Editor's note: Take a breath. We're almost there. 2020's been quite the year, and it's very nearly over. Across the festive break, members of the Eurogamer team and our contributors will be running down their personal top five games of 2020, before we announce our game of the year - and before, of course, we hand over to you for the annual Reader's Top 50. Thanks for being with us this year, and see you on the other side.

I never thought I'd be talking about Grounded as one of my games of the year. I thought it would be a fun-for-one-evening kind of game. But it's still there, still rigidly imprinted on my mind. And do you know what the memory looks like? It looks like a gigantic hairy spider.

I was obsessed with them; I was obsessed with it. It wasn't just that they were there, in the same way ants were there, or aphids, or ladybirds, or gnats, and that they looked incredible seen from a tiny perspective. It was that they were the menace. They were the villain in this familiar but alien backyard world. Their threat was everywhere (though they seem to be more orderly in recent builds of the game? I think they were more aggressive and active at the beginning. And I should add that playing the game alone makes for a far stronger experience where the spiders are concerned, than playing with the safety of friends.)

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Cyberpunk 2077 has sold over 13m copies - even factoring in refunds, CD Projekt has said.

In a regulatory note to investors, the Polish company said its controversial blockbuster hit the 13m mark as of 20th December.

13m is the sell-through figure - that is, it's the estimated volume of retail sales across all hardware platforms, factoring in returns submitted by physical and digital shops, less all refund requests emailed directly to CD Projekt by the 22nd December.

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A law firm has indicated that it is considering a class-action lawsuit against CD Projekt, the publisher of Cyberpunk 2077.

As reported by the New York Times (thanks, VGC), Mikołaj Orzechowski - a Warsaw-based lawyer and CDPR investor - has indicated that they are exploring the possibility of suing, alleging that the studio may have misrepresented itself to investors in order to secure funding.

According to a briefing prepared by the lawyer, they are inviting others affected by the "suspension of the sale of the Cyberpunk 2077 product".

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In the latest of a long litany of issues, reports are now coming in that Cyberpunk 2077 save files are becoming permanently corrupted for players if they exceed 8MB in size.

Though initially reported as affecting games across all platforms, some now suggest it's just a PC issue. However, without confirmation from developer CD Projekt Red either way, players have been advised to "keep a lower amount of items and crafting materials".

In a response posted on the GOG website, CDPR has confirmed that once corrupted, there's no way to recover the save, so it recommends you keep "a lower amount of items and crafting materials".

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A modder has done what CD Projekt didn't: added in-game haircuts to Cyberpunk 2077.

I was surprised to discover Cyberpunk 2077 does not let you change the haircut of your character beyond character creation. Night City is packed to bursting with food stalls, but there isn't a usable salon in sight.

Enter woodbricks, a modder who has created a working in-game haircuts mod for Cyberpunk 2077 on PC (grab it from NexusMods).

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Cyberpunk 2077's Microsoft Store page now has an Xbox One performance issues warning.

"Users may experience performance issues when playing this game on Xbox One consoles until this game is updated," reads the warning.

The addition of the warning came hot on the heels of Microsoft's decision to expand its refund policy to include all who bought Cyberpunk 2077, which costs £49.99, on its digital store.

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As we inch closer to booting 2020 out the door, next-gen video game news continues its never-ending outpour. This was a week dominated by Cyberpunk 2077 and what is sure to go down as one of the most disastrous triple-A launches ever.

Not long after it emerged the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of CD Projekt's sci-fi epic were in a terrible state did reports come in that some had found success nabbing a refund. CD Projekt was then forced to apologise for not showing Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4 and Xbox One before launch and, in the same breath, suggested anyone who wanted a refund would be able to get one without bother. It turns out Sony, Microsoft and the shops didn't get the memo.

Its reputation in tatters and its share price tanking, CD Projekt held an emergency investor relations call in which the bosses of the company vowed to "rebuild trust". Updates, patches and fixes are inbound, CD Projekt said. Just give the studio time to make things right.

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Death Stranding now has a Cyberpunk 2077 update on PC.

The update adds six new missions featuring characters and lore from CD Projekt's game. There are new items and a new hacking function, too.

Currently, the collaboration is exclusive to the PC version, Kojima Productions said. "We'll have more announcements coming in the near future, stay tuned!"

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Cyberpunk 2077 released last Thursday with a bumpy launch: after a critic discovered some scenes could trigger epileptic seizures, we finally got our first look at the console version running on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 - and the results were, well, not great.

In response to criticism of the game's performance on last-gen consoles, CD Projekt Red has now issued a statement apologising for not showing Cyberpunk 2077 running on Xbox One and PS4 - and has announced that players can ask for a refund of the game if they're unhappy.

"We would like to start by apologising to you for not showing the game on base last-gen consoles before it premiered and, in consequence, not allowing you to make a more informed decision about your purchase," the statement said. "We should have paid more attention to making it play better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One."

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There's no doubt about it - Cyberpunk 2077 is a demanding game, heavy on both CPU and GPU, while solid-state storage is also recommended for an optimal experience. It's perhaps a game geared towards the computers of the future, but in the here and now, it's still possible to get a fantastic PC experience - a process we hope to aid with our optimised settings. Put simply, we tested every graphics setting in Cyberpunk 2077, measured the performance cost and judged the overall quality you get at each preset. The idea here is straightforward: to retain everything that makes the game 'next-gen' from a visual perspective, but to deliver the best 'bang for the buck'.

The test rig we used is hardly mainstream - we paired Intel's Core i9 10900K with a RTX 3090 and 32GB of 3200MHz DDR4, and we ran the game from an NVMe drive. However, all of our measurements were taken at 4K resolution, meaning that as you move down the resolution ladder back to 1080p, the requirements of the graphics card you'll need scale back considerably. To put all of this into perspective, our chosen settings allow an RTX 2060 to run the game without ray tracing at 4K30 resolution using the balanced version of DLSS, or to hit 1440p60 (with just minor dips in the busiest parts of the city). Interestingly, native 1080p actually seems a touch heavier than DLSS 1440p - and certainly looks a significantly less impressive.

Hopefully that gives some kind of idea of how this game scales on the graphics side - yes, it's demanding. The RTX 2060 may well be the least capable Nvidia GPU with next-gen features, but it's still a fairly powerful piece of kit, relatively speaking. You can of course tweak downwards still further and still have a great experience, but at that point, you'll start to cut into the quality level. Our objective here is to set the bar, and to retain the the game's wow factor, and to achieve this with an RTX 2060 is impressive stuff. It does have its limits - 6GB of VRAM takes ray tracing out of the equation unless you're happy with 1080p30 (in which case, you can max out every single RT effect, right up to psycho-level lighting) - but it's still an impressive showing overall.

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