How Dark Souls, Twitch, and Discord helped me survive lockdown

www.thesixthaxis.com

Well, with the crushing inevitability of a heavily foreseen, only mildly warned about giant inevitable thing, it looks as though the UK is about to enter a second lockdown in an effort to curb the growing number of cases of Coronavirus Covid-19. This is of course designed to save lives, and to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed, and as such it’s something that absolutely must be done. However, along with a host of questions and worries it creates for households around the country, it will have gamers wondering about what will happen to any PS5 or Xbox Series X|S pre-orders that have been made physically in store, whether that’s at GAME, Argos, Smyths Toys, or another retailer. There are a number of variables here, beginning with the fact that some game retailers considered themselves essential retail during the first lockdown and remained open. We can all grudgingly agree that they’re not essential, even if we consider them to be so, and the chances of GAME or someone else using a loophole like this probably won’t last very long. Perhaps you might be able to collect from outside the store, but that doesn’t seem in keeping with a national lockdown. The secondary, and most likely option is that they will shift physical in-store preorders to delivery, though there’s already going to be an almighty strain on the UK’s delivery services through that period to begin with, with even further issues brought on by a second lockdown. There’s very little chance that anyone with an in-store order will receive their console on day one, as the console pre-orders that were already in place for delivery will have all of the capacity booked up. Combine that with the fact that the new consoles are huge and take up way more space than any previous generation, means fewer will fit on each van. It might be the case that you will receive it within a week, if you’re lucky. If it’s GAME, they’ve also started charging an extra £10 for delivery, so you might receive it, but it will cost you more. The third, and worst option, is that you simply won’t be able to get your console until the lockdown lifts, most likely according to news sources on the 1st of December. A lockdown means lockdown, and game consoles aren’t particularly important in the scheme of things. The only option will be to pick one up in a supermarket, but as we’ve recently seen in Wales, non-essential items were removed from sale. They might receive their stock but not be allowed to sell it to you. Given that pre-orders for both consoles are sold out everywhere, it looks impossible to move it a different retailer. We’ve reached out to GAME, Smyths Toys and Argos for comment.