Merry Christmas; also, screw this whole year

Warning: No holiday cheer to be found here, just disappointment

Not really a fan of the season, but others are so I might as well come out and say 'Merry Christmas,' now can I just say that this has been the worst year ever. Yeah I know, not exactly a new take out of me, but I just really need an outlet and this is pretty much all I have available to me, so there it is. Now from the very first moment of this crappy year there has been every single possible kind of scare that it's feasible to have, oh and a pandemic thrown in there just to tap things off. General life has been difficult too, coming from a Caribbean family I understood exactly what it was like to be in the middle of a group of people who believe themselves patently too good not to still throw stupid parties in the middle of all this. The general public, who are already kinda standoffish over here anyway (being British) have become their true ornery selves in public. And the job market's a wasteland, but maybe I'm getting a bit too personal with that last one, there's just as much crap happening in the gaming world too. (And isn't that just the best? When my escapism needs an escapism!)

But where do you even start with the absolute mess that this year has been. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I mean the best gaming event that happened this year was probably the release of Demon Souls Remake. But that was PS5 so I can't really celebrate that one too hard. (There was also Ghost of Tsushima and FF7R but I don't have a PlayStation. Others can claim that victory.) I guess Doom Eternal was pretty tight, but from there things just seemed to go down hill. First there was the game that I highly anticipated for about an entire year, Resident Evil 3 Remake. Now I haven't really talked about this much because I wanted to enjoy as much of that game as there was to play, but there really wasn't all that much. The biggest problem with the original RE3 was the fact that it was essentially made from 80% recycled assets which really limited the scope of the game and resulted in a much smaller experience. The Remake didn't need to share that problem, and yet it did! The assets were new, some of the zombies were new, but the game was still unnecessarily truncated and sold for the same price as last year's Resident Evil 2! (The missed potential- It burns!)

Then there was the situation with Avengers the video game, and yeah- I pretty much saw straight through this game from the very get go- but gosh darn it I wanted to believe so bad! I've always been a huge fan of Marvel even before their recent spat of Movie success; I read the original Days of Future Past, I played the X-men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance games; I was a Marvel fan. (I am a Marvel fan, I should say. The game wasn't that bad.) But somewhere along the way this game which should have been a bonafide Marvel swansong fell to the wayside and floundered. (Meanwhile Sony's Spiderman shot webs around Avengers and gloated their superiority.) Even having played the game myself I don't think is was quite worth the murdering it received from the community, I mean it didn't deserve it's price either, but for the £20 it's typically seen for around now I'd say it would be worth it. It's a little bit of fun. (If anyone actually played it anymore, which they kinda don't. Also I guess it's not optimized well either...)

Warcraft 3 Reforged- wait a minute, that whole thing happened this year? Wow, that was back in January... feels like a whole different world, doesn't it? Now to be fair, I didn't have the personal link towards this game that would make it really hit home, but I do consider myself somewhat in tune with the community so I understand the hurt it caused. The Original Warcraft 3 pretty much laid the groundworks for the archetypal community supported game. (Or at least got the ball rolling for Half Life to set the world of modding into motion.) It was a classic game, nurtured such creativity that a whole genre spawned out of it and prepared the scene for the Blizzard juggernaut that was WOW to rule the MMO landscape for the next decade. Thus it was heinous what was done to this game under the guise of 'making an upgrade', especially when considered alongside the rampant marketing lies and anti-community policies which were put into place. Why, if this was the way the gaming year started, imagine how sucky it would be if the year ended with a dark mirror of this exact situation?

And there we come to the cap off for this year, the Anakin Skywalker on Mustafar moment of 2020. Cyberpunk 2077 was bought to us after 7 years of development to break the spell that this abysmal year held over us, and yet it was seduced by the allure of quick profits and lie-driven marketing. They were supposed to redeem the industry; not damn them! Bring balance to gaming, not leave it in ruins! Have you heard the tale of CDPR's fall? It's not a story the Jedi would tell you... But in all seriousness, I can't think of a worse possible blow to the gaming world than to have the literal paladins of the Industry, CD Projeckt, (As in the whole company, not just the 'Red' developers) turn out to be liars and oathbreakers. It's like having everyone you love slowly stick a knife in your gut and twist it, only for the final person to be the one you trusted the most, like a kindly parent or a kid who shot your girlfriend that one time. (Huh, that metaphor got stuck somewhere between Final Fantasy XV and Game of Thrones...) Point is, we were lied to and the betrayal is still very fresh for some of us. (Well it's been less than a month so I guess that makes sense.)

'Coming out: When it's ready'. Can you believe that was the first thing we saw regarding this game all the way at the end of that reveal trailer all those years back? What a total crock. 'When it's ready' was like the rallying cry of CD Projeckt fans over the years. Whenever a AAA game drove itself off a cliff because it rolled off the production line with faulty breaks, you'd hear the discordant chorus of "Should have come out when it was ready, that's what CDPR are doing!". I was never part of that crowd, to be honest, but I did share that feeling of safety that everyone of that ilk did when they considered Cyberpunk. CDPR would get it right, they understand how to treat gamers right. And somewhere I'd like to think that's still true, though that part is struggling with the realist who tells me I'm coping from the shock right now. Like finding out your older sibling sells ketamine for a living in order to pay for those lavish presents he always gets you for Christmas. (Okay, that one wasn't even a reference; my imagination is just running wild; no more Metaphors. That was a simile. No more of them either.)

And you want to know what the most messed up part is? The thing which makes this burn so much worse than the other gaming screw ups this year? I still want to play the game, it still looks good; only I don't have the hardware to run it. I would have been fine if CDPR had just cancelled the current gen versions, I mean it would have hurt being denied access after waiting so long, but it would have been better than handing off this deformed abomination and calling it an appropriate port! I was dragged along on the lie that Cyberpunk was within my grasp, and it's one that seems all the more incredulous when you account for both the absolute state of the game and the original release date. Remember how that was slated for April? Before the Series X or PS5 were even formally announced? (You know, the two consoles on which this game actually consistently runs like it should?) What in gods name did the game look like then and how did anyone think it was nearing completion as long as they did? At the time I remember remarking about how the delay was clearly long overdue as evidenced by the sheer length of it, but this is insane! The game should have been delayed by a year at least! (Maybe then it might actually be 'ready')

Sure, though we've seen their apologies and heard the crocodile tears of the bigwigs telling us how "We just weren't paying enough attention"; what a load. "We totally forgot about the console versions until they launched, our bad!" Really? Well that's funny considering that two trailers actually released dedicated to showing off those versions of the game, (albeit, rather pointedly not on the base last gen consoles but their suped-up cousins) and the footage was rather curiously free of all the bugs which the game launched with. Do they mean to tell us that this clearly curated footage just happened to be completely bug free and run fine, so they thought the game ran fine too? Is that the reason why they denied console review codes to reviewers before the release of the game too? It wasn't just done in the knowledge that the PC version was both more stable and came with the inbuilt excuse of "Well, the bugginess is because you're trying max settings without the hardware to back it up." (And yes, they did try that.)

So they purposefully obfuscated the shoddy performance and shipped the game on every platform, why exactly? This is the point that doesn't compute to me; why not just delay the consoles release? Is it because deepdown CDPR know that no amount of patching is going to solve the fact that previous gens just don't have the processing power to run Cyberpunk? (I certainly hope that's not the case, but I'm losing all trust in CDPR's abilities recently. I'd like to think rightly so.) But again, why did CDPR need to sell broken software to half it's customers? I mean what is the point? Bluepoint didn't need to sell a crappier version of Demon Souls in order to make that a success, so why did Cyberpunk need to release on everything? It smells like a classic case of corporate greed and the desire to make 'all the money' even when it's a desire that leads you off a cliff.

And this time it absolutely has, because as much as it pains me to say; it seems the industry is turning Cyberpunk into an example. Likely due to it's hype and the high-profile nature of this blunder, everyone is trying to make it known that regardless of the overall quality of the product (Which, again, seems decent) this was unacceptable and it won't be stood for. Memes have mocked CDPR relentlessly, stock drops have cost them a cool billion, (They made back Cyberpunk 2077 costs in pre-orders, don't cry for them just yet) and now, shock of all shocks, Playstation just removed Cyberpunk from it's digital store. A week before Christmas. Because apparently they built up enough heat for a level 3 action. (Yakuza reference, anybody?) Now these blogs are written a week before debut, so it's highly likely that something more has transpired which I don't know yet, but dems the breaks for now. And you know what? I'm still angry. (Admittedly, the Playsation store thing does take a lot of that anger off. There's a kick to the nuts I wish upon no game company) This should never have happened in the first place, and CDPR, more than anyone else, should have set the example that a rushed game is immediately bad whilst a delayed game is eventually good. (That's Shigeru Miyamoto, man; learn from the king himself!)