Gaming Ramble Weekly

Welcome back to another edition of Gaming Ramble Weekly!  I hope you’re well and looking forward to what is going to be a seriously STACKED month in the gaming space.  February has become the biggest month of the gaming year in recent times: in 2022, February saw the release of Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West, while last year saw Hogwarts Legacy and Wild Hearts release, amongst others.  This month sees Suicide Squad, Helldivers 2, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth releasing, and for many, this is one of the most hotly anticipated months of the year.  For me, it’s business as usual, nothing really appealing to me, but I’ll be covering the major news surrounding these titles!

On a sad note, January has seen many many jobs in the games industry be lost, as studios continue to pay the price for over-hiring during Covid, where it became easier to hire people remotely as the world adapted to working from home.  The most significant of these came from newly acquired Activision Blizzard, with new parent company Microsoft (Xbox) releasing 1900 people from their jobs, equating to 8% of Xbox’s overall game dev division.

This is sadly not unexpected, especially with Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard finally being completed just 3 months ago.  This deal, which has been heavily scrutinised in both the UK and US courts, and has captured the attention of all hard-core gamers for the last couple of years, demonstrated a real statement of intent from Xbox, as they look to claw back some of the momentum that was lost during the last console generation.  Acquiring a company as large as Activision Blizzard however, was always going to lead to layoffs, especially in departments such as marketing or HR.  There is less need for a full structure whenever Xbox have their own.

The big worry for the industry is that there has been 5,600 layoffs in January alone, which is nearly half of all layoffs in 2023 (which was seen to be a bad year for job layoffs).  And with more and more companies going to a more hybrid approach to working, it seems that employees will not have the same flexibility that they had in 2020.  As the industry deals with these cuts, coupled with a boom in the consumption of video games, there are fears that crunch (working extreme hours with little to no breaks) will become more prevalent again.  Let’s hope that the industry can find a balance in some way.

I Broke the Loop

Yes, that’s right!  I finished my first game of the year with Deathloop, and overall, I have to say that it was a lot of fun.  Once I managed to get into the bones of the story, I felt myself getting hooked by the mystery of the loop, the significance of Julia, and the personal journey that Colt finds himself on.  The structure of following leads is a great way to navigate to finding the perfect, or Golden, loop to reach the conclusion of the story, and I felt that the structure managed to bypass some of the difficulties that can be had with time-loop games.

However, with any time-loop media, there felt to me like some inevitable plot holes/rules broken in order to service the story.  At times, I found myself questioning the rules that the game had set out, almost saying “so that can be remembered but this can’t?”, and I think when you get to that stage, the immersion is broken slightly.  I’ve spoken before about struggling with first person games, and my skill level is still pretty terrible, and while that was a slight barrier for me, I still found that I was able to get to grips with the traversal and combat well.

Now, the focus is on finding the next game to sink my teeth into, and my desire is to find something that has a captivating story and plays in third person perspective.  Knowing me, it’ll take me a day or two just to figure out what to play, but I feel like I really want to commit to a game this month, and experience a longer story-driven game.  I’ll let you know next week if I manage to make a decision…

PlayStation are Making Moves

Oh boy, am I glad that I am only writing this on Monday night, because about an hour ago, PlayStation announced a State of Play event on Wednesday 31st January will go live, showing 15+ games, and an extended look at Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin.  See the official announcement below:

This is where hype starts building for me, as we enter February there is also likely to be a Nintendo Direct, and so there will be plenty to talk about and cover!  But with this State of Play, it’s likely that we’re going to have more of an idea of what to expect from PlayStation in 2024, and while hype is dangerous and can lead to disappointment, I believe there is going to be one big announcement of some sort.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Death Stranding 2 News, as well as the rumoured Until Dawn PS5 version.  

No doubt then that next week will be all about this State of Play should it be up to scratch, and with PlayStation being slightly less specific than previous showcases, I think they have something up their sleeves to tell us about on Wednesday.  This week also will see the announcement of next month’s PS+ Essential games, which is something I always look forward to.  January’s games were actually pretty good, with A Plague’s Tale being one of the games on my Backlog.  I still need to play the first one, so that might be something I look into very soon.

Thanks for reading until the end!  I appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings, and as I say nearly every week, I’m really enjoying writing this.  I’ve also really enjoyed experimenting with the TikTok, which is also photo-based content rather than videos, which is very much a time reason than anything else.  A few weeks ago, I set the ambitious target of hitting 1000 followers on there, and I’ve been using that as a motivator as I post daily.  As it’s the end of the month, I’ll give you a quick update.  As of writing, I have gained 44 followers in 3 weeks of posting, sitting at 191 in total.  This has really picked up in the last 7 days, and I’m buzzing with the level of interaction I’ve been able to generate over there!  It’s really encouraging when something you enjoy doing starts getting results, and I’m more motivated than ever to keep going!  

I shall love you and leave you, and I look forward to discussing PlayStation’s event this time next week!  Until then, have a great week, get stuck into some great games, and I’ll see you next time!