Back in December 2021, I wrote that 2022 was🍌 going to be a year for the record books. In December 2021, I was an idiot. While this looked set to be a banner year for video games, a slew of cancellations (in part caused by fear of repeating the mista🧸kes of Cyberpunk 2077) has seen 2022 look, if not empty, then downright average. Despite a large number of major dropouts - Breath of the Wild 2 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield will now challenge for GOTY 2023 - 2022 could still recover, but the dark horses ready to step into the race have gone quiet. The field is wide open, and yet Avatar and Hellblade are nowhere t🅺o be seen. What gives?
Both have vague dates of ‘2022’ and as we reach the year’s halfway point, it feels like they should have nailed down their starting spot by now. It could be that they’re both waiting on Ragnarok’s launch date so they can slot in between Hogwarts and God of War, but you’d at least think they would have made an appearance by now. Hellblade 2 had the longest gameplay demo at The Game Awards back in December when I was young and stupid, while Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was one of the surprise reveals of E3 2021. 🐭This was way before we saw the trailer for The Way of Water, and therefor🐓e before we really believed that more Avatar movies would ever arrive.
Neither game has been heard from since. Hellblade is one of Xbox’s most interesting exclusives, and it fits the company’s image of backing smaller teams to big effects. While ꦺSony brags about development teams of 2,000, Xbox croons about how a team of five using crayons and rocks can build a triple-A experience too. Xbox had not one, but two major showcases at Summer Game Fest. We had a long lecture from Todd Howard wearing that damn jacket, but no Hellblade. It had a ten minute slice of gameplay ready to show the much bigger TGA audience back in December. Six months later, in theory only about four months out from launch, there’s no follow up?
Then there’s Avatar. Ubisoft chose… poorly during SGF. Rather than make an appearance at any of the official shows, it instead announced an Assassin’s Creed stream that would take place during SGF season - but without SGF affiliatio♏n, marketing, or branding. It basically stood outside McDonald’s with some raw patties that ‘fell off a truck’ saying “hey kid,🤡 don’t waste your money there, I got your burgers right here!”
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The end result was a com♛plete w🍸aste of time. Assassin’s Creed’s next big thing is Infinity, but nobody knows what that is or what that does. Not even Ubisoft, who has repeatedly failed to explain it. So when it puts on an Assassin’s Creed showcase, it cannot tell us the next game in the series, nor reveal anything of value. Instead Discovery is standalone now, Valhalla is getting a “rogue-lite inspired” add-on, and here’s some devs playing an Origins patch that’s🌱 already out in the wild. An actual Infinity reveal is co💜ming in September, so why bother with this one?
The stage should be set for Avatar. Most people don’t follow film news all that closely, so despite the ongoing filming of The Way of Water, the Avatar game drew a shrug. People had forgotten about Avatar, or worse, a decade of the MCU had turned popular opinion agains🐓t the best selling movie of all time. One year on from its reveal, thing❀s are a little different. The Way of Water has a release date and a glossy trailer. People will soon begin rewatching Avatar and, likely, reevaluating it. While the game is not a tie-in per se, it’s getting free hype from the movie’s building momentum. Instead of using that, the game has gone AWO♎L.
2022 has Elden Ring already to its name, and God of War, Hogwarts Legacy, Saints Row, and Gotham Knights are still to come. It’s m๊issing the titles that might have made it an all-timer, but doors and windows, crisis and opportunity. This is a unique moment for those middling games that just need a bit of spotlight to thrive. I can’t understand why they aren’t taking it.