It is 2020!

Hello and welcome back to Eccentric Spheres in 2020!

Over the Holidays, I went and got a bit of flu, which I thought I had gotten rid of, but the damn thing has crept back on me, and it feels like I have more phlegm in my head than brains.

But you are here, and the show must go on!

In game news, things seem to not have changed all that much. The biggest news story at the end of 2019 was the hack/exploit in Fallout 76 that allowed the cheater to empty peoples inventories from a distance. So you'd be walking along, minding your own business and – POOF – you'd be walking in nothing but your underwear and all your stuff would be gone. If the hacker was really mean, he could also take your pipboy, meaning that you wouldn’t be able to access your inventory anymore, meaning you were stuck in your underwear forever.

Bethesda claims to have fixed it, but people in the know say that all they did was put a band-aid on the problem, and that it's only a matter of time until the next exploit comes along.

I understand why a live-service game is so attractive to the money-suits, but making one and keeping it running at a level that keeps the masses playing is really hard. You can't just take any old thing and make it live-service. That won't do.

Also from last year: Star Wars The Fallen Order seems to be an honestly good game, with none of EA's usual nonsense. Just a good single player game and that is it.

Moving into 2020, the first big piece of game news concerns the famously bad WWE 2K20. As the name suggests it's WWE wrestling, by 2K games. It looked worse than the previous titles in the series, and was so full of bugs it could intimidate an anthill. Well, as soon as the clock ticked over to 2020 the game stopped working. Indeed, you read that right, the game was so sloppily programmed that it refused to play in the year it's supposed to be for!

Speaking of sports games, I read an article the other day that lamented the fact that “all” sports games are held by either EA Sports or 2K games. Both companies are more interested in milking money from whales than making good games, which is of course an awful thing, but it got me thinking. EA and 2K have the official licenses for the big sport franchises, not the sports themselves. So yeah, no one else can make NFL, NBA or FIFA games, but perhaps the time is right for someone else to step in and just make a good game without the franchises.

Take city builders as an example. Back in the day, the big dog was SimCity. No one could touch them and they ruled the roost. Until SimCity 4 came out and failed super hard. In a nutshell, the game was lousy to begin with and had to be played online at all times, even though it was basically single player. On day 1, the login servers broke and no one could play the game at all! Que furious fans and an apologetic Maxis and EA claiming there was nothing they could do. The game had to be played online, period. Until a fan wrote a patch in less than an hour that made the game run with no internet needed.

That was the death of SimCity, but it left the door open for Cities: Skylines, an indie city builder that has become a huge success because it is a good game. I don't see why this couldn't work for sports. Sure, a FIFA fan wants to play the official stuff, but when it's so bad... there has to be space for indie games as long as they are good.

Well that's what I can wring out of my snotty brain. Join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres, and until then, have a great week!