CHENNAI: Buying the newest, most-awaited games on the day of release did not work well in 2020. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla continues to have game-stopping glitches on the console edition: Eivor gets stuck inside a wall a lot of timesand falls into the void more often than some of us did while trying to pay attention on work calls last year. There was yet another game that made it to the meme headlines for weeks — due to bugs eating holes into its gameplay. I dare not mention its name, because its appearance would summon an ugly upvote on this article.The point is, 2020 taught us an important lesson — that it is better to not let the pressure of a game’s newness force us into having opinions with which we do not agree. Therein is my segue to my personal theme for gaming in 2021 — REPLAY.
While ‘play indie’ is my year-agnostic refrain, mainstream videogames hold an allure that distracts us. They lure us with their tantalising presence — like when the table next to us at a restaurant dips into a cheese fountain while we wait, sipping water. But waiting, and waiting to replay has a lot of benefits, with the only cost being us staying off the internet to avoid spoilers.
Big game, big bucks, bigger bugs: A brand new game is like a tiny plant that needs to be coddled into flowering.As you sow, shall you reap(lay). Big games offer over hundreds of hours of playable content which are mostly poorly rendered on the initial release. The benefit of this bigness is that the developers continue tweaking the game years after release, with hopes to expand player base. Everyone needs to believe it is good, till it becomes good. We should leave the believing to the big paid reviewers on YouTube and Twitch. Don’t waste your bandwidth on hotfixes and quick updates. Wait, till the game becomes cheap. Like Just Cause 4 — it was free on the PS store last month. Assassin’s Creed Origins, Hitman 2, Far Cry 5 were all free on the Epic Game Store last week.
Hindsight is a free-to-unlock DLC: Big games are hugely appreciated only years after their release. For example, there is now a new wave of gamers (me) romanticizing even the heavily critiqued Assassin’s Creed Unity, after having experienced the provokingly repetitive Valhalla. Red Dead Redemption 2 is now in vogue, as its online game has now matured enough to be its own standalone edition. Patient gaming provides you with the freedom to relive old gameplay moments: the characters are like old friends, the story feels more relatable, you notice things you missed, the combat feels more real, the air is fresher, the sky bluer etc. Leave the experimenting in 2021 to others. Relax and replay.
Anusha Ganapathi
@quaffle_waffle
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)