feels like greed motivated by the success of Fortnite and similar garbage at this point.
I don't know... This must be what getting old feels like, with every upgrade being harder and harder to justify to myself. There was a time where I sunk at least a grand in to my PC every year, now I can hardly see the point. Gaming was, for the longest time, my favorite hobby, my greatest escape, but it feels more and more like a source of guilt. There are so many ways I could better make use of that time. This may end up being my last big PC upgrade, ever, and that's a deeply unpleasant realization.
TLDR: getting old, everything is too expensive, game and hardware company greed way out of hand, it hurts to feel like I'm outgrowing my longest running hobby.
