Video Games- Game of the Year

[Kalbear]

I had personally thought for CP2077 I'd try and do just the main mission and not worry abotu the sidequests due to my time constraints, but I'm finding sidequests to be really fun and enjoyable for playing for an hour or two at a time. And I really like just going around the map and checking things out. 

Dunno how that falls into the too long/not long enough divide, but it has just enough fun of exploration for me.

[Proudfeet]

On 1/15/2021 at 5:31 AM, briantw said:

I do this with basically every game.  I'll start it, be way into it for ten to twenty hours, then the next shiny thing releases and I rinse and repeat.

How many hours did you have in TF2 again? 

[Inkdaub]

If the story isn't there I most likely won't enjoy the game as much.  I do like side quests, though. 

Witcher 3 isn't a good comparison in a lot of cases.  They did so many things right with that game it's almost unfair.  Trivially, I know a guy who loves games and plays often but won't play Witcher because of the name.

[Denvek]

The little Easter Eggs in Valhalla are both very varied, and never egregious. Today I've had both "exit pursued by a bear" and "the cake is a lie".

[Centrist Simon Steele]

14 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Oh gods, no, sorry if that wasn't clear! I should have been clearer in my point. Some games benefit from being long/large, and others less-so. It's a question of the story the developers are trying to tell, what roadblocks are put in place, and what gameplay style options are presented. As @Werthead said: "It's not the case that "all long games are bad" and "all short games are good," it's that games have a natural length to them and beyond that can get overstuffed, or they can be too short and perfunctory to the point that it hurts the story or experience, just as you can have a novel, film or TV show that goes on too long, or is too short." Which fits well with your comment about Witcher 3: "kind of that perfect blend of long story and huge world". Witcher 3's story never drags or features tedious fetch quests. It's intelligently structured to maintain player engagement and provide a balanced amount of variety. 

On the other end of the spectrum, there's Dragon Age: Inquisition, which takes about 45-50 hours to play through the main story, but famously features a wild number of useless fetch quests that blow the gametime out to over 100 hours yet never provides the same level of emotional payoff as you'd get in Witcher 3. Clearly Final Fantasy XIII has similar issues ("the 20 hours spent on a singular path with SO MANY cutscenes was too much"). There's clearly a point where games can become longer than they need to be. 

And that issue of artificiality is what bugs me about Assassin's Creed III (and that franchise in general). It did not need to be a 28 hour game. At various points in the game, irrelevant narrative roadblocks ("Look - it's Benjamin Franklin!") were introduced just to keep me busy, rather than getting on with telling a potentially compelling story about a really fucked up father/son relationship. 

 

Yeah, I tried replaying ac 3 and it feels really self-indulgent. We know in the writing world that prologues are often considered a bad idea. AC3s 5 to 8 hour prologue playing not the main character reeks of someone thinking they tell such amazing stories that traditional rules don't apply. AC, as a series, is the worst for this kind of stuff. Odyssey, in fact, was the first AC game I've played since three because that game constantly interrupted what I wanted to do: explore the world. Valhalla is the same way. And it's world feels large and empty like AC 3.

It's a fine balance no doubt.

[aceluby]

Was on paternity leave the last couple months and cleared out a bit of my backlog.

Started with HZD and it might be the best game I've played in a very, very long time.  The story and narrative was tight, the combat was fluid and incredibly fun, I did literally all of the missions I could except for the hunting grounds and still wanted more, the DLC pushed the envelope is just the right ways, and the overall length was long, but not overly so (like RDR2).  As close to a perfect game as it gets IMO.

Next up was Control.  Had no idea what it was about except some people here like it, but hit a lot of great notes for me.  Story was super weird and hard to follow, but somehow it was engaging and still very much a positive because of it.  The combat was difficult, but manageable.  And by the end it was just so much fun with all your powers, plus the last level is just bonkers fun.  Had a great time with it, but knock off a few points because it was kinda glitchy in spots (seems to be geared for the "pro" version of consoles and high end PCs), the side quests for the most part seemed like pure filler, and the skill tree was kind of unnecessarily huge which meant underutilizing skills unless you did a ton of the side quests.

After that was Tomb Raider: Enhanced Edition.  Nice, short, fun little adventure game.  Probably should have been called Lara Croft: Mass Murderer, but I digress.  Best part of the game are the optional tombs/puzzles, which there seems to be too few of and too much straight up action.

Currently playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, and am generally enjoying it, but there's too much filler stuff and required crafting.  Really want to finish out the series though.

Also decided that I'm going to wait on getting a PS5 until there are games on it not released on other systems.  I heard Horizon Forbidden West will be dual released, which was the only game I really wanted to play on PS5 besides Demon's Souls.  Hopefully I can hold out until a Pro or slim version.

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, aceluby said:

Was on paternity leave the last couple months and cleared out a bit of my backlog.

Started with HZD and it might be the best game I've played in a very, very long time.  The story and narrative was tight, the combat was fluid and incredibly fun, I did literally all of the missions I could except for the hunting grounds and still wanted more, the DLC pushed the envelope is just the right ways, and the overall length was long, but not overly so (like RDR2).  As close to a perfect game as it gets IMO.

Next up was Control.  Had no idea what it was about except some people here like it, but hit a lot of great notes for me.  Story was super weird and hard to follow, but somehow it was engaging and still very much a positive because of it.  The combat was difficult, but manageable.  And by the end it was just so much fun with all your powers, plus the last level is just bonkers fun.  Had a great time with it, but knock off a few points because it was kinda glitchy in spots (seems to be geared for the "pro" version of consoles and high end PCs), the side quests for the most part seemed like pure filler, and the skill tree was kind of unnecessarily huge which meant underutilizing skills unless you did a ton of the side quests.

After that was Tomb Raider: Enhanced Edition.  Nice, short, fun little adventure game.  Probably should have been called Lara Croft: Mass Murderer, but I digress.  Best part of the game are the optional tombs/puzzles, which there seems to be too few of and too much straight up action.

Currently playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, and am generally enjoying it, but there's too much filler stuff and required crafting.  Really want to finish out the series though.

Also decided that I'm going to wait on getting a PS5 until there are games on it not released on other systems.  I heard Horizon Forbidden West will be dual released, which was the only game I really wanted to play on PS5 besides Demon's Souls.  Hopefully I can hold out until a Pro or slim version.

Agree 100% on HZD.  I also played the new Tomb Raider trilogy within the last year and enjoyed it too.  Really like the Uncharted type gameplay.

[aceluby]

1 minute ago, Rhom said:

Agree 100% on HZD.  I also played the new Tomb Raider trilogy within the last year and enjoyed it too.  Really like the Uncharted type gameplay.

What's weird is that in Uncharted my favorite parts were the combat and fast pace parts.  The cover system was just so much fun and they did the platforming superbly, but the puzzle were lack luster (stopped playing after UC3, so this might have changed in the newer ones).  On the other hand for Tomb Raider I think the best parts are the puzzles and stealth, while the action fights you just kinda trudge through.

[Toth]

All this talk about Open World Games makes me want to dip back into a Bethesda one for some reason, even though I still have that Total War Warhammer campaign to finish, have Battlefront II (the performance is oddly dependent on whether Origin is in online or offline mode. It's smooth in offline mode, unplayable online... and I only ever played singleplayer modes yet XD) and also have a Thrawn's Revenge campaign going ever since... when did the last episode of The Mandalorian aired? Still have only barely advanced and... amusingly just like in the Book I'm having a crippling shortage of ships and very little money to build new ones, so I keep advancing with what little I have to desperately try and connect my territories. In ground battles I'm building my entire strategy around protecting that one single AT-AT that I have. In terms of getting rid of heroes, I destroyed the Errant Venture (which weirdly I don't remember from the first trilogy, it only appeared in Hand of Thrawn), but on the other end of the galaxy Ferrier is cut off from my main forces and pretty much fucked if the New Republic opts to go for him.

To the Open World Games question it's weird, my motivation to interact with them is strangely depending on the mechanics. I loved most Bethesda games. Oblivion was the first game of the series I played and it was such a wonderful game to get lost in. I played through the entire main quest... after I already explored the whole damn country and looted every second dungeon. It was such a gorgeous game to just wander around and do whatever you fancied. The Shivering Isles was also a terrific addon.
Before Skyrim came out I played Arena and Daggerfall. Arena is an outlier in how I never managed to leave the first dungeon, but Daggerfall was surprisingly fun. I loved the sheer insanity of the size of the world, the size of the cities and the absurd number of them. It may have been an autogenerated mess, but it really made you feel like travelling around a huge ass country instead of a miniaturized mock-country with six cities that would barely qualify as villages in the real world. Strolling through huge plazas with houses till the horizon, knowing that you could go into every single one of them (and rob their owners blind XD) is something the hand crafted Elder Scrolls games never managed to replicate really.
I tried to get into Morrowind numerous times, but weirdly enough the mechanics really pulled me out. I also felt really restricted exploring because no matter where I went I hit a brick wall where I was clobbered by some ludicrously overpowered enemy or was harassed to death by flyers. Exploring simply wasn't fun. Oddly enough I didn't feel anywhere near this frustrated with other open world games of the time that were beefgating their world, like Gothic 2 and Gothic 3. I think it's because Morrowind doesn't have any geographical boundaries that actually discourage exploring, it invites you to, but then slams you head first into the mud.
Skyrim is an odd case. I played it for a long time as well, but... I'm not sure what happened. I never finished the main quest or the civil war quests, I played it like Oblivion in that I walked around tracking down every single side quest, but somehow I never felt like exploring every single little ditch the same as with Oblivion and when I got distracted by other games, I never came back even once.
The only Bethesda Fallout game I ever played was Fallout 3 and... in that one I actually played through the main quest and I think I also went through every single little side quest, so I got a lot of time out of it. Still curious to see how the other games of the series look like.

Now since the comparison with Assassin's Creed came up... Origins is breathtaking, but I must say the levelgating is once again something that rubs me the wrong way. I bought the game with the specific intention to go sightseeing the pyramids (in the game, not the discovery mode) and yet it forces me to grind through Alexandria and its surroundings before I can have any chance to survive there. I haven't seen them yet, damn it! And the Pharos was oddly underwhelming as well, the tomb from the prologue and the streets of Alexandria themselves were far more pretty to look at.

Haven't played The Witcher 3 yet. I wanted to play through the entire series, but was still in the second chapter of The Witcher 1 when I lost my savefile when my laptop had to get fixed. Gragh, I don't feel at all like picking it up now, but it feels weird to have such a highly praised game in your library and never touch it.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Gothic 2 was awesome. I loved exploring areas that were too dangerous for my character level. 

Gothic 3 was really bad but I never tried the fan patch version. 

[Toth]

1 hour ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Gothic 2 was awesome. I loved exploring areas that were too dangerous for my character level. 

Well, yeah, I distinctly remember cheesing single orc patrols in the final levels as groups of orcs were pretty much impossible for me to kill. Then again... Gothic 2 was awesome, but I'm kinda baffled at the brick wall I reached at the end. I never managed to defeat the final undead dragon boss and found very "encouraging" comments on the internet that it is damn near impossible for the paladin to beat the game if you are not cheesing with copious amounts of scrolls. -.-

I played Gothic 3 when it was fully patched and I found to be a really smooth game, significantly less restrictive than Gothic 2, but I remember being very underwhelmed about the story.

Aber für uns deutsche Spieler gab es damals ja immer noch das absolut geniale Video von der Gamestar dazu:

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

Lol... 

Back when gamestar was cool. I had an abonnement until 2005 I think. 

I remember finishing it with all classes. I dunno how well it worked with the Paladin but I do not remember it being that difficult. The mage was op though. 

[Werthead]

 

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I tried to get into Morrowind numerous times, but weirdly enough the mechanics really pulled me out. I also felt really restricted exploring because no matter where I went I hit a brick wall where I was clobbered by some ludicrously overpowered enemy or was harassed to death by flyers. Exploring simply wasn't fun. Oddly enough I didn't feel anywhere near this frustrated with other open world games of the time that were beefgating their world, like Gothic 2 and Gothic 3. I think it's because Morrowind doesn't have any geographical boundaries that actually discourage exploring, it invites you to, but then slams you head first into the mud.

I really wanted to get into Morrowind but it is brutally unforgiving and the game doesn't really give you any clue on when a mission is too tough or not, you just have to risk it and see if you die instantly. Plus cliff racers are annoying. I'm waiting on the remakes (not that it looks likely they'll ever be done).

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The only Bethesda Fallout game I ever played was Fallout 3 and... in that one I actually played through the main quest and I think I also went through every single little side quest, so I got a lot of time out of it. Still curious to see how the other games of the series look like.

Fallout 3 is solid but the weakest of the three Bethesda-published FO games. New Vegas has a vastly better story and player freedom and world reactivity, whilst Fallout 4 is a lot prettier, has solid open-world exploration and build mechanics and the settlement building stuff is both fun and gives you a reason to collect all the junk in the world.

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Haven't played The Witcher 3 yet. I wanted to play through the entire series, but was still in the second chapter of The Witcher 1 when I lost my savefile when my laptop had to get fixed. Gragh, I don't feel at all like picking it up now, but it feels weird to have such a highly praised game in your library and never touch it.

The Witcher 3 has virtually nothing to do with The Witcher 1, to the point it's a bit odd when one of the NPCs from the first game shows and briefly mentions the plot of that game, as otherwise it's not really relevant. You can just leap into The Witcher 2, which is a really just a short and focused 20-25 hour prelude to The Witcher 3, or just jump straight into The Witcher 3 itself, which is a more a sequel to the novels than the first two games. In fact, The Witcher 3 is weird for game-first players because it expends so much time on Ciri and Yennefer when they are barely mentioned in the first two games, whilst book-first players are bewildered by how much time all three games spend on Triss, a side-character (at best) in the books.

The Witcher 1 has not aged well, at all, and still has a fair bit of jank to it.

[aceluby]

At this point I think I've probably sunk ~75 hours into the Witcher 3 across two systems and have come to the conclusion that I will probably never actually finish the game.  I know everyone here thinks it's one of the best stories ever told in video games, but for some reason it has never gripped me and every quest feels like a fetch quest.  The most fun I have in it is playing Gwent, but I've run out of players to play against in my game and I get bored within an hour of the next fetch quest to get more players to play against.  I feel like I'm missing something (or something's wrong with me), because I like the world they created and love the show, but keep getting taken out of the game for some reason.

[Toth]

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I remember finishing it with all classes. I dunno how well it worked with the Paladin but I do not remember it being that difficult. The mage was op though. 

I unfortunately played it with the gold edition that included the Addon. As far as I know because many thought the final boss to be too easy, the developers buffed it up so hard with the Addon that only the mage was able to beat it on his own strength.

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I really wanted to get into Morrowind but it is brutally unforgiving and the game doesn't really give you any clue on when a mission is too tough or not, you just have to risk it and see if you die instantly. Plus cliff racers are annoying. I'm waiting on the remakes (not that it looks likely they'll ever be done).

Yeah, that covers pretty much exactly my own thoughts. Also this:

 

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

whilst Fallout 4 is a lot prettier, has solid open-world exploration and build mechanics and the settlement building stuff is both fun and gives you a reason to collect all the junk in the world.

If the aim of collecting junk isn't to build a gun that launches teddy bears at enemies with enough force to rip heads off, I'm not interested!

5 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The Witcher 3 has virtually nothing to do with The Witcher 1, to the point it's a bit odd when one of the NPCs from the first game shows and briefly mentions the plot of that game, as otherwise it's not really relevant. You can just leap into The Witcher 2, which is a really just a short and focused 20-25 hour prelude to The Witcher 3, or just jump straight into The Witcher 3 itself, which is a more a sequel to the novels than the first two games.

I remember you wrote the exact same thing back when I mentioned I was playing The Witcher 1. I'll think about it if I ever have that itch again.

[Luzifer's right hand]

1 minute ago, Toth said:

I unfortunately played it with the gold edition that included the Addon. As far as I know because many thought the final boss to be too easy, the developers buffed it up so hard with the Addon that only the mage was able to beat it on his own strength.

 

Ah that makes sense. I never played the addon although people have always said that it was awesome.

[Poobah]

I think everyone that's ever played Morrowind still feels the unending bone-deep hatred of Cliff Racers. 

Still one of my favourite games of all time though. I know some of it is nostalgia goggles (though I have played more recently, mostly just with graphics mods) but I don't think any other game has really captured that feeling of mystery, wonder, and danger, and of being an outsider. That island has such a sense of place, Vvardenfell is so alien and unforgiving and unapologetically its own.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

If the aim of collecting junk isn't to build a gun that launches teddy bears at enemies with enough force to rip heads off, I'm not interested!

Oh, you can still do that. It's just you can also built a complete town defended by robots and sentry guns if you want as well.

[briantw]

21 minutes ago, Poobah said:

I think everyone that's ever played Morrowind still feels the unending bone-deep hatred of Cliff Racers. 

Morrowind was amazing, but two things will always stand out more than all the amazing stuff.

1. Fuck cliff racers.

2. I spent about ten hours of my life punching mudcrabs.

[A True Kaniggit]

Aaaah Morrowind.

The hours I spent having my character run into a wall to level up. 
 

The best way to travel will always be that jump spell which allowed you to hurl yourself huge distances across the map.