The Death Bat's 2025 Year in Review

2025 - Oh What a Long and Unpleasant Year

I have a confession to make, one which I think is a sentiment others might feel: when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it can have a real impact on one's desire to enjoy simpler pleasures in life. Gaming, for example, requires a certain amount of personal time investment in both effort, thought and emotional commitment. It can be very hard to provide that level of commitment when Real World problems are sapping that time and energy away from you. So while this is not a blog where I write about all the other crap going on in the Real World, it is a blog where I try to focus exclusively on hobbies, interests and escapism...and this year was a challenging experience. I mean, I finally had to start assigning myself a quota on blog posts to force myself to write, because I could feel myself slipping away from these little entertainments in life. Hell, I got rid of my Saturday gaming night this year, because I simply didn't have enough energy left in me due to the interference of the Real World.

But luckily this is not a blog about the Real World, so lets talk about the noteworthy aspects of gaming in 2025:

Deathbat's Game of the Year for 2025: Starfinder 2E

Who knew....I really love this new edition of the game, and it is 100% compatibility with Pathfinder 2E. The new design and focus makes it a much easier and more accessible experience, and a real pleasure to GM. I am looking forward to running this one more than any other game (except maybe 13th Age 2E) in 2026.

The RPG I Played the Most in 2025: Pathfinder 2E

Close runner up is Mothership, followed by Tales of the Valiant and then there was that D&D 5.24 campaign I ran to give it a fair shake. 

Best New Sourcebooks in 2025: BRP Creatures, Monster Core 2 and Monster Vault 2

A three-way tie! Both Pathfinder's Monster Core 2 and Tales of the Valiant's Monster Vault 2 came out this year, and not a moment too soon. I love the updated stuff in the Monster Core 2, and I really love the Monster Vault 2, which is entirely new stuff, something I didn't think was possible given how many monster books Kobold Press has already come out with. Meanwhile there is the BRP Creatures book, which provides at long last a decade's long "most wanted" book for Basic Roleplaying, now providing enough content that a person could effectively replace their D&D life with BRP if they wanted to.

Best RPG I Didn't Get a Chance to Play in 2025: 13th Age 2nd Edition

I have only been able to read the PDFs, still waiting for physical books, but I am very much loving this mildly revamped new edition of one of my favorite D&D iterations, and it could not have come a moment too soon....I predict I will run a lot of 13th Age in 2026.

2025 PC Game of the Year: Deadzone Rogue

Look, there's not a lot to Deadzone Rogue, it's a FPS game about a dude on a derelict spaceship who has to solve the mystery of what's going on by shooting a million rogue robots and mutants. Every time he dies a computer recreates him and he starts over, but luckily carries his experience forward. It runs like a charm on every handheld I own which means its an essential game for my travel kit.

2025 PC Game I Played the Most: Tom Clancy's Division 2

Per my Steam metrics it turns out I have played this game a ton every single month. I did an entire second playthrough this year, in fact, and am working on the DLC expansions that came out. I like it, and similar to Deadzone Rogue it runs on all my handhelds like a charm (fair disclosure: I have not tried running it on the Xbox Rog Ally base model, but I may try it just to see; its surprising how well this device works with games, actually).

2025 Best Game I Played This Year That Was Not New: Little Nightmares I and II

Yeah, I tried them out on a lark and ended up loving them. Finally about to start the newest one. I understand purists don't like the new one as much since it not a continuation of I and II, but let's be honest, by the end of I (which II is a prequel to) left your little raincoat-clad survivor as Death Incarnate, so I am not sure where they'd have gone with an ending like that.... 

2025: The Year of the Next Generation of Handheld PCs

This year we got the Lenovo Legion Go S, the Xbox-themed Asus Rog Xbox Ally series, the Lenovo Legion Go 2, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and also I understand that all the usual suspects still pump out very nice high end (and high priced) handhelds, such as OneXplayer. Both of my Steam Decks suffered catastrophic failures this year, one of which was clearly a hard drive failure, and for my OLED model I am still trying to figure out what happened if it is recoverable. This motivated me to find replacements. First I sold my old Asus Rog Ally original model, then sold my Legion Go original model, which went to a good home. Then I snagged a SteamOS edition Lenovo Legion Go S with the Z1 Extreme chip, bought my wife an Asus ROG Ally X, and then as the year closed out I managed to get in succession (yes, I have a problem) a MSI Claw 8 AI+, Xbox Rog Ally base model, and a Lenovo Legion Go 2. After the Legion Go 2 I decided I was done for now; there was no purpose to getting the Xbox Rog Ally X model which was inferior to both the MSI Claw and the LeGo 2 (as the fans call it).

Oh yeah, and the family upgraded to the Switch 2 when it came out. My son uses it exclusively as a Pokemon device, but my wife plays a lot on it. I continue to enjoy Switch 2, even though I am not really a good Nintendo guy, but I concede....I really love the new Kirby games that came out on it. 

This may sound excessive....and it is. I could have stopped with the Legion Go S which does everything I want, but I really enjoy messing around with this handheld tech, and I know it goes back to my youth when I would dream about the idea that one day this level of gaming fidelity in a handheld model could ever exist. Seriously, I was thinking about how cool handheld devices were when I was ten or eleven years old, and I have owned pretty much every handheld device for gaming that ever came out in the following decades. It's an illness, I know.

I'll probably be writing more about my experiences with this new generation if Intel 7 and Z2 Extreme powered chips in January. 

2025: The Year of the Walled Tabletop Gaming Garden and the Collapse of D&D 5.24 as the One Game to Rule Them All

   This year really saw the division rise between gamers who play D&D 5E, and those who play D&D 5.24, Tales of the Valiant, Daggerheart, Pathfinder 2E, or "insert here." The end result of the WotC OGL kerfuffle from two years back has born much fruit, but gaming now feels a bit corralled. Of these different options I feel like Paizo is working hardest to keep their corner of the market, as if Kobold Press, while D&D 5.24 moves forward on the momentum of a fanbase that is divided in a way I haven't really seen since the 4E days, albeit with less vitriol....probably because 5.24 didn't really change enough to merit anger, but what it did change just feels pointless, unfun or stupid. The number of times I have read an argument about why 5.24's method of "all humanoids are represented by a generic set of NPC stat blocks" is just fine, actually, and the system doesn't have any depth in stat blocks so there is totally no difference between a thug or scout and an orc warrior or lizardfolk is totally normal; the argument for the fans is literally, "The game isn't deep enough, get over it." Meanwhile, an even slightly more thoughtful design on the game could have simply included the customization by species rules from the original 5E DMG and it would have solved everyone's problem here, even mine. Unfortunately almost all of the changes in 5.24 ultimately feel like this: poorly thought out, solving a nonexistent problem, or tackling the problem (if there was one) poorly. I suspect 2026 will see D&D collapse further, and I hope the Daggerheart guys, Paizo and Kobold Press are there to scoop more players up.

2025: If Tabletop was a Hot Mess, Computer Gaming was a Dumpster Fire

From Games as a Service models collapsing to Microsoft publicly trying to murder the Xbox Console in favor of their Game Pass subscription model, to developers taking flack for using AI tools in their development, while other developers use AI generated voices to replace voice actors, its just a hot mess. To be clear: AI (or rather, the programs such as LLMs which are coming out of generative designs) as a tool for programmers to use makes sense to me. But the thing that freaks people out the most is when it looks like AI is used to replace human creativity; because the only people who don't seem to recognize slop for what it is appear to be Big Tech. (EDIT: That's not fair to Big Tech, they know exactly what they are doing, which is theft; it's the tech bros who will argue that slop is fine actually and not theft.)

On top of all this, the rapid development of AI Data Centers are causing RAM shortages and price spikes, and making the prospect of affordable computers in 2026 look dim. Just in the last two months you can see prices spike, and I'm actually really happy I managed to both upgrade my own personal tech and do a ton of hardware upgrades at my place of business earlier in the year, before the prices went out of control. You can find cheap laptops and desktops now, sure, but those machines have specs that were embarrassing in 2019, let alone now. 

2025: Was a Year of All Time

It sure was. I'd like to think things will be better for 2026.....but yeah, I don't think it's going that way. I think 2026 will unfortunately be the year that makes us look back on 2025 and go "Wow, remember when all the stuff we were dealing with in 2025 was just silly stuff like dumb game issues, short sighted and malicious Big Tech decisions driven by accelerationist philosophies, corporate greed and cowardice, life in a kleptocracy and a never ending river of AI slop? Yeah those were great times."

On AI Slop Part 2 - When the AI Consumes Bigger Projects

 I just received my hardcover copy of Delta Green: God's Hunt, a four part campaign series that is, as all things tend to be with Arc Dream and Delta Green, really cool. The reason it comes up is because, in a rather interesting observation from my son, we were looking at the cover, and I was speculating on the insects on the cover swarming the astronaut when my son said, "That really looks AI generated." 

I was a bit defensive at first, suggesting that there appear to be obvious tells its not AI generated by the use of certain painting techniques, such as on the bugs, to evoke imagery through a stylized brushstroke, and that I wouldn't think AI could easily replicate that, but I sort of realized that yeah, at this point it probably could. Moreover, my son pointed out some other inconsistencies, such as the difficulty in telling where a thumb is on the hand. My take is, the thumb is hidden....but in consideration, that's not really an easy "pose" for a human hand. But still....it seems so unlikely to me this would be AI art, right?

Well, when I read the contents of the book I find that there are credits to Dennis Detwiller as the art director and illustrator, which is interesting. There's no other artist in the book? My old school self is just impressed at Dennis Detwiller's art talent even as modern me is growing suspicious. My son, however, finds it odd that no piece is evidently signed, as real artists tend to leave signatures. I don't muddy the water by pointing out that AI can probably imitate badly scribbled artist's signatures easily enough. 

When in doubt on these things I google a bit, and do hit a patreon notice about Dennis taking steps into using AI art. I'm not a patreon supporter so can go no further on this, but it does lead to me now leaning toward the notion that my son, in fact, is right. 

All of this is a bit of a shame. I really want to enjoy my Delta Green works, but at the expense of real artists? I am more than a little uncomfortable at supporting projects out there which are not giving real artists a fair shake. To contrast, there are an enormous wealth of real artists supporting the gorgeously illustrated Daggerheart RPG (more about that soon.) You know all those weirdly bemused reviews I and many others had about the oddly off-putting art in the new D&D books? Yeah well all the really cool, evocative and inspiring fantasy art is sitting in Daggerheart, which resoundingly slaps the D&D art  around when it comes to showing it how its done. But if you do some searching, people have at times questioned if the art in the game is AI generated, and while this has been refuted, it is an example of how the use of AI more broadly is impacting the ability of people to tell when a real person is behind the art. 

Anyway.....more examples of how AI generated art is creeping in to places you could not or would not expect it, and the unfortunate results. Look, I get that some AI art is now reaching the point where it is quite impressive. But every time I see a piece of AI art like that, it means somewhere an actual artist was not given a chance to show their work and get paid for it. I know art is probably one of the most expensive components of writing an RPG product (especially for small press publishers), but this is one corner of a larger erosion of human value and input into the picture; I'd rather just not buy a product that doesn't support live creators (be they artists or authors) than contribute to a product that removes live creators from the mix. Unfortunately this means I need to be more meticulous in my consideration of Arc Dream purchases in the future.  And if I am on Drivethrurpg going forward, if your art credits on your listing don't look like the ones on Daggerheart RPG which says "hand crafted" (see here), then I am going to assume that declining to identify your Creation Method (as Delta Green Products do, for example) is tacitly endorsing AI use in your art, and that's a no-go for me. 

AFTERTHOUGHT: I was looking through older Delta Green books and it seems Dennis Detwiller is pretty consistently the only identified illustrator, even when its from books that predate the rise of AI generated content. This certainly makes sense, as Delta Green has a pretty distinct style to it and having one illustrator will keep that style. Maybe Dennis doesn't want to identify himself as utilizing AI in the art to avoid conflating his use of the tool with his own style, but this is only exemplifying my point: AI is muddying the waters here, badly, when it comes to identifying human generated works vs. AI generated works. So I suppose if, regardless of tools in use (treating AI as a tool) the artwork would remain consistently the vision and intent of Dennis Detwiller then there is perhaps no conflict here. But how much longer before we start seeing competition that uses AI with prompts like, "Make it like Dennis Detwiller does?" I can see a lot of art like that on Drivethrurpg already.....even with the "block AI art" button turned on. 

No matter where you look at it, this road doesn't end well for human artists and authors.