Five gaming new year’s resolutions we’re making in 2025

Yes, January is hard. All 56 days of it. There’s no getting around that, however much leftover Christmas cake we shovel into our pallid, emotionless faces. But in amongst the brown pine needles and endlessly regurgitated ‘Yeah really nice thanks, just had a quiet one’ conversations, there are the first green shoots of hope.

January is also a time for positive change. For resolving to be better humans, changing our behaviours in enriching ways that will, in some small measure, crystallise into the building blocks of our best life.

Making new years’ resolutions, then, is an important human ritual. And focusing those resolutions on our passions is a great way to wring the most joy out of them. Behold, then: five of those.

No, we know – but listen, it’s time.

Nothing will top Bethesda Game Studios’ perfect open world of frosty mountains, shouty monks, cosy homesteads and rolling tundra where giants herd mammoths. Probably not even the next Elder Scrolls title, if you’re going on the diminishing returns presented by Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield.

So that’s why it’s still on your hard drive, and ours - it’s just nice to go for a walk about in Skyrim. Plus we never finished that one questline in Markarth, or found all the Dragon Priest masks. And then there are the 519 4K ultra-ultra high detail texture, lighting and ‘better trees’ mods we’ve all got installed, propped up like a precarious house of cards and prone to toppling next time Bethesda releases an update.

But, we say again – it’s time. Clinging onto Skyrim has taken up time that we could have spent making new memories in Cyberpunk’s Night City, or Starfield’s galaxy, or any number of very-nearly-as-good open worlds that slowly reveal their qualities as you show them more time investment. So 2025 is the year we finally free up the hard drive space it’s been living on, and make room for fresh open world strolls.

Here’s how it usually goes in the Gran Turismo economy: check out the new car showrooms at the start of the game, dribble while watching some desirable models spin around, vow to buy them once you can afford them, amass the required credits, then… never buy them.

Because there’s always a reason not to, isn’t there? Oh, you’ve just won a prize car that can race in the same category as the one you were going to buy. Or you’re going to unlock an achievement/trophy if you buy two more Lamborghinis, so you do that instead. Or you hoard all your credits without buying any cars at all, keeping it aside for better tyres and turbo kits.

Three years later, we still haven’t bought that Ferrari Testarossa, even though we linger over it every single time it pops up in the used cars menu. This is the year. Rosso corsa, if you please.

Honestly, ReallyGoodGameSoft, if you were that bothered about us seeing the end credits of Massive Campaign With A Live Service Element 6, maybe you should have made it a bit shorter. Whereas we once wrung our palms about all the unfinished games accumulating in our periphery and diligently stacked them into a Pile of Shame, in 2025 we’re simply going to… You know, just stop playing stuff once we don’t feel like playing it anymore.

Does that mean we might miss out on some Elden Ring DLC bosses? Almost certainly. Will narrative loops remain forever un-closed? They will. But we’ll be having far too much fun adjusting our teams in Championship Manager 1997-98 to care.

It was a double-edged sword, the sim racing boom of the lockdown years. On one hand it was incredibly heartening and encouraging to see the community explode in size, and for such a vast and varied population come together to compete in virtual racing. On the other: slow down a bit, would you?

The standard is incredibly high now on the established sim racing titles like ACC, iRacing and GT7, and that means it’s hard to pick up race wins and top 100 leaderboard times in the modern era.

And that might have got us down before. But in our new, ginger shot-necking, constantly Burpee-ing 2025 incarnation, we’re not going to let being a midfield racer get us down. Plus, we could always just practice a bit more if it really starts to get under our skin.

It’s not just us, right? As well-intentioned as we are when embarking on a new racing sim, somehow we inevitably end up shirking the methodical approach of changing out toe-in angle a fraction of a degree at a time, doing ten laps, and then coming in to pore over the telemetry data. In the end, there’s always someone else’s setup to download and apply.

Talented virtual race engineers know this, too. It’s why there’s a market for paid setups in ACC, allowing the lazier or less technically inclined competitor to apply someone else’s rigorously tested work to their own GT3 car and reap the lap delta rewards.

But it really is true, what they say. It’s always faster, in the long run, to develop your own setup, because only you know how you like your platform to feel. Some super-talented internet stranger might be getting close to lap record pace with their setup, but if they prefer an oversteery sensation and you don’t, it’s very unlikely you’ll see similar results.

Ergo, we’re working on our own tunings this year. If anyone needs us, we’ll be in the corner googling tyre PSI operating windows.