The Cartridge Thief Blog

 December 2021 feels like a long time ago now. The two hit combo of post-pandemic time distortion and a constant stream of escalating world affairs has really helped to drag out the last two and a half years. Nobody though, has felt the crawling passage of time quite like those waiting for Monolith's Wonder Woman . (Image property of Monolith Entertainment and Warner Bros. Games) Announced at the 2021 Game Awards with a flashy pre-rendered trailer, new information has been pretty thin on the ground ever since, fuelling rumours and hearsay spreading about a troubled development and internal delays.  However, I'm not interested in rumours today. Rather, I want to talk about a far more dangerous scenario; what if the game does come out? A game that never came to be, like PT , is remembered as a beautiful bud, never allowed to flower. Games that come out though, they have to live up to expectations and, oh boy, does Wonder Woman have some high expectations... Background For those...

 At the end of May, CD Projekt Red, developers of the beloved Witcher  series marked an important milestone for their studio. Finally, nearly four years after its disastrous launch, nobody at the company was working on Cyberpunk 2077 , marking the end of a decade-long journey for the Polish studio. (Image property of CD Projekt Red) As something of a memorial then, to the mountains of man-hours invested in Cyberpunk , I want to take the time to appreciate what CD Projekt have been able to create not only in Cyberpunk  but also in their previous work with The Witcher 3 . Particularly, I want to examine why it is that, in an industry full of samey, empty open worlds, CDPR's worlds continually manage to immerse, surprise and excite me in a way that very few others can. The onset of open world fatigue Usually, whenever people bring up the feeling of open world fatigue, the immediate instinct for many is to point the offending finger at Ubisoft. They have, by their own hand, b...