It’s not real time but Civilization is a must for any strategy fan. I personally recommend getting V and all its expansions, it’s peak for me still. Some like VI but I could never get into it.
From a purely architectural point of view i think you’d be hard pressed to find a better video game city than Night City. Scale too, like you mentioned. I always hold Paris in AC: Unity in really high regard too, but Cyberpunk is on another level in terms of complexity and verticality.
It’s been a minute since I played but setting carry capacity to infinite should certainly be trivial (I didn’t use it but I’ve seen it around). Smarter Scrapper was enough for me I think. Also Muted Markers in the same vein, though it’s not strictly inventory. Limited HUD is also a must have. But if you let me keep going you’ll eventually end up with 250+ mods just like me.
I hope you’ll enjoy your time in Night City! I think it’s a great game at this point with some really interesting characters and a good story. It has its flaws, but I had no problem overlooking them though your mileage may vary. If you intend to pick it up on PC when it’s arrived there is also a vast assortment of great mods.
Also, you’ll be blown away when you’re trying it on your new rig, fully path traced Cyberpunk is probably still one of the prettiest games out there.
It’s not strictly a 90s schmup but I got the original XIII (2003) on sale on GOG last month and played through it. I never played it back then and always thought it looked cool. It’s a shame it wasn’t a big success, the art direction and concept of playing in the panels of a comic strip was really cool and still holds up. I love the typed out sound effects like TAP TAP TAP on footsteps and BOOOM on explosions. So I guess that’s my retro recommendation.
Next for me will be No One Lives Forever, which I also missed back in the day but heard was amazing. It’s been unavailable to purchase for decades but I just recently found out the game is made available to download for free by some fans.
I guess I’m on a bit of an old school spy game kick lately.
I’m about 160 hours into Pathfinder: Kingmaker and I can’t say for certain if it’s a good game or not. It’s certainly captured my obsessive attention, and there are parts of it that I really enjoy. However, the game is also frustrating and messy and the two halves of CRPG on one side and kingdom management sim on the other really don’t mesh well. It’s also a complete nightmare for any completionist with the huge amount of timed quests, many of which never announce their timer publicly. The encounter design also doesn’t feel great and the difficulty is often unfun - though there are some menu settings that can mitigate some of that.
Though Unity will always have my favorite game play(…)
I love seeing another Unity enjoyer around here. That game is severely underrated and had it not had that disastrously buggy launch the AC franchise could have gone in a completely different direction than the open world RPG flavour we ended up with. Plus, revolutionary Paris is one of the best realized video game cities of all time, it’s just beautiful.
How powerful is the PC? Is the question more about games optimised for mouse+keyboard, or is it about demanding recent games that allows his new machine to flex its muscles?
Since you say he likes Souls-likes Black Myth Wukong probably checks both boxes - I never ended up playing it (my backlog is too long) but it looked great with stunning visuals and I heard good things about the gameplay.
Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there and a pretty damn good game too after the patches and expansions.
Finally, something like Fallout: London could be an interesting suggestion as mods of that nature are out of reach of the console crowd. Could give him a whiff of what he’s been missing out on.
What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)
Gacha games have been taking over the world ever since Genshin Impact and those are pure gambling. Going even further back, Ultimate Team on FIFA (EA FC now) is probably the worst true “selling gambling to kids” product I can remember.
Jesse didn’t really do it for me as a protagonist, not sure if it’s due to writing or the performance (I suspect both). Which is really a shame because the game itself is really fucking cool. I still recommend it to anyone, the gameplay is slick and the SCP/world building aspect makes it engaging and interesting enough by itself.
Cyberpunk with full path tracing is still one of the prettiest games out there. And I also think - in its post 2.0 state - that it’s just a very good game too. I recommend the Ultra+ mod to squeeze out even more performance and visual fidelity from the engine.