Delays

Rescheduling conflicts 

As we have much to celebrate when it comes to gaming in this fine year, so too do we have cause to mourn; for that which was once on our doorstep has been shoved back into obscurity. Such is the consequence of 'delays'. That which was imminent becomes far, and that which is immediate is then immaterial. And we'd all be liars were we to insist that the wounds don't sting a little each time our upcoming hype trains take an unscheduled hiatus. Yet it's generally accepted etiquette nowadays to be understanding and patient in times such as these, as most tend to evoke that old Miyamoto Quote that I abuse worse than a Jamaican dominoes set. "A delayed game is eventually good but a rushed game is forever bad." What's that? Nintendo Life say the quote was never coined by him and instead belongs to some dude called Jason Schreiber? Look, Nintendo Life- no one's looking to have you ruin their fun, 'kay? I'm going to carry on attributing it to industry legend Shigeru Miyamoto and we'll hear nothing more about it!

Yet recently, with the sheer amount of game delays that just seem to pour out of the industry with every new release, sometimes I can't help but slip out of that meditative stoicism, stamp my feet a little and say: "what is going on?" It seems like the only games which come out when they say they're going to anymore are the uninspired yearly reiteration franchises; and it's so far in their best interest that they don't miss their own deadlines that they're willing to release cobbled together yawn generators rather than push back a release by even a couple of days. But with Breath of the Wild 2 being delayed, Baldur's Gate III being delayed, God of War: Ragnarok delayed twice; one starts asking questions like: is there any big game which hasn't been delayed?

Now of course one must be attentive of the times we live in. And of course with work at home and all the disruptions that has manifested in the industry over the past couple of years, there's going to be some hold-ups in the production line. And of course no one is going to gripe on the STALKER 2 devs for pushing that game into indefinite holding on account of the simply sickening disaster their home country is being forcibly subjected to currently. But this pattern of developers announcing big games and then changing course, sometimes at the last minute, hasn't been unique to these last two years either. It's almost an expectation that the industry has adopted in the last console age that has just carried itself on to this one. And I wish to speculate on why that is and could be.

The first time I really was shocked by a delay, it was all the back in 2012 with the bait-and-switch of Grand Theft Auto V which was surprise pushed back half a year. That was easily the biggest game of the year, what would go on to become an industry definer, just getting casually punted into next year on the verge of release. And by 'verge' I'm perhaps talking a couple of months out, but that's still  dangerously close to pull something like this. And whatsomore, given how long the delay was for, it almost seems like this was a decision that had been already pre-made. If I want to give the company the benefit of the doubt, I suppose I could try and interpret this as Rockstar's moment of integrity crisis; maybe they were behind on the project right up until the last 10 weeks and had to really sit down and ask themselves whether it was better to release a broken game today or delay out of their financial year. A crisis of faiths that lasted a little too long, perhaps; but one which ultimately scoured us a 10/10 masterpiece. (If only more modern titles would have learned from such a decision.)

On the other end of the spectrum we have the Cyberpunk delay. Not the first half dozen, but the delay which pushed the game from April of the year so that it would drop into the late Autumnal drifts- all on the eve of freakin' March! That's- just insane. They definitely had made that decision weeks beforehand and were too cowardly to let everyone down at once. Whatsmore, given the pathetically broken state the game ended up launching in anyway, one can just imagine the disaster which everyone in the team was staring at in March. Perhaps, and this is very much speculation, they looked at the state of the game back then and realised that they had utterly failed in making the game they wanted to, but figured the next six months could work to polish it into a fine game in it's own right.

What really gets to me is the way that I knew this delay was coming, it was obvious. Why? Because there was no marketing material whatsoever to even advertise this thing in the leading months. They weren't even getting TV spots yet, let alone the extended gameplay previews that I, and others, were expecting. Of course CDPR would end up going overboard, spending months hyping the dream of a game which at that point they had to mostly all know was going to disappoint; but at least at that point the name of the game was getting out there. Who were they fooling that April ever was looking like a release vector? I doubt they even prepared a single marketing graphic for that fake date. And yet, inexplicably, they maintained the false hood until the last possible moment! Bizarre.

Breath of the Wild 2, I don't even know the title yet, was delayed out of 2022, and that's something we're all trying to get to terms with. This game has been an enigma upon enigmas, with but a couple intentionally detail sparse trailers to feed us vague dregs about what this title might contain. Heck, it was only during this delay announcement that we got to even see the Master Sword for the first time in order to spot how mangled and broken it was. We hadn't even seen that series stable in the regular marketing yet! Yet this is a more understandable and forgivable delay. Made nearly an entire half year before the prospective release, not too many more months thrown on top, and clearly just a question of needing more polish time. No one is so wound up that they can't forgive a first delay like that.

When you're on your third delay, however; people can get disgruntled. Baldur's Gate III has been rubbing nerves with it's latest delay out of 2022, and it's pretty easy to see why. This title has been in early access for a year and a half, and though this is obviously the biggest project that Larian has ever worked on, one might start to question whether or not this undertaking might have been bigger than they anticipated. I love getting little teases into the gameplay, UI and classes of the main game; of course I do, but I'd much more love a complete and polished adventure to go through which doesn't leave me blue-balled before the wrap up of act 1. Delays have come timely, and kept a respectful distance, but they've also been grating after all of this time in active development. One has to wonder how drastically Early Access is holding things up and whether the game would have been better off without this period! Not having played the full thing, no one outside of their offices can really say yet.

Personally, I can take the wait. I think there's too many big games flying this way and that any given day and a little bit of spacing things out isn't going to kill us. But by that same merit, making dates is a promise and breaking that promise kind of sucks. It hurts my trust in the product and the company handling it, as I'm forced to ask if literally anyone has a good handling on the project and the work going into it. (I'm still wondering if Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 is happening. That game is literally as old as this blog, please don't let me outlive the first game I spoke about here!) Maybe we'd all be better off if developers waited a bit longer, for the project to be a bit more fully formed, before slapping dates and getting hopes up. Else we all end up like that one guy who booked his holidays off-work time for the Cyberpunk release under the explicit promise by the Cyberpunk marketing team that the game would hit it's current release, only for a delay. (It made for a funny tweet, but please let's not make that a habit.)

S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chernobyl

 You never get used to the zone

One of the things I was most happy to note during my time watching the E3 showcase was the absolute influx of Slavic games, or at least games with Slavic voices, across the presentations. I don't know exactly why this is the year that all these Slavic game developers decided to hit the scene, and I'm sort of tickled by the fact that most all of their games were in some way inspired by S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but I'm always a proponent for other cultures throwing their creative weight into the marketplace of ideas and no artistic medium, except for drawn art I suppose, is quite as good at mixing the strengths of various cultural influences as gaming is. Bring all the creativity that's unique to you into the industry and that could inspire people from across the globe to pick up that torch or incorporate parts of it into their own project, all in pursuit of this global oneness that we all aspire to.

I've seen Chernobylite steadily rocking towards the grand wrap up of it's main storyline, Atomic Heart slowly meteoring towards the wide spread attention I've said it was worth for months now and even Metro Exodus popped up in a trailer this E3 for some reason despite being over three years old now. All this shows quite clearly that our Slavic friends have the potential to be power houses in the game development world and we should be excited for their contributions. Chief among which, at least in my eyes, comes from the long waited true sequel to the hardcore shooter grandfather, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl. A game wherein real time strategy and first person shooter elements were married into a hair-raising bloodpumping dance of death where even the most mundane of encounter could spell death for the unprepared.

What you have to understand about the sort of game that S.T.A.L.K.E.R was, is that it was aimed at shattering the notion of first person games up until that point. Until then those games were all about embodying some demi-god human who had the strength to plow through hoards of demons, or single-man rush entire enemy battalions of Nazis or heal from deadly wounds simply by standing still and catching their breath. They weren't realistic and tried their hardest to feed into the whole 'power trip' notion of the gaming ecosystem. S.T.A.L.K.E.R rejected this premise, because it's team, GSC Game World, understood the elation which came from surmounting the impossible and riding the knife's edge against all but certain death. That same sweat-drenched satisfaction that us Dark Souls fans crave, was present in the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R and it's part of what makes that game timeless.

Thus now that the Souls franchise is considered gaming royalty, it only feels fair for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, now called 'Heart of Chernobyl', to resurface the beloved series for us all once again. A game which has finally landed a shot at the bigtime with Microsoft themselves seeming more than willing to back the thing for exclusivity rights. That's a long way to rise for a series that would have be considered pretty niche ten years back, and all of it is rightly deserved given the level of mirror-sheen quality we're seeing out of this game on a pure graphical level so far. What they've managed to achieve so far looks incredible, and after the most recent trailer which blessed our eyes I simply cannot wait for the full raw gameplay reveal.

Straight away this new trailer actually did show us some real gameplay for us to salivate over, however it was stylised and cut-up chunks when what I really want is a substantial ten minutes or so of uncut gameplay with everything in there so we get an idea of the pacing for a game like this, something that's sure to be important. But even then we still got a pretty good idea of how this game will play at an alpha level at the very least, as between some dialogue there were sections of actual action and even some gunplay. Honestly that was a lot more then I expected from a Microsoft conference, so Kudos to them for actually learning about what the fans want to see from games. (Now if only the rest of E3 could learn the same lesson.)

I do, however, look at the gameplay we saw as pure Alpha footage (but with a nice coat of paint slathered on there) because there was a clear whiff of 'just because it would look cool in a trailer' shown here. Watching the way that attachments for weapons are applied real time (something which Battlefield is also doing), hearing snippets of the genuinely stellar sound design and the gushing about the practically photo-realistic rendering of the building that was being sieged, there's a lot to love here. However we did clearly see several instance wherein there was obviously no enemy AI in the game, which was strange. Seeing the player stand out in the open whilst gormless soldiers stand shooting straight ahead for the mere effect of the trailer is a real big standout in a game series where a single stray bullet can take you out. I understand dressing things up for a trailer, but couldn't the trailer player have just acted as though the enemies had AI? Maybe even taken cover? I just think it's an odd way to highlight the shortcomings of your unfinished project.

We were also lucky enough to see some anomaly gameplay up on the surface of the wasteland, which carried this perfectly captured air of desolation to it that rivals Metro in it's artistry, and Metro's developers are the kings of atmosphere so that's really saying something! There was also a bit of survival horror thrown in there when a huge mind-flayer anomaly was stalking across an underground laboratory and going full slasher-movie on the player. (Something I hope carries over to when the team get around to actually coding enemies, I don't want this to just be a flashy staging for the trailer.) And finally we got one extended shot of an impassioned speech up close, highlighting both the quality of facial animations and the voice acting which, and remember that I don't speak Russian as I say this, seem actually AAA quality.

Looking at S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 compared to the original classics is honestly rather jarring in that a lot of it is almost unrecognisable. Flawless graphics, stunning setpeices, full-body motion tracking animation, it feels like a whole new world that this relatively straightforward franchise has stepped into and I'm ecstatic to see the results. The gaming landscape has gone too long without that tough-as-nails shooter to bring us back down to earth and remind everyone that we're really as the bottom of the foodchain, and I can think of no better deliverers than GSC. It's great to see you back on form, guys.