{"id":53419,"date":"2021-12-16T06:00:41","date_gmt":"2021-12-16T11:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53419"},"modified":"2021-12-14T10:02:30","modified_gmt":"2021-12-14T15:02:30","slug":"denouement-2021-part-1-i-need-a-medkit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53419","title":{"rendered":"D\u00e9nouement 2021 Part 1: I Need a Medkit"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was not a great year for me. My health took a turn for the worse in May<\/a>, and things sort of spiraled out of control from there. Eventually there was some surgery<\/a> that went poorly, some drugs with bad side effects, some complications, and a small but permanent downgrade to my quality of life. And then just to keep things interesting, my wife was injured<\/a> this August, right when she had a ton of stuff to do at work and I needed a lot of help at home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I turned 50 this year<\/a>, and I felt every bit of it.<\/p>\n

My wife is back on her feet now and I’ve adjusted to my new condition, but still. What a year. I had several months where I didn’t really play much in the way of games, or I played familiar low-stress “comfort-food” style games. I’m pretty sure my Factorio series<\/a> was cut short by the hospitalization. I seem to remember I had more posts planned, although I can’t remember the details now.<\/p>\n

So this was a weird year. Normally I look over the industry and try to find a trend or theme to tie the year together, but I spent most of 2021 looking inward and not paying attention to the news. Did I miss anything important? Did Half-Life 3 finally come out?<\/a> Did Rockstar announce GTA VI yet?<\/a> Did a new MMO displace World of Warcraft<\/i>?<\/a> Did EA finish rehabilitating Anthem?<\/a> What’s going on? What was the big story this year? I wasn’t paying attention.<\/p>\n

I don’t know about any of that, but I do know I’m cold all the time and I suspect my blood pressure medicine is to blame.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I suppose if I had my act together this year I could maybe make the case that this is the “Year of the Remaster”. Tony Hawk got one and it was pretty good<\/a>. Grand Theft Auto III got one and it wasn’t<\/a>. Modern Warfare 2 got one and it was okay<\/a>. The Warcraft III Reforged debacle<\/a> was last year. The pointless remaster of Grand Theft Auto V<\/a> is next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The industry is finally waking up to the idea of re-releasing legacy games. This is being done less for conservation and more for monetization, but it’s still good that these old titles are getting a chance with a new generation.<\/p>\n

Looking Back<\/h3>\n

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At the end of my 2020 wrap-up<\/a>, I listed a few games I was looking forward to. Let’s look back and see how those turned out.<\/p>\n

Mass Effect Remaster \u2013 I just want an excuse to play through Mass Effect 1 again. That\u2019s all I\u2019m looking for. I\u2019m very worried some dipshit will use the remaster as an excuse to shove a bunch of obnoxious Cerberus<\/a> retcons into the first game. It\u2019s very obvious that Cerberus is the pet villain of someone at BioWare, and that person isn\u2019t above flagrantly self-gratifying and tone-deaf bullshit<\/a>. They put Cerberus into ANDROMEDA, for crying out loud.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t plan on playing through ME2 or ME3. I really have seen enough of that nonsense<\/a>, and I know it all ends in frustration<\/a> anyway. Like The Matrix, Mass Effect is so much more enjoyable if I can pretend it\u2019s the only one. All I want is the original with a fresh coat of paint.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This year I spent a lot of time putting together Mess Effect<\/a>. By the time I was done with that, I was pretty burned out on Mass Effect. I did buy the remaster, but I only played the first few hours.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t help that some of the graphical upgrades were sort of questionable. They really cranked up the lighting, which was pretty subdued in the original. The remastered cutscenes often seemed to have lots of broad, soft light. That’s what you want if you’re filming a soap opera, a gameshow, or a sitcom, but it’s not really ideal for science fiction. It didn’t ruin the game or anything, but some of the mood was spoiled in the process of upgrading the game.<\/p>\n

Manifold Garden<\/b> \u2013 This is technically out now. It appeared on the Epic Store first, and I gave it a pass because I was tired of the Epic Store. It came out on Steam in October, but by that time the end-of-year deluge had begun. My plan is to play this one during the slow summer months of 2021.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah yes. The “slow summer months of 2021” when I was spending most of my time in the waiting rooms of various medical facilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The game didn’t set the world on fire. I don’t think it was bad or anything. I certainly never heard anything bad. In fact, I never heard anything at all. I just didn’t see the kind of excitement or interest I saw for The Witness<\/i>, Baba is You<\/i>, or Filament<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I did pick this game up around Thanksgiving, but I haven’t been able to put any real time into it. (I do like what I’ve seen so far.)<\/p>\n

Hyperbolica<\/a> \u2013 This is a game that takes place in hyperbolic space. It looks very trippy<\/a> and I can\u2019t wait to explore it for myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This one got pushed back<\/a> to 2022.<\/p>\n

Hitman 3<\/b> \u2013 The rebooted Hitman series is 2 for 2. Can they make three great games in a row? Probably. This one is out on the Epic Store, but I own the previous two Hitman games on Steam. They share a common pool of levels, so I don\u2019t want to break up the set. So while this is a 2021 release, I probably won\u2019t get to play it until 2022.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not only did this not come to Steam in 2021, but we still<\/b> don’t have a release date yet.<\/p>\n

I’ll have more to say on the Hitman games a little later in this series.<\/p>\n

Bloodlines 2<\/b> \u2013 I already talked about the troubled development of this game earlier in [my 2020 D\u00e9nouement]. It\u2019ll supposedly come out this year. We\u2019ll see how that turns out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nope! Delayed again. We don’t even have a release date yet, and it’s entirely possible this game is going to die in development hell.<\/p>\n

Gotham Knights<\/b> \u2013 Ugh. I\u2019m pretty confident I\u2019m not going to like this one. I hate everything the designers are doing<\/a>. But I\u2019m still waiting for someone to recreate the magic of Arkham City<\/a>. I need to play this, because otherwise the internet will never let me hear the end of it. Also, you never know! It might be good! This is not a prediction. I’m just allowing for the fact that this is technically<\/b> possible right now, no matter how unlikely it seems.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Looks like this is yet another game pushed back to 2022. And speaking of delayed games, back in my 2019 wrap-up<\/a> I said:<\/p>\n

System Shock Remake<\/b><\/p>\n

Supposedly this will come out this year, more than two years past the original promised delivery date<\/a>. It’s been a long road for this game. The demo released in December did not inspire confidence. It looks right. It feels right. But can they get the content done and polished before they ship it? I have no idea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two years ago it was already two years past its promised release date. And here at the dawn of 2022, we still<\/b> don’t have a release date. Honestly, at this point it would make sense to push it all the way back to 2023 and release it as part of the System Shock 30 year anniversary.<\/p>\n

30 years! Where did the decades go?<\/p>\n

Let’s Get 2021 Over With<\/h3>\n

Those of you who follow the site probably know that I normally don’t start this end-of-year series until the first week of the new year. This year I’m breaking with tradition because that’s just how the schedule worked out. I finished off my Prey series last week<\/a>, with just three weeks left in the year. I didn’t want to start the new series, run for 3 weeks, and then put it on hiatus for the D\u00e9nouement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Shamus, why not just have the two things run concurrently? You’ve done that in the past!<\/b><\/p>\n

This next retrospective is going to be a little different. Specifically, it’s going to feature two<\/b> posts every week. I didn’t want to run those two posts AND the Diecast<\/a> AND the ongoing Arkham Origins collaboration<\/a> AND my end-of-year stuff all at once, because that would be chaos.Also, I’m not sure I could keep up with that workload.<\/span><\/p>\n

So instead we’re going to power through this end-of-year in the last 3 weeks of 2021, and then kick off the new year with the next retrospective.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Next week we’re going to talk about a couple of games that I spent a lot of time with in 2021 but didn’t manage to write about.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was not a great year for me. My health took a turn for the worse in May, and things sort of spiraled out of control from there. Eventually there was some surgery that went poorly, some drugs with bad side effects, some complications, and a small but permanent downgrade to my quality of life. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[613],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53419"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53429,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53419\/revisions\/53429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}