Promises Promises.

 

In this world of steel and brush, there is little in our lives that means more and less than a promise. We make promises and break them every day, whether formally or silently to ourselves and occasionally those we live around. The very premise of a promise imbues some faint visage of sacred authority, that to break one would incur some mystical godly wrath that would shatter the wills of the staunch most out there- but it is a myth. A myth we need to believe in for the sake of functioning in a world so dependent on a mutual trust- trust that hangs on the balance of the 'immutable' promise. Perhaps that is why there are few betrayals so profound as being thrown from the stability of an assured 'thing' into the mire of indescribable uncertainty once that fragile trust has been shattered. Like being left out in the woods by an absent parent, it's a primal and bone shaking fear.

Recently I've found myself thinking on the nature of such promises following the recent debacle of the Life at Sea Cruise ship. Or rather, the lack thereof. You see, a proposition of some all-inclusive three year pleasure cruise for the elderly to spend their twilight years visiting hundreds of worldwide ports was recently cancelled, one week before launching for lack of a ship. As it turns out, the event organisers were planning to turn this around on a dime, and had vested all of their hopes on the purchase of a cruise ship a few months ago. Yes, they sold the premise of this cruise to people before they even had a vessel to command. Seems insane but who knows, maybe that's common practice in the cruise business. Either way, the deal ended up lagging and eventually falling through entirely just weeks before setting sail in Istanbul, for which many of the prospective guests had already travelled and were waiting to embark on the next three years of their lives. Needless to say, the cancellation was a shock.

Because when you really break it down, having three entire years of your life planned out to take place on a cruise ship (I couldn't imagine a fresher hell) is a giant commitment. Giant enough that some people had put all their chips into living on this cruise ship, to the extent where they sold their houses, auctioned off their possessions, long-term rented out their manors and whatever other lavishly overexpansive hostel belongs to this breed of octogenarian. (I feel comfortable regarding them as 'the other' because my grandparents were lifelong hippies- wouldn't catch them dead falling for an expensive grift like this.) This situation is recent enough that there has been no resolutions ironed out and the betrayal is still fresh in the news cycle- but I think it fair to present this example out front for the matter of perspective. Because everything else we're about to delve into, squarely back in the realms of gaming, thankfully pales in comparison to this: the cock-up of the decade by my humble estimation.

Yes, we're going to talk about Overwatch 2. Can I help it? This one hits pretty close to home for me, personally. The promise? An apparently outdated plan to provide Overwatch 2 with the one thing that the Overwatch brand had been missing since it debuted on the main stage- context. Overwatch 2 was advertised featuring a top-shelf, hand-crafted, single player RPG campaign covering each of the main heroes and implementing some genuine interactable agency in this grand universe that had, until now, been relegated as little more than a colourful backdrop to one of the generation's most successful and pervasive multiplayer shooters. But of course, the very pitch was a lie. The story mode had been scrapped before the game even hit digital shelves and the team kept their lips shut for fear of sacrificing the momentum of their launch. The results? The lie grew, the expectations mounted and when everything came out Blizzard burnt every bridge with that sector of the community they had. The vast waves of Internet folk hanging on with bated breath for Overwatch 2 to finally achieve it's potential were scattered to the winds as they learnt the lesson that every other Blizzard fandom had already had stamped onto their foreheads: Blizzard live to disappoint and betray- it's their one kink.

Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has returned to the good graces of the Internet there is a sizable portion of people crawling out of the wood works to declare that 'they knew the game was good the whole time' and such typical trite, strawmanning for public pity points- what else is new? Curiously though, then the conversation shifts to the actual marketing for Cyberpunk 2077 and a curious pattern emerges. I've heard more than once how, if you actually look at the marketing, CDPR were shockingly upfront with everything they presented and never once misled the audience and it was actually fans who drove hype for the game up to unattainable heights. Is that right? So we're just going to ignore the several months of trailers then? The bold claim that this was the 'next generation of open world game', carrying implications that this title would not just be a more polished Far Cry? How about the presentation of the game's most reactive mission, the Malestrom deal, capped off with a summary of all the different ways that situation could be handled with the stinger. "And that's just one mission-" Which in a way, I guess was actually true. That level of reactivity was indeed, reserved for just one mission, everything from then on was largely straightforward and staunchly binary until the endings.

CPDR lied to their consumers. And I use that title as a collectively, hitting out at one element of the CDPR team, the marketing arm or the managerial arm or the shift workers or the accountants or the janitors who never managed to dry off the slippery floors in time- it muddies the water. The company as a whole presented an image of a game that Cyberpunk wasn't and still isn't. What makes Phantom Liberty so good is that it's no longer trying to be the super mega RPG that the game was pitched as, but just a damn good open world FPS game with solid progression- which it absolutely is. Before then, however, CDPR were the public latrines for everyone to relieve themselves in- and there was a time when it was seriously a question whether or not anyone could trust them again. Even now the whole 'trust first' mentality has been robbed- nobody wants to give that team the benefit of the doubt until they deliver something worth talking about. Which is fair, but a damn 360 compared to where they were at before this game launched after the love afforded to The Witcher 3.

Of course this brings us to one of the more recent of such stories and a sad one all around, as Crowd Funded Pony Fighting game 'Them's Fighting Herds' has recently announced that after their first season of content is wrapped up the game will be ceasing development, which in turn means the cancellation of the story mode, and some of the other promises from their Kickstarter days. This one is fresh off the presses so there is no deeper truth to dig into outside of the small studio themselves, but there doesn't appear to be any malicious intent in this one. It was an idea that never really had a chance to kick-off, the premise was pretty niche for all but My Little Pony Fans who really wanted Twilight Sparkle to go nuts and off one of her friends, the game launched in the dreaded 'Early Access' state which turns so many players off from the get-go unfortunately and the game slipped into Free-to-play; the typical make or break last desperation move for a project on the ropes. Promises broken sure, but what can you do without the traction and success to make it work?

A promise is a vow, and what we've come to see is that people seem to take those vows quite staunchly to heart. Every single one of these cases has resulted in vitriolic and disgusted backlashes from the affected, even the Pony Fighting game who's players were run ragged by the idea that development had dragged on for so long- apologies are worthless at this point. And there is indeed a point where a promise becomes a noose around the neck of the giver, further illustrating how sparingly some should be made in the face of the shifting tide of capability most are bound to. Maybe it's best to hedge your bets a bit more in life. Be a politician. Afterall, what makes failure even worse? Being reprimanded for your failure and dragged out to be a public whipping boy for all the world to see.