Leah's Gaming Digest, 14th November

It’s November! It was also November last week but now we are firmly in the middle of November, typically a month in which big AAA gaming titles will see a release date, and I might just be forgetting some things, but it really feels like there haven’t been that many games teased or released so far prior to the Christmas shopping wishlist season. That doesn’t take away from the absolute BUMPER year we’ve had so far, but it is a little interesting.

• A cheeky GTA VI teaser…

• Golden Joysticks Awards!

• CoD Multiplayer release

• BBC Children in Need

• OWL is officially dead :(

GTA VI IS REAL???

I know what you’re thinking. GTA 6, so soon after GTA 5? Have they given themselves enough time to top the cultural phenomenon that became one of the highest grossing games of all time?! Here’s hoping, because I’m sure the devs over at Rockstar are feeling a LOT of pressure to move mountains with the next installment in the series, expectations are high, and we know that gamer expectations are about 10 times higher than regular expectations.

GTA V was actually one of the games that persuaded me to sit through and enjoy a narrative based experience, which probably sounds insane, but something about the setting and the humour just grabbed me in a way few other games had. I played through that campaign at least twice, which is a miracle by my standards, and spent countless hours roaming around freely just experiencing the world. If you haven’t caught on, my opening statement was indeed slightly tongue in cheek - GTA V released in 2013 and been wrung out enough in that time that it’s somehow still relevant - GTA V is in fact one of the most consistently watched games on Twitch, though that is through the GTA Roleplay servers in which intrepid, brave maverick developers decided to essentially crack the game and develop a whole interactive-online roleplay experince with the foundations of the world. But still - updates were still being produced for GTA Online as recently as last month, it’s a cash cow with endless supplies of milk, you can see why a slowly-slowly attitude for developing a sequel was afforded. Many sequels are pumped out to capitalise on the hype of a title that went down well, to varying degrees of success as we all know. I would hasten to say the recent Star Wars: Jedi Survivor game fell short of it’s hit prequel, Fallen Order, released barely 3 (technically four, but Fallen Order released towards the end of 2019 and Survivor released at the beginning of 2023) years prior, really not much time at all to create such a huge complex world full of environments and easter eggs.

GTA 6 has had TEN years in the oven. TEN! With GTA 5 released in 2013, 6 was mentioned in 2018 but confirmed in 2022. It’s likely of course that the entire ten years wasn’t spent on purely development time, I’m sure some of that was spent on creating content and DLCs for 5 and the pre-development planning stage, but still, fans have been waiting a long time for this. Rockstar also released Red Dead Redemption 2, and my god, it cannot be denied that game is a masterclass in real-world beauty and immersion, regardless of how tedious those immersive details may have been to actually play out. With RDR2 as a baseline for what we hope to expect from the sheer attention to detail in any future releases from Rockstar, it feels like an almost impossible task to create something that feels stunningly grounded, new and innovative, yet also samey and familiar enough that it evokes those feelings of zooming around Los Santos without having to reinvent the emotional wheel.

Anyway, this has all been fluffy digression as I sit here having read the tweet from Rockstar this morning:

Old news by the time this will be published…

December! Our first look! Somehow, mercifully, there have been no substantial leaks about GTA 6 yet, so this will truly be a first look into the next generation of Grand Theft Auto, and I am equal parts excited and terrified to see where they’re going to take it - I’m sure the internet will be awash with discourse and I will have lots of my own opinions to share right here when it drops.

Joysticks for All!

It’s the early awards season with the Golden Joysticks, held annually in London but returning for the first time since 2019 to an in-person event. The Golden Joysticks are the Awards of the people, voted for by the global public and has in fact been running since 1983. Those are your factoids for the day, please remember them, there will be a quiz next time.

The categories have increased in number over the years, this year a huge 23 awards were given out, acting as an interesting taster for how people have felt about this years bumper year for game releases, because there have been some BANGERS.

Larian with Baldurs Gate 3 took home 5 of the awards, including Best Storytelling, Visual Design, Gaming Community, PC Game of the Year and Ultimate Game of the Year… I would say that’s easily predicted since it truly is an incredible game, but the competition is pretty dang stiff - It was surprising to see Zelda Tears of the Kingdom only take home one (Best Nintendo Game). Starfield managed to grab best Xbox Game, though in all honesty the pickings were real slim for that one, it still beat out the highly acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush. It was great to see Ben Starr, voice actor for Clive Rosfield in Final Fantasy 16 snag an award for Best Lead Performer too - his performance truly made that game something special.

Clive won a statue…

We’ve got the Games Awards to look forward to in December and the Gaming BAFTA’s are coming back around again towards the first third of next year, so still plenty of time for the internet to be awash with conspiracy theories as to why their fav didn’t grab the GOTY awards.

The other half of Call Of Duty finally releases!

The half 99.9% of people buy the game for finally released! Yaay! I logged a few hours into it and it was like a weird nostalgia wave, seeing all those MW2 maps remastered into the game. If you’re confused it’s okay, me too. This is Modern Warfare 3 (2) but with Modern Warfare 2 (1)’s maps. All I know is seeing those maps I spent hours and hours running around repetitively years ago brought a little tear to my eye. The single player experience still leaves much to be desired, but I suspect that will remain uninstalled by that 99.9% of the playerbase anyway.

BBC Children in Need branches into Gaming

If you’re from the UK you probably grew up with Pudsey on the TV every November with the yearly show raising money for Children in Need, working in many ways to improve the lives of disadvantaged children. This year they branched out to the Gaming scene and I was invited to take part! They had a 2-hour liveshow on BBC Three which involved some poor gamers (me) racing F1 2023 on an actual sim rig (I did alright! I didn’t embarass myself on live TV! This time!), and also invited 6 streamers into a room to all stream separately on their own channels, to a somewhat chaotic but somewhat effectual end, since altogether we managed to raise over £10000 in that room (mostly thanks to Tubbo, a minecraft creator with enough energy to power a thousand suns).

It was an awesome step for broadcast to reach out to gaming in this way, to any of us this sort of show isn’t too groundbreaking - people produce this kind of thing online fairly often, but for live TV it’s quite a brave step, i’m sure it took many years of convinving producers to let it happen but i’m glad it did, and hope it does continue to in the years to come.

and finally….

Overwatch League is finally resting in pieces

This one hurts.

Overwatch League, the competitive esports side to Blizzard’s Hero Shooter, has officially been declared deceased. It has been hanging by a thread long before Overwatch 2 released, but its demise is pretty damn depressing considering the hype start OWL had back in 2018. Wikipedia has changed the description from ‘OWL is a professional esports league’ to ‘OWL was a professional esports league’, so you know it’s serious.

The pandemic certainly wouldn’t have helped anything, but it seemed there was much beneath the surface that contributed to Activision-Blizzard choosing to ‘transition away’ and take it in a ‘new direction’.

I was lucky enough to go to the OWL Arena in LA back in 2018 and despite not closely following any of the teams playing, I bought into the hype immediately - it was infectious, and in fact that trip was the catalyst for my tentative entry into watching esports for games I didn’t even play, like LoL at the time. There was something special about it.

The ambitions were high with OWL - Blizzard even floated the idea of Cities building their own esports stadiums and having home and away games akin to regular sports, but the idea just didn’t take on, a real damn shame in my opinion, but there does seem to be a lot less money in esports than people seem to think - many teams and leagues over the past couple of years have really felt the pinch, cutting staff, having difficulty paying players, being unable to even compete in some cases due to lack of funds. At this point, founding an esports team seems like a glamorous money sink. the ‘buying a yacht’ of the younger tech savvy generation. What the future holds is unclear, but OWL biting the dust, while the writing may have been on the wall, is no doubt a loss, and confidence in the esports industry on the whole is no doubt shaken seeing a huge player like Acti-Blizzard unable to make things work out.

These things keep getting longer don’t they? And probably worse written, but hey! You read this far!