In Pacific Drive you develop a relationship with your car like the classic bad relationship you have with a person in your 20s: “I can fix them.” Only you’re right, because it’s a car and not an unemployed stoner who is sort of in a band sometimes.
At the end of every trip into the Zone I’d repair that rustbucket and upgrade it, but never fix that one weird thing it does if you slam the driver’s side door too hard, because that gives it personality. And then I would prepare to go for another run into the Zone, look at the clock, and think maybe I didn’t have time after all.
Gripes Week
We’re spending the week airing all our grievances with gaming and computing in 2025. Hit up the Gripes Week hub for more of what’s grinding our gears.
When Pacific Drive launched there were no mid-mission saves, and if you didn’t complete an entire jaunt in a single go you’d have to abandon it and throw away whatever progress you’d made. That only happened to me a couple of times, but it was enough to make me gunshy about going for a second run if it was getting late or I had somewhere to be or the dog was looking edgy, and so I’d call it quits after one run of Pacific Drive then play another game that fit into whatever time I had left. Until eventually I just switched to that other game and never went back.
Though Pacific Drive’s game director Seth Rosen previously said he was committed to the game being the way it was and we could like it or lump it, a year later he changed his mind and Pacific Drive was updated to have a sensible save system for normal people. Too late for me, though. I’d already moved on, uninstalled it, and frankly forgotten so much of what was going on that I’d have to start over anyway. Maybe some day I will?
A similar thing happened with the System Shock remake. It had a robust set of difficulty options that meant you could leave the combat on normal but turn the navigation down to easy to activate a waypoint system. Since my main memory of the original is getting completely lost—and hating the controls, but mainly getting lost—I turned that option on. And then didn’t see any waypoints.
Turned out they were completely missing from the launch version of System Shock, which seems like a pretty big oops from Nightdive. I struggled on, but eventually had one of those moments where I didn’t have time to play for a few days, and then spent an entire evening figuring out where I was and what I was supposed to be doing without making any progress. That kills pretty much any game stone dead for me.
Of course, in 2024 the System Shock remake was updated to have an easy mode waypoint system that actually worked the way the menu said it would. It got a bunch of other neat changes too. But again, too late for me.
Bugfix patches are one thing, but it’s common now for games to get significant post-launch quality-of-life updates as well. Blue Prince’s updates have made it so certain doors and a safe remain open once you’ve solved the associated puzzles once, so you don’t have to repeat that stuff on subsequent runs. Promise Mascot Agency’s update is going to let your truck do a sick rail-grind. Every single Owlcat game gets significantly better like a year after I finish it.
It’s great that Pathfinder: Kingmaker eventually got an optional turn-based combat mode and Disco Elysium got full voice-acting, because I was happy to have an excuse to play those games again. But it keeps happening and I don’t have time to play every single videogame twice. I could wait, but I am enough of a wanker that I enjoy playing things when they’re new so I can feel like “part of the conversation.”
If we weren’t airing our grievances this week like it’s Festivus I wouldn’t bring this up, because it’s not like I think game developers shouldn’t be allowed to make games better for free. That’s a really nice thing to do. I just wish we could coordinate so it would stop happening right after the moment I uninstall them and delete the cache where I remember their plot and also controls from my brain.
Best SSD for gaming 2025