Game of the Year

So Arakhor you really enjoy the assassin's creed series it looks like? How do all the titles fare? Cus I got the first one, the director's cut, and really struggled to get into it. But then I heard people say it's pretty monotonous and 2 is a huge improvement.

Do you need to play them in order for the story or does it not matter at all? Cus like Mass Effect it doesn't really matter but it's still nice to have back story you know? Dragon age, matters even less imo. I believe the assassin's creed story is pretty disjointed.
 
Altair's story is essentially a tech demo. The post-assassination monologues are good, but it can get quite tedious, yes. AC2 and ACB are my favourites - AC2 has an interesting story and the conspiracy glyphs are great fun, but ACB has better mechanics and a large area over which to roam.

I found Revelations to not be as much fun - the map was low-contrast, amongst others, whilst I really wasn't a fan of AC3 - it's outside my field of interest, during the American Revolution of all things, the architecture was bland and Connor was boring, but the modern sections were quite interesting, if only to conclude Desmond's arc. Haytham was the best part of AC3 in my opinion.

AC4:BF, on the other hand, had a naval campaign, piracy, diverse scenery, a British "hero" (Haytham's dad, no less) and it improved upon the mechanics that were new in AC3. You then had Shay's story in AC: Rogue, which is basically what ACB is to AC2, but where you play the typically bad guys instead of the nominally good guys.

I haven't played Unity or Syndicate, as I have yet to get an XB1 (I've played all the AC games on console rather than PC).

TL:DR - get AC2, AC: Brotherhood and AC4:BF and call it a day, unless you are really invested in the overarching Templar/Assassin backstory.
 
For hopefully very obvious reasons, I *have* to vote for EU IV.
 
Saints Row 4 and Tomb Raider are both awesome games, but Saints Row 4 wins for the sheer utter craziness, and Tomb Raider loses points for ludonarrative dissonance.
 
2013 is the easiest one: GTA 5

Rockstar follows up on their insanely high production value, and ludicrous attention to detail. I'm basing it of the single player experience alone as I've yet to explore the MP aspect of the game. Not sure why as I hear it's supposed to be pretty great. I guess it just doesn't appeal all that much to me. Kinda like civ, I'm all about the single player experience in that game.
 
yeah I'm still waiting for gta5 to discount under $15 on pc. Might be a long time, it's over a year old, base price still $60, has only seen 33% off discount.
 
Europa Universalis IV gets my vote. I'm not entirely sure if it's fair to compare 2016-era EU4, with the various patches and DLCs of the past three years, to games that were abandoned a couple months after release. But I'm gonna do it anyways.
 
sure it's fair, just like it's fair to vote for an expansion if you feel it's the definitive version, but cleaner to vote for the original.
 
EU IV

Snerk said:
2013 is the easiest one: GTA 5

Rockstar follows up on their insanely high production value, and ludicrous attention to detail. I'm basing it of the single player experience alone as I've yet to explore the MP aspect of the game. Not sure why as I hear it's supposed to be pretty great. I guess it just doesn't appeal all that much to me. Kinda like civ, I'm all about the single player experience in that game.
Click to expand...

In some aspects they did indeed do an amazing job, but in other and often important aspects GTA V, even excluding the atrociously designed and coded multiplayer, ranges from "okay" to "mediocre" to "did they event try?" to "this is just bad".

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed playing it, the characters were great and there were a lot of great and fun missions. But wow, for the amount of money, talent and people working on it is it a hot mess.

Driving and shooting are the biggest parts of the game, and yet both are a bit awkward.

Driving is usually good enough... but even small mistakes send cars spinning wildly out of control in ways that stop being funny very quickly and proceed to just make it annoying when it happens. Though I have on problem with being able to go all terrain in any vehicle, the lack of any real difference between driving any car at all over the hills and mountains and being on a road is not only weird and immersion breaking but just kind of lazy. There also is no way to control your speed other than tapping on a button because it's still all "floor the gas peddle or nothing" (at least on PC). First person view is a nice addition but completely useless due to the low field of view that is not unlockable. It's nearly impossible to use it to drive.

The AI also loves to clearly purposefully swerve into oncoming lanes to ram into you for no reason at all. I suspect this is on purpose, and it adds nothing of value to the game except to randomly kill or hurt you or your car (and cost you money).

The police AI is also still really, really dumb. While I don't expect it to be great either, as it is part of the charm to have ridiculous police chases, it's still just so incredibly simplistic and they routinely run over innocent NPCs and are just generally bad at driving as often as not. It also does get a little tiresome when the waves of police never end even after you've killed 100s and they just go straight to shoot to kill even when they are the ones that bump into you.

The menus also lag a lot of the time, stutter, flicker, and often don't register clicks. This is extremely bizarre and I have never seen that behaviuour in any other game before. Completely inexcusable from a company like Rockstar.

There also is no way to save cars you buy online except in the garages... so you can put $1,000,000 into a car, it gets accidentally destroyed, and you're SOL.

As well as a bunch of other problems I don't remember off the top of my head. Fun game, but GOTY? God no.
 
Anyone else got 2013 comments or should we post our 2014 faves? We're almost caught up! Then I can ignore this thread for a half a year til 2016 is done!

Actually what I might do once we're done with 2015 is make a giant bracket and we can have games go head to head and pick of forum favorite of all time. But I'll need some help with seeding ideas etc so no one gets too mad and something like planescape torment is eliminated cus it went first round against civ2 or something.

2014 gets tougher cus I'm usually a year or two behind on current gaming. I see many notable games but not much I've played. Even dragon age inquisition I didn't give a serious go yet. A bunch I haven't played, Dark Souls 2, Titanfall, Age of Wonders 3, Daylight, Transistor, Child of Light, Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare, Divinity Original Sin, Tropico 5, Alien Isolation, Civ Beyond Earth, Shadow of Mordor, Game of Thrones (telltale version), Mario Kart 8, This War of Mine.

Are any of those GOTY? I have no idea but they seem notable.

Really I've only played Defense Grid 2 and that's about it. But DG1 was better, DG2 was fun but not that replayable, shorter, strats more straightforward. They added some more tower types but got rid of a lot of stuff that made what you build more crucial like how the command towers work.

I have a feeling if I had played them the DA:Inqusition, Divinity Original Sin and Age of Wonders 3 would be my faves with maybe Alien Isolation sneaking in there too. But I don't feel right voting DAI for a game I haven't played more than a couple hours. I may just not vote for 2014.
 
Maniacal said:
In some aspects they did indeed do an amazing job, but in other and often important aspects GTA V, even excluding the atrociously designed and coded multiplayer, ranges from "okay" to "mediocre" to "did they event try?" to "this is just bad".

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed playing it, the characters were great and there were a lot of great and fun missions. But wow, for the amount of money, talent and people working on it is it a hot mess.

Driving and shooting are the biggest parts of the game, and yet both are a bit awkward.

Driving is usually good enough... but even small mistakes send cars spinning wildly out of control in ways that stop being funny very quickly and proceed to just make it annoying when it happens. Though I have on problem with being able to go all terrain in any vehicle, the lack of any real difference between driving any car at all over the hills and mountains and being on a road is not only weird and immersion breaking but just kind of lazy. There also is no way to control your speed other than tapping on a button because it's still all "floor the gas peddle or nothing" (at least on PC). First person view is a nice addition but completely useless due to the low field of view that is not unlockable. It's nearly impossible to use it to drive.

The AI also loves to clearly purposefully swerve into oncoming lanes to ram into you for no reason at all. I suspect this is on purpose, and it adds nothing of value to the game except to randomly kill or hurt you or your car (and cost you money).

The police AI is also still really, really dumb. While I don't expect it to be great either, as it is part of the charm to have ridiculous police chases, it's still just so incredibly simplistic and they routinely run over innocent NPCs and are just generally bad at driving as often as not. It also does get a little tiresome when the waves of police never end even after you've killed 100s and they just go straight to shoot to kill even when they are the ones that bump into you.

The menus also lag a lot of the time, stutter, flicker, and often don't register clicks. This is extremely bizarre and I have never seen that behaviuour in any other game before. Completely inexcusable from a company like Rockstar.

There also is no way to save cars you buy online except in the garages... so you can put $1,000,000 into a car, it gets accidentally destroyed, and you're SOL.

As well as a bunch of other problems I don't remember off the top of my head. Fun game, but GOTY? God no.
Click to expand...
Personally I think this is more a description of GTA 4 than 5.

I have almost no issues with the driving. Feels very nice. Sure at high speeds you can spin out of control, specially if you lose traction from a bump or something, but that's not a bad thing. But I definitely agree that most cars have way too much traction off-road. It's silly that normal city cars can to some extent climb mountains. It also takes the purpose out of the actual off road vehicles in the game. But in the big picture it's a very minor thing.

Shooting also works well. Or at least as well as any other cover based third person shooter I've played. Sometimes you don't get the cover stance you intended and it can be annoying, but that seems to be the way it is with these games.

1st person view should be viewed as just a concept more than anything else. The game wasn't meant to be played that way, and shouldn't. It's fun you can try it out though.

I think the AI is as smart as it has to be in this kind of game. It's not a tactical shooter after all. You just need AI to be not obviously moronic in shoot-outs and stuff, and I think it passes. Better AI is always better though.

Haven't played it on PC, just PS3 and PS4. Framerate wasn't amazing on PS3, but much much better than the horrors that was GTA 4. Oh my.
 
2013 game of the year for me is Papers, Please.
 
Papers please was a very cool concept. You play an immigration officer in a fictitious country. For every person admitted into the country you earn pay, but you have to make sure they are legitimate. If you let someone in you shouldn't have you get docked pay. At the end of the day you have to pay rent, pay for utilities and buy food for your family. It's really, really hard to make ends meet and your family can get sick and even die cus you basically suck at your job. Or at least that's how the game makes you feel. Really you're kind of setup to fail.

The interface is also really cool. It's not that hard to figure out which passports and other documents are real and such, what's hard is there's a time limit to the day. So you're under stress trying to get as many people through as possible and not mess anything up and it gets increasingly more complex. Like first you just need to check the passport has a valid country of origin for example, which you can cross reference in this atlas type book. But then later you have to reject people from specific countries, and then later you have to match the country of origin with the correct seal or something, so it's a lot to keep track of.

Then eventually as the game proceeds you're presented with some major choices, stuff like whether to try and flee the country with your family, or stick it out for a promotion and what not. There's maybe 30 alternate endings, more like 3-4 variations of 8 paths or so, but it's interesting to try and unlock them all by doing different stuff.

It's a very fun puzzle type of game but I don't think it'd be game of the year for me. Once you've done a few endings and then wiki'd the rest the replay value is pretty much gone, and the game play gets repetitive.
 
A little too much work : play ratio for me.
 
There are lots of 2014 games I simply haven't played, such as Shadow of Mordor and Dragon Age: Inquisition, which I might have thought would be pretty good. Instead, I'll go for a game I'm still playing for the first time and have really enjoyed: The Talos Principle.
 
2014 is another of those years I didn't play games much for. I suppose I could cheat and double-vote for EU since that's when they started putting my name in the credits and letting me rewrite the map), but that would be double-voting still.

So I'm going to give my vote to my brother, and vote how I'm pretty sure he would have voted: For Super Smash Bros Wii U.
 
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