My method for these past GOTY blogs has been to let dozens of takes about a bunch of different games simmer over the course of the year before unleashing several of thaem in a flurry of creative energy at the end of December. This time, I'm halfway through January and I honestly still don't feel super motivated to write this. That creative impulse certainly isn't there like it normally is, but that in and of itself is interesting and worth exploring so I guess that's your peek into my mental state after a very strange year with games. Also liberate Palestine.
No Gods No Masters No Categories
Because I have very little to say in specific this year, I'm letting my whims guide this freeform ramble.
So my strange year with games should probably be qualified. At the onset this looked like a year of nonstop bangers for me. In past GOTYs, I've written (or at least I think I've written) about how amazing a year it was for games, and this one I assumed would be a standout among standouts. It was one of those years were I looked at the list of anticipated releases and started to wonder how I was possibly going to winnow that down to a top 10.
A ton of my absolute favorite series were getting new releases, some of them after more than a decade since their last iteration. On the way were a new mainline Final Fantasy, the next Diablo, and even a new Alan Wake and an Armored Core that wasn't going to be Armored Souls. So it kind of sucks to be sitting here not wanting to talk about most of these games because I really have very little nice to say. But also I'm old now so here is a quick and dirty list of me getting my gripes in.
- Fire Emblem Engage - The story and character designs made me drop it after only a few battles
- Redfall - We all know what happened there
- Assassin's Creed Mirage - Feels oversimplified and sloppy instead of refined
- Final Fantasy XVI - Terrible story, terrible writing, boring and laborious gameplay
- Diablo IV - Return to skill trees and explosion of item affixes broke the addictive balance of systems in 3
- Marvel's Spider-Man 2 - Narrative devolved into an unearned speedrun of Venom comic arcs
- Baldur's Gate 3 - Bad camp system forced several act 1 restarts because of companion lockouts before I gave up
- Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon - It's a great game but a bad game for what I liked about the series
Honorable mentions to Octopath Traveler II which seems like such a massive improvement over the first game which I already enjoyed, but also for whatever reason every time I try to play it I fall asleep, and Street Fighter 6 which, for personal reasons, I just fell off of fighting games this year so it never turned into an obsession the same way SFV did for me.
The Part Where I Accuse Everyone of Misogynoir
That's a shitpost, mostly.
People who actually played Forspoken have numerous valid criticisms of it; it is very much one of those sorts of games that people have reasonable fatigue for and also comes with the general lack of polish you'd expect from a game that is building itself from nothing but also wants to have massive scope. If you played Forspoken and hated it, you are valid. But the initial negative backlash against the game was both undeserved and incredibly outsized for the way it sort of engulfed so much of gaming discourse.
It calls to mind the early talk around Days Gone, when an out of context video clip lit the internet ablaze. You couldn't take a step without bumping shoulders against someone declaring the game misogynist. To be clear, Days Gone isn't a feminist masterpiece nor is it the pinnacle of game design, but as most people seem to agree upon revisiting the game in recent years Days Gone is actually inoffensively fine, maybe even verging on good. In hindsight, though, it's difficult to look at the way people delighted in tearing into it without even playing it as anything but a sort of mass exercise in performative wokeness.
Gonna go ahead and tap the "your informed opinion is valid" sign again to say that if you played Days Gone and found it bad, offensive, hateful even, that's a totally ok opinion to have and I wouldn't try to dissuade you from it. And on balance I'd much rather have people be performatively woke than anti-woke, but like all things internet it is so easy for complex topics to get flattened into "thing good" or "thing bad" and then everyone else just jumps on board because it feels good to have people agree with you.
Which brings us back to Forspoken. If you played the game and hated it, if you played the demo and hated it, or even if you just generally have a fatigue for that style of detached and sardonic characterization, that's fine. Forspoken is definitely not for you. But if you say, found yourself shit talking the game after every trailer but also still find the writing of characters like Spider-Man compelling, maybe it's worth taking a look inward.
Because much like Days Gone, it was impossible to exist on the internet without running into people bashing on Forspoken long before it came out. No other game was getting the same level of attention. If a new trailer dropped, you could guarantee multiple channels on multiple Discord servers would circle back to bashing on that trailer multiple times per day for weeks to come. And much like performative wokeness, it's easy to get that good feeling of having people agree with you nowadays by accusing something of being "Whedonesque."
To be clear, fuck Whedon for being a predatory asshole, and there is definitely an oversaturation of quippy dialogue in recent decade, but that doesn't mean we have to throw the quippy baby out with the quippy gamer bathwater. Plenty of game characters, especially in trailers, have a more "well that just happened" sort of vibe, but none in recent memory have been singled out for recycled memery ad infinitum like Frey, the protagonist of Forspoken. And it's easy to point to the way she stands apart from all those other game protagonists. But if we honestly engage with her as a character, it becomes clear that the writers are doing something meaningful when they portray her as being quippy. It's not quips for the sake of quips.
In simple terms, Frey is a very intense Spider-Man. She has faced a lifetime of hardships since birth, far beyond what a typical person experiences, and has developed this detached persona because she literally needs to dissociate from the dire reality of her situation just to keep moving forward. She starts the game as one of the most disempowered people in society, and much like Spider-Man, a lot of her character is formed by the shifts between when she is mouthing off at some incredible threat and when she decides to let the wall down and open up to her emotions. Obviously the writing and her arc aren't going to work for everyone, but it's the people who were willing to write her off, vocally and repeatedly without any context, that make me wonder if they weren't exercising a little internalized something something.
It's Not All Bummers, Though
But the other reason I haven't felt that compulsion to write about games this year is that even when it comes to the games that I did like, they were mostly just good games doing standard good game things that didn't give me anything interesting to say. So here's a quick rundown of the very surface level thoughts on the games that I particularly enjoyed.
Alan Wake II is an incredibly fun and cheesy narrative wrapped in a gorgeous package so despite how much I hated the new survival-horror style gameplay and the fact that I yet again got bodied by a lethal bug that deflated the big musical setpiece, it still is one of the best experiences I had all year. And I'm all here for the continued expansion of the Remedyverse.
Resident Evil 4, Theathrythm Final Bar Line, and the Burning Shores DLC for Horizon Forbidden West are all just examples of games I have historically and consistently enjoyed continuing to be enjoyable in the exact same way. Aloy has a girlfriend now so put another point on the board for the lesbian agenda. Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon is new but also familiar in the way it reminds me a lot of how great the original Okami is. It's another evolution on the Zelda formula that marries a unique and beautiful art style to a strong and challenging gameplay gimmick that demands mastery and manages to remain engaging across the duration of the game.
Forspoken is a strong first try at building a new "one of those" open world map icon-a-thon games with maybe my second favorite movement system in any game (the Spider-Man comparisons are inescapable and no Spider-Man doesn't have my favorite movement, that would be Anthem). The combat itself has kind of an inFAMOUS vibe but also with an incredibly vast ability set that shifts the focus from the typical management of resources to an optimization of abundance. Instead of never using my abilities because I have limited ammo or whatever and what if I run out when I really need it, in Forspoken I'm encouraged to always be using everything and the list of everything is something in the realm of 50 different powers by the end of the game. It also does one of the coolest examples feeling the narrative through gameplay when it takes away a significant game function during the build up to the climax that stays gone until the end. Of course, like Anthem, Forspoken is probably the only Forspoken I'm ever going to get so maybe it is all bummers.
And I have no way to talk about Armored Core VI that isn't just complaining despite it being 6th on my list so I just won't talk about it. Double Trouble 4 lyfe.
So Why Am I Writing This at All
Really this is all just preamble to me talking about the thing that has been my entire personality online for the past 3 months which is virtual photography and modding in Cyberpunk 2077.
I missed the big update to version 1.6 in September of 2022. I had hopped back in briefly for 1.5 in February of that year but otherwise was pretty done with the game, at least until the announcement of this year's Phantom Liberty DLC and the massive gameplay overhaul coming along with it in version 2.0.
The biggest standout from my experience with the original game was the strength of the in-game photography system. I have never seriously engaged with game photo modes before or since Cyberpunk, but the combination of the semi-familiar environments of Night City's pseudo LA, the high fidelity of the game's custom characters, the wide variety of base game fashion items, and the atypically robust photography tools led to me taking hundreds of photos across multiple playthroughs. If nothing else, having the excuse to get back in the game with 2.0 meant spending more time with the game's photo mode and that's what I was doing initially when the 2.0 update launched. I was playing an unmodified version of the game and running around on a new character, experiencing the new systems and taking new photos when I noticed something that annoyed me.
One of the game's customization options for femme characters is the ability to choose between three different bust sizes. Historically I've veered towards smaller busts, maybe some sort of attempt at capturing a degree of trans-femme realness as a cis-masc presenting person. That's what I did with my original V (the player character's name), and honestly I probably was aware of the issue I was about to encounter again back then as well, but that was years ago and my memory is vibes-based instead of knowledge-based. So this time around I went for the larger bust size, just to mix things up, but only a few photos in I re-realized that while the boobs I picked were the boobs I saw if my V was topless, every top piece of clothing would shrink my chest to the middle size. That's when I got the vibe of a memory of the smaller bust of my first V being similarly upsized by clothing.
That was my first impetus to start looking into Cyberpunk mods. Surely this design oversight would have annoying enough people that someone would have done the work to resize the game's clothing to accurately represent smaller and larger busts. Well, no, as it turns out with the launch of 2.0. Despite all my looking I couldn't find a resize mod for the base game's clothing for larger or smaller bust characters. What I did find, however, was a resize mod for the base game's clothing to fit the bust shape of the custom Enhanced Big Breast body mod. So if I wanted to take photos of a V with a bigger bust, these seemed like my only options. Of course the body mod came with a slew of other recommended mods so I figured in for a penny, and that is when I fully fell down the rabbit hole of thousands of mods that people had been developing in the years since the game's release.
So as I continued to play my new 2.0 V, gradually working my way up to the new Phantom Liberty content, I kept downloading more and more mods to further customize my character and improve my game and photography experience in particular. I am now verging on 1000 mods, mostly custom clothing options, but the key mods that really exploded the possibilities of virtual photography for me are Photo Mode Unlocker which does what it says on the tin and makes the existing photo mode far more comprehensive, Appearance Menu Mod which among other things allows for the spawning of characters and props and the fine-tuning of V's on-screen position, and the CharLi Character Lighting Suite which lets you spawn, place, and adjust light sources so you are no longer reliant on the game world's lighting for your shots. Special mention goes to the Portrait Enhancer mod not for the mod itself, but for the way it made me realize i could get much better portrait shots by rotating the camera 90 degrees and for pointing me in the direction of ReShade.
ReShade is a post processing injector that can be used with games to apply hundreds of different visual filters that are completely customizable and modular. It is a legitimately overwhelming tool which is why it took me over a month after learning about it before I started using it in earnest, and even then only by way of loading presets made by other people and figuring out which ones I like the best. So now most of my free time is spent managing my nearly a thousand mods with new ones being added every day, and playing very little actual Cyberpunk, and taking hundreds of photos further enhanced by two injectors, ReShade and a set of photo mode tools by Frans Bouma that you need a patreon sub to get access to.
As a weird little roadbump, I've actually gone back to my original launch V since early December when the 2.1 update released. Originally I was hyped for the update because they claimed, among other things, that issues around character shadows being missing had been fixed. In 2.0 there was a bug where sometimes torsos and particularly arms would not display raytraced shadows correctly while in photo mode. In order to take photos of a 2.0 character with accurate shadows you had to be using non-cybernetic arms on your character and only be using local shadows, shadows cast by lights other than the sun. Unfortunately, the 2.1 shadow "fix" added a universal shadow of the hands in the default neutral position instead of whatever the actual hand/finger position was, so instead of one arm/lighting combo to get accurate shadows there was no possible way to get accurate shadows outside of only using poses where the hands stay in the neutral position.
While I could revert my game back to version 2.02, I had accidentally locked my new character into 2.1 by letting all of that V's 2.02 saves get overwritten. So instead I went back to my old launch V with her most recent save being from version 1.5. It took a few days of effort to uninstall and reinstall my game and redo all of my mods, going through the hundreds upon hundreds of available cosmetic mods and making new choices. Despite originally having a smaller bust, all of my original V's photos were of the middle bust size due to the clothing implementation, so I sized up my character and redownload every clothing mod to match. Maybe I'll go back to my bustier V if a future update actually fixes the shadow issues (although I do not look forward to re-redoing all of my mods yet again), but version 2.02 is where I'm living for the foreseeable future.
There's more to be said here about identity and the fact that unlike other games with powerful photo modes, in Cyberpunk I can make a character who to an extent looks like me or like people who look like me, and put her in fashion and locations that are largely indistinguishable from our modern day life. And maybe that's also part of why I felt less motivated to get around to writing that this year, because taking photos in Cyberpunk isn't just an exercise in aesthetics but an outlet for personal expression. I'm not making Aloy look cool or Saga Anderson look cool, I'm making me look cool, or an alternate reality version of me.
If you want a more comprehensive look at my photo journey in between retweets of current events, you can check out my twitter profile under the same username where I'll probably keep posting. There's some spicy stuff there too but all behind spoilers and content warnings. Still, proceed with caution. Some day I might even experience the Phantom Liberty storyline which I hear people say is actually very good.
With That Out of the Way
I am, at least, going into 2024 with far lower gaming expectations. Really, all I care about are Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Dragon's Dogma 2 and that's it so for the rest of the year I'm fully open to pleasant surprises. In the meantime I'll keep trying to hone my virtual photography skills for whenever Cyberpunk 2078 comes out and honestly maybe not even play it on release because I'll just be waiting for mod support. Oh right this is a GotY blog in theory so here's my list we all love lists.
- Cyberpunk 2077 - Virtual Photography
- Forspoken
- Alan Wake II
- Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon
- Horizon Forbidden West - Burning Shores DLC
- Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
- Street Fighter 6
- Theatrhythm Final Bar Line
- Resident Evil 4
- Baldur's Gate 3
Runners-Up: 11. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, 12. Octopath Traveler II, 13. Mavel's Spider-Man 2, 14. Marvel's Midnight Suns - Season Pass, 15. Horizon Call of the Mountain, 16. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, 17. Hi-Fi Rush, 18. Diablo IV, 19. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, 20. Final Fantasy XVI
Honorable mention to Beat Saber my primary reason for the PSVR2 which has become my daily exercise routine and the only rhythm game to out flow-state my time playing drums in Rock Band.
Thanks for sticking with me through this one if you're still reading this far. Now enjoy this shotgun blast of shots chronicling my evolution across my Cyberpunk virtual photography journey.
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