Game of the Year

Zack said:

well #714 implied otherwise, but okay

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714 should be read in the context of 711.

Good Sarmatian - I see. I suppose I can understand that. Woudl frustrate me if everyone suddenly decided to go to (old) Bioware style plot-heavy stuff ; let alone Japanese pseudo-RPGs (at least Bioware gives you some control over who you are. Japan just lets you walk a character through an everything predetermined)

Akka said:

The problem with Skyrim is that, as I said about it, it's superficially open-world, but with nearly no actual player agency in the actual content (most egregious example : the Guilds). You can visit them in any order, but each part is totally linear. And even in the very rare cases you have a choice, often one aspect is comically bad (example : the Brotherhood) and the "real" one is obvious. It's just, as for most of the entirety of Skyrim, just fake.

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As right as you are, I don't think we're going to see this change for future ES games. Most mechanics are rather tacked on and redundant in the context of the missions. Like in Morrowind, why bother having ten thousand spells if all you're doing is fetch quests? These games are really about exploring an environment and soaking in the lore. I do wish there was more agency there besides not finishing quests just to withhold items and randomly killing strangers.

But at least Morrowind embraced truly the "exploring the world and soaking in the lore". Yes the spells weren't necessary, but they were fun and gave possibilities to freely dabble in. Guilds at least had logical requirements to advance in ranks. It was a world that existed in which you could do things.

Skyrim on the other hand, try to inject "epic story" but only get the bad sides of it : no agency and no logical restraints (you can become the Grandmaster of the Mage guild without even knowing to cast spells FFS...) that comes often with narrative-driven games, but no real quality nor depth to this story which ends up letting the game world feel empty. And the world, hanging on said story, has a hard time being able to exists by itself.

You want a good story with a world that actually really reacts to it ? F:NV is infinitely superior. Skyrim is absolutely gorgeous (only TW3 manages to be more breathtaking IMO) and it's true there is a pleasure (once you've put tons of mods so the level scaling is eradicated...) to wander around and find all the nooks and cranies and sceneries and so on. But as a true sandbox game, it fails hard, and as a story/character-driven game it doesn't even manage to fail, as failing would imply being able to even start.

Much of that has to with Michael Kirkbride, who took away a lot of interactivity from the series design bible when he made his lore. It's intricate, it's wonderfully insane, but it's all background detail that often hamstrings the games' arcs. It says a lot when Daggerfall's multiple endings were retconned to not mean anything. I do notice with Morrowind that the illusion of interactivity is slightly greater thanks to the slightly greater amount of detail in the environments. Vivec didn't need to have its number of cantons and neither did Vvardenfell need to be so twisty in its paths. But the designers took an extra amount of time to do that.

I enjoy the lore but I don't pretend that I'm not following an existing chain of events. Elder Scrolls Online makes this painfully obvious when there are other players running around you, so you feel like you're walking through Pirates of the Caribbean. But as glorified theme parks, they entertain me. As far as GOTY goes, that's why Skyrim (aka Morrowind III) doesn't really make it for me, as the original Morrowind made a much bigger industry splash in 2002.

New Vegas is still in my Steam queue.

Oda Nobunaga said:

Shallow open-world trend my left foot. I vastly prefer open worlds to railroaded story-centric roleplaying games. Open world are actually focused on your role and how you want to play it, rather than forcing you into a pre-determined role as chosen by the developer.

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Problem is, as Akka points out, most of that is a facade and you usually have no real actual effect or there is only one outcome.

GoodSarmatian said:

Oh, I'm not doing that. I would have to take points away from Skyrim for contributing to the shallow open world trend of the past years that turned Dragon Age: Inquisition into a single player MMO and has lead to the de-RPGfication of Fallout 4.

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GoodSarmatian said:

What I meant is that after Skyrim many developers -or rather publishers- got it into their heads that open world = all the money. I have nothing against open world games per se if they offer real content and choice and interesting sidequests instead of padding the world with with semi-radomly generated mini-quests and enemies and pointless collectibles.
Fallout New Vegas gave you real choice and made the factions matter and Witcher 3 proved that you can succesfully combine a story centric RPG with an open world.

Dragon Age: Inquisition made large areas for the sake of it and bombarded the player with map icons. The enjoyable parts of the game are still linear and railroad the player. Bioware copied the Ubisoft way as much as the Bethesdaway, but they explicitly said that they did it because Skyrim sold so well and Skyrim is what most newcomers to the RPG genre now expect (and presumably that DA:I will also sell 20 million copies because of it). And they're threatening to do the same to the new Mass Effect.

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A bit, but Bioware was already heading in that direction. The open world trend predates Skyrim and a lot of it probably started copying Grand Theft Auto 3 & 4 as well as a general move away from strictly linear levels.

DA2 already had a problem with MMO-like influences on combat and NPCs, so it is no surprise that DAI had that same issue. I think that, Skyrim or not, DAI was going to end up being open world-ish anyway.

New Vegas has its flaws, but god damn was that actually an amazing experience. Along with a number of other (often quite older) well written games, I've found it a lot harder to enjoy some games because they're just so poorly written and designed.

GoodSarmatian said:

What I meant is that after Skyrim many developers -or rather publishers- got it into their heads that open world = all the money. I have nothing against open world games per se if they offer real content and choice and interesting sidequests instead of padding the world with with semi-radomly generated mini-quests and enemies and pointless collectibles.
Fallout New Vegas gave you real choice and made the factions matter and Witcher 3 proved that you can succesfully combine a story centric RPG with an open world.

Dragon Age: Inquisition made large areas for the sake of it and bombarded the player with map icons. The enjoyable parts of the game are still linear and railroad the player. Bioware copied the Ubisoft way as much as the Bethesdaway, but they explicitly said that they did it because Skyrim sold so well and Skyrim is what most newcomers to the RPG genre now expect (and presumably that DA:I will also sell 20 million copies because of it). And they're threatening to do the same to the new Mass Effect.

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I think many devs now want to copy The Witcher 3, not Skyrim, as far as the open world aspect of their games goes.

ls612 said:

I think many devs now want to copy The Witcher 3, not Skyrim, as far as the open world aspect of their games goes.

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Maybe, but doing it the Witcher way is much harder because it requires well written side quests, and good writing is an aspect of a game that can't be improved by throwing money at it. I fear it will be one more thing that lesser developers will try to copy without understanding why it worked so well.
I tried to search for sales figures for fallout 4 and Witcher 3 to check which one is more likely to be copied. I remember that Fallout 4 had a much more successful launch than WItcher 3 thanks to brand recognition and marketing hype. Fallout 4 has about twice as many owners on steamspy (3,2 million vs 1,6 million), but Witcher 3 doesn't require steam and it only accounts for PC sales anyway.
Although accurate numbers are hard to find, it seems that Fallout 4 had a much better launch, but Witcher 3 is still selling very well a year later and is nearing 12 million copies.But with the industry being so focused on launch day sales it will probably look to Fallout 4 and we'll much more crafting and base building in the future.

GoodSarmatian said:

good writing is an aspect of a game that can't be improved by throwing money at it

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huh? good writers aren't cheap

Any chance of a best of 1980-89 game?

I'm not going backwards to the 80s, must march on! My second child was born on the 13th hence my absence, but now I'm back in the office and posting during my boring meetings so...

Not sure who won 2011, who cares? Let's do 2012! (jk I'll tally 2011 later). Really good discussions on open world rpgs though. That's exactly what this thread was supposed to do- lead to other discussions on gaming and design and such.

I did totally screw up and not mention SPAZ, space pirates and zombies, for 2011. I thought it was a 2012 release. It's a super amazing arcade rpg shooter. Really good modability, really good replay value if you like that type of grindy arcade game.

2012- Initial thoughts. Kingdoms of Amalur came out but was a pretty big flop overall. I played it a little and it was ok, but had potential.

Fez was interesting, a really good spin on platformers but I'm not the biggest platformer fan anyway. Same with Spelunky, a nice rogue like spin on platformers but it's so freakin hard for me and I lose interest.

Legend of Grimrock was a cool throwback title but ultimately fell a little on the cumbersome side for me.

Diablo 3 I never played. A lot of people had huge issues with the base game though, I think it only got good with expansions.

Torchlight 2 I did play and many have said it's the better ARPG compared to diablo3. I did enjoy it a lot, but the plot is so super thing, no replay value for me, not close to goty status.

There's some other notables I haven't played like assassin's creed 3, dishonored, borderlands 2, xenoblade chronicles, guild wars 2, far cry 3.

But two monster titles for me:

Mass effect 3 - The final chapter in the Mass Effect story. Excellent game play, overall some great upgrades over ME2 in regards to gameplay. The way ability cooldowns work with weapon loadouts was great, and rolling into cover was awesome.

So many people whined about the story and ending but I didn't think it was that bad. However where the game falls flat for me is really hard to describe. Essentially I just didn't connect with the characters as much. I feel like the tone of the game compared to ME2 was so different it didn't resonate with me. In ME2 I loved getting to know Miranda and Jacob, they were like real people almost to me, I mean as real as a video game can get. Everything felt personal, like I was making decisions, I was growing my squad by doing those dossier missions for samara and thane, and unlocking weapons to use and such. ME3 also felt so dramatic all the time, like every conversation had the end of the galaxy hanging over it like a wet blanket. The tone was not as fun. Still an amazing game, just for those reasons a tad shy of ME2 for me.

The other game is FTL: Faster than light. It's a rogue like game in space where you are carrying plans to save the empire from some rebels and you have to get through 9 or so sectors to the empire's base. You pick a ship and then have to traverse between nodes in each sector to reach a final boss battle with a huge spaceship.

The combat is really unique. It's real time but pauseable. You have to balance power distribution between all your ship systems, so you can't have full engines plus a full arsenal of weapons and max shields. It's all tradeoffs for different stuff. And of course you have to find the different stuff along the way by buying weapons and systems from shops or salvaging them. It's all randomly generated so it's infinitely replayable. There's a ton of ships to unlock too by doing achivements which I found to be quite fun. And it's really hard! I still haven't beaten the game on normal. Overall it's well designed, addictive and fun, and the dynamic soundtrack is perfect for the game. The music will actually change depending on if you're being threatened or on the run or in a peaceful sector.

Overall it's an extremely hard choice. But ME3 didn't really do anything ground breakingly different from ME2, it just fine tuned the game play and expanded the story. FTL I feel did break a lot of barriers for indie games, showing that clever gameplay and design matters more than fancy graphics. It introduced me to rogue likes as a genre, and I've seen several games since that remind me so much of it, I think it had to influence some. I'm voting for FTL.

Mass effect 3.

Civver - surprised hat you left out a certain title off your list of Big Games of 2012...a title that has a 150 page thread on these very forums ; and a currently ongoing CFC succession game ; a title that propelled a niche developper into the mainstream, and that still enjoys a more than fair deal of popularity even four years later, and a title that blend roleplaying and grand strategy in a way that's almost unheard of outside that one game...

My 2012 vote, of course, goes to Crusader Kings II

Glad Oda's post reminded me of CKII. Everything was looking rather underwhelming for 2012, but now CKII definitely gets my vote.

Zack said:

Mass effect 3.

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Honorable mentions to:

Dishonored
Far Cry 3
XCOM
Crusader Kings 2

civvver said:

My second child was born on the 13th hence my absence, but now I'm back in the office and posting during my boring meetings so...

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I liked X-Com: Enemy Unknown, I played a lot of Mass Effect 3 (and, unusually, so much multi-player), but it has to be Crusader Kings II. There's no question of it.

2012 has to go to The Secret World. An MMO that had excellent horizontal character progression and even better storytelling.

Oh man... CK2... XCOM... CK2... XCOM... I hate having to decide between these.

CK2 I think was the best Paradox game to date; struck a great balance between the sweeping, grand scope, intricate rules and complex under-the-hood simulation, while also keeping it accessible and intuitive enough that you didn't need to spend 100 hours playing before you had a clue what you were doing.

XCOM had three flaws. The strategic layer was a little too simple; the difficulty curve on the game was out of whack (particularly at higher difficulty levels) - it would start out brutally hard, and get steadily easier as the game went on; the map pool was small enough that they got old after a while. Counterbalancing that were things it did extremely well or outright perfectly. Soldier and alien abilities. Controls and UI. The way they implemented cover, vision, and sound clues. Graphics and sound effects in general. Equipment choices. The balance they struck with soldier leveling and perma-death.

Haven't played that many games from 2012 but I did enjoy Far Cry 3 so I'll go with that.

Mass Effect 3. Awesome game until the last 15 minutes, and the series is a milestone in storytelling and presentation. I'm not ashamed to say that I had something in my eye on multiple occasions.
There were some things that bothered me, like occasionally bad dialogue and the demotion of your ME 2 team, but it's still one of the best games of this decade.

Zack said:

Honorable mentions to:

Dishonored
Far Cry 3
XCOM
Crusader Kings 2

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That was quite a year. Haven't played Far cry 3 and only gor Crusader Kings much later, but Dishonored and XCOM are both are a very close second.

CivCube said:

2012 has to go to The Secret World. An MMO that had excellent horizontal character progression and even better storytelling.

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I really liked it for the universe, but I really wish it was a proper RPG and not an MMO. I hope they'll one day make a single player spin-off.