The Game Awards got it wrong this year. One of the titles nominated for Best Independent Game, Dave the Diver, was produced by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. No matter how hard you squint, it is not indie. Dave the Diver is an excellent pixel-art game about deep-sea fishing and restaurant management, but it was commissioned and bankrolled by Nexon subsidiary Mintrocket, with billions of dollars and decades of experience at its back. When The Game Awards nominees were announced on November 13, fans were quick to point out the error, and the recurring debate over what "indie" means was reignited.

CD Projekt SA Chief Executive Officer Marcin Iwiński made a public mea culpa this week about the disastrous rollout of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 in December. He took personal responsibility and asked fans not to blame the team. In a somber five-minute video address and accompanying blog post, Iwiński acknowledged the game "did not meet the quality standard we wanted to meet. I and the entire leadership team are deeply sorry for this." Iwiński's apology, the second within a month, was an attempt to restore the Polish company's reputation with scores of fans -- and investors -- who had waited eight years for the game, only to discover it was riddled with bugs and performance issues when it was finally released.

So here we finally are, in Night City. Almost a decade after it was first announced, CD Projekt's massively ambitious role-playing game has launched into a swirling maelstrom of hype and controversy that befits its salacious, histrionic setting. Like the technological MacGuffin at the centre of the plot, Cyberpunk 2077 is highly advanced and ingenious, but also bug-ridden and irresponsible. You play as V, a cybernetically enhanced street hustler looking to make their name on these squalid, vicious streets, taking infiltration and assassination jobs for the gangs who've carved up the criminal underworld. While attempting to steal a cutting-edge biochip from a powerful corporation, you implant it in your own head, unknowingly infecting yourself with the digital ghost of dead rocker and anarchist Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves, essentially playing Theodore "Ted" Logan's asshole brother).

CD Projekt could use a big hit. The company has only one other major game franchise, and all eyes are on "Cyberpunk" because it is the industry's only original major title coming to market this holiday season. Executives at CD Projekt said the cost of making and marketing "Cyberpunk" was significantly higher than the roughly $80 million the company spent on its last game, "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," without providing specifics. They said they initially miscalculated how long "Cyberpunk" would take to complete, with the health crisis most affecting the latter stages of four years of development, following pre-production work that started around 2012. With employees homebound, making even a minor tweak--such as changing the placement of characters or objects in a scene--would take hours instead of minutes, said Marcin Iwiński, who co-founded CD Projekt with a high-school friend in the early 1990s and is now co-chief executive with Adam Kiciński.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been a highlight of the last two E3s, so of course we couldn't have this year's Fake E3 without it. Today CD Projekt ran its debut Night City Wire stream, where we got probably our best look at Cyberpunk 2077. Less guided and less constrained than the previous demos, I feel like this is the first time Cyberpunk 2077 felt like...well, a video game. The highlight of the stream was probably the new trailer. CD Projekt stated that all of the new footage came from the prologue, which like The Witcher 3 means I'm guessing we've got a 10- to 15-hour intro ahead of us.

Myst developer Cyan is running a Kickstarter campaign for a new game, Firmament, and Gearbox finally announced Borderlands 3. But that's just the start of this week's news, which also contained release date announcements for Heaven's Vault, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Observation, plus the announcement of a new Divinity: Original Sin spinoff tactics game, CD Projekt teasing not one but two games before 2021, and free copies of Morrowind to celebrate the Elder Scrolls anniversary. This is gaming news for March 25 to 29. This week's free game offer is near and dear to my heart. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda is giving away free copies of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a.k.a.

You want an eye implant? You'll watch the Ripperdoctor lean in to pull your existing, organic eye out (in first-person) and then see the mechanical eye flicker to life. And don't forget to take your post-operation meds. Anyway, the demo took us through two missions. The first, which opened the demo, had us infiltrating a "Scavenger" apartment.