The arguments for Destiny were bad.

I believe this goes down in the "Jeff hates Red Dead Redemption" level of how poorly an argument was made for a game.

Some caveats up front:

• I never do this, ever. The arguments were so infuriating that I had to say something.
• Picking apart an argument made in person is not fair when I have had some time to digest the arguments.
• I enjoyed Destiny for what it was, a very flawed game.

Now in no particular order:

• Diablo 3 absolutely has hand crafted items with flavour text; and they have more impact on how a class plays. They can modify abilities, proc effects and can be items which people make builds around.
• Diablo 3 again, the maps are randomly generated including random Elite and Champion encounters with their own resistances. Like the elites in Destiny but with more unique abilities and more resistances.

I only mention Diablo 3 because he made an equivocation himself, which rings so false having played a stupid amount of both games they are barely similar outside having loot.

• Nightfall and Raids cannot be match made. This is inconceivable. The argument that its too hardcore for a pickup group is ridiculous and fundamentally proven wrong by the DestinyLFG third party site.
  I cannot access the "best content in the game", the game WILL NOT LET ME.
  I could randomly friend people in game and try to group with them, but what the fuck difference is that than just hitting a matchmaking button?
  I can do it with everything else, including PVP. It is the absolute worst aspect of destiny.
• Grinding and attunement was weeded out of MMOs 5 years ago for a reason. It isn't fun, its a meaningless timesink and 100% of the time is looked back on as a mistake.
• The whole engram system is idiotic. Its like having an identify scroll but with a decent chance of getting something worse than you anticipated.
• Going back to the tower is dumb. Every godamn time you have to load in and talk to some faceless NPC. The tower is a meaningless hub, there are no social features whatsoever, its the mass effect elevators all over again.
• The mission design is pathetic. You defend that boring ass robot so many times I felt sad by the end of it.

This thread will probably be a horrible mess of people hating on Brad, which I am sorry for because I don't want it to be that at all.

Opinions are subjective and all are valid, but some of the facts glossed over or misrepresented were terrible.

I think they all just caved because it was Brad's passion game.

The flow of the conversation was actually hilarious. The sequence went like this:

• It was dead and buried. "I don't think Destiny can be on this list" - Jeff
• Then Vinny resurrected it.
• The group then begrudgingly accepted it could make the list.
• Then Brad sort of went into "over-selling it" mode and re-opened the discussion. The thing that really ignited this was his "if only there was more of it" comment.
• Brad then has to make all kinds of impassioned pleas just to keep it in the top 10.

I put 20 hours into Destiny, and honestly I thought it pretty much sucked. The game was just something I was doing, figuring something would emerge as interesting, but it never did. I finished like 90% of the campaign and was level 18-20 (somewhere in that range). I just couldn't find the fun at all. So hooray for Brad for enjoying it, but it seems like a pretty dubious inclusion when no one else wanted to go to bat for it at all.

I'm not losing any sleep over it though. It was just a weird, weird year for games. I think only a couple of these would have made a top 10 in some of the stronger years.

I don't care how crazy his arguements were #TeamBrad all the way on this one baby. He had his daggers out slicing throats for that game and it was fantastic. That man can filibuster when he has to.

Brad always does this for one game. This and DOTA2 should have an asterisk next to them, he won with the power of attrition.Eventually people are just going to get tired, all he has to do is go "you haven't seen the endgame" over and over. Like yeah, a lot of people didn't grind through bullshit for hours and hours to get to an endgame. Because that's fundamentally terrible design. You don't get to say "the thing behind the wall is great" if the only way behind the wall is punching it until your hand is raw and bloody. The process of getting to the "fun" would drive you insane. Its videogame Stockholm Syndrome. I don't hate Brad, he's been taken hostage. He's a victim, we need to free the poor man.

The whole "he got a cookie I should get a cookie" argument is super petty, though. Judge a game on its merit, if you're talking about what opposing opinion "got" when the opposing opinion won by merit of articulating the value of a game. Not by attacking other picks. If you win by attacking other nominations that tells me that you don't have a strong case for your game.

Side note: Jeff's nonsensical hate rant about Red Dead was starting to give me the vibes of a bile filled hate speech from a racist or what have you. I'm not saying those two things are anything close to equal (obviously!), but listening to that was just uncomfortable.

I was a little surprised about how Brad compared Destiny to Diablo, too. Oh well.

Also, Destiny made the top ten of 2014 while Divinity: Original Sin didn't. I'll just let that sink in for a moment.

Brad is bad at arguing, news at 11

Oh man, "hand crafted loot". This is priceless. So it has loot in the way COD single player has loot. It has about 25 pieces of loot, so its super hand crafted. "Hand crafted loot" might be the best spin I've heard for "this game kind of doesn't have real loot" I've ever heard. "They patched it since release" is fantastic too, considering Unity got zero credit for addressing almost every technical issue over 4 giant patches within a month.

All these special exceptions made for Destiny. The crew made great points against the game but they can't pin down the Iron Brad, he wasnt going to let it go until he won.

You guys are acting like something really serious is riding on this or something?

Neither did Transistor, Wolfenstein or Dragon Age Inquisition.

@corevi: Or Luftrausers.

It's just a list with words on it. No big deal really.

That doesn't mean it doesn't interest people or isn't worth discussing. Technically everything written on the site is just a collection of words.

@corevi: Other than Destiny and Far Cry 4, it was a solid-ish list I thought.

At one point literally every other person went around the table sharing their disdain for Destiny, no other game received that much consensus good or ill. Its amazing. Unprecedented, really.

Also I like that all these super chill people are taking a break from their hammock and light beer to let people know its no big deal. Glad you came to this discussion forum to let people know they don't have to discuss things. Let me throw on some flippy flops hit the beach. Great advice, bros.

@animasta: Yep, pretty much this! I'm just annoyed that this happens so often that it's to be expected. Though, I do Really love the dig near the end when Jeff mentions this argument and that Saints Row: the Third/Skyrim garbage.

I'm sure we all have our own "Destiny" game that we sugar coat flaws on. Also, I believe Brad has acknowledged most of the OPs points in one form or another but still goes back to how much he enjoyed the game despite the flaws. I think we need to untie Brad on this one, but save the rope incase he tries to put in Destiny DLC as his GOTY in 2015 :-p

@mb: Fair enough. What I really meant was that differentiating opinions are a good thing, if everyone agreed with each other about everything, life would be terribly boring. I just said it in a drunken/dickish way.

Between Patrick not putting up a really strong fight for Divinity, and Brad passionately reducing all of the arguments against Destiny to, "If only there were more of it," I felt like Destiny robbed so many better games of that 10th spot.

I will say Dan got Mario Kart 8 on the list on far less, but I don't think there were as many people passionately opposed to seeing it on the list as there were for Destiny not being on the list.

@xanadu: The problem is not the opinion. It's the way it's argued. For the past 3 years at least Brad has come up with one or two very weak arguments for his chosen game and just repeats them ad nauseum until everyone else gives up. No matter how thoroughly his arguments are dismantled he just keeps it up. They have to go home some time so eventually they give up. I say all of this as a fan of Brad and what he does... for 51 weeks of each year at least.

Can't say I'm thrilled about rewarding (encouraging?) a studio for what many suspect was an intentional pre-release gutting of the content from a game so that they could sell it as overpriced DLC. At the very least, Bungie intentionally held back content from a game that sorely needed it because they knew the game would sell anyway. If studios care about such recognition, imo, it's not a great precedent. Fortunately, even if they do care, I kind of doubt that it matters anyway because ultimately they've already been rewarded in a far more meaningful way by the droves of sales that this garbage has accrued (capitalism!).

All of this said, loved loved loved the GOTY content (and thanks to the entire staff for all their work on it!). Personal tastes are personal tastes. Brad is 100% entitled to his opinion, and I certainly respect it. At the end of the day, this lawyer is well aware that simple persistence wins a great number of negotiations.

Most of us have played some loot treadmill of some form or another, whether F2P or MMO in their nature. These tremendous investment of time lead to these "sunk cost fallacy", these Stockholm syndromes, that pushes you to convince yourself that you made a good decision spending so much time on these Skinner boxes.

@bceagles128: In fairness, being number 10 on a list probably does send a message to the devs that this game isn't what it could be. It seems like a big deal to us, beating out some big games. But when an investor or dev or publisher looks at all these lists and sees Destiny teetering on the fringe, the message is "we played this, and 9 things this year were better" when what they anticipate is universal accolades.

@villainy: You're not wrong about that. Remember that last year Brad called GTA V's mission design "fucking boring" but this year it was on his top 10 list because it looked better (and I have my doubts that he even finished it). That said, Giantbomb has a very small staff compared to other sites so the lists are always going to be more personal than analytical. Which personally, I am more than fine with.

Expecting cogent arguments seems like an incredibly tiring way of absorbing this content. I would've thought that after years of GB recording their dumb-ass knife fights for all to hear, we would've learned not to get worked up over them.

I was pretty confused as to how Destiny made both a most disappointing list and the GOTY list.

Personally I don't see how a game with so many admitted problems could beat out something like Wolfenstein. But it wasn't my GOTY list it was GB's.

@corevi said:

Dragon Age I can understand. I played all 90+ hours of it and it barely cracked my Top 5. I say this as a total lore hound and big fan of the Dragon Age setting, and while I enjoyed it, I have some grievous misgivings about the title.

Wolfenstein though? Wolfenstein?! That game is shooter of the year. It took me back to the good old days of DOOM, just with a modern design philosophy that found the sweet spot between "hardcore old school" and "contemporary" shooters. Out of all the games I've played this year, Wolfenstein felt inspired. Like Machine Games were on a mission to not only resurrect the Wolfenstein brand, but to prove themselves as rock solid developers. I think they did a great job. Easily Top 3 for me in 2014.

All in all the top ten list this year is a head scratcher to me. I agree with Jeff that this year in particular nothing really stood out as exceptional, but on the other hand giving Destiny a spot when it was a runner up for biggest disappointment of the year is... well it's just plain weird.

I just noticed that Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare made it to the number four slot on the overall list, despite only appearing on Jeff's list and no one else's. At least it wasn't a runner up for Most Disappointing, though.

Destiny robbed WWE Supercards! That's right Jeff, I said it.

Like Brad has already stated in the past, Destiny is the loot game with a good enough gameplay loop to make him stick with it until the end game. I get it, it's the cool thing to hate destiny but can you at least try bringing up good points without constantly strawmaning Brad's entire argument? Brad made plenty of good points, you just didn't want to hear them or remember them because you disagree with him.

Aside from that, you can talk about item variety in Diablo all you want, even if you actually beat the whole game the item variety doesn't matter at all. You pick up the stuff with the higher number for your class stats. That is all.

I literally see no difference in Diablo 3 and Destiny. I hit the level cap in both. They are practically the same thing. I love both of those games for the same reason. Monk and Titan the heros of grind.

That actually isn't true at all, and I think it shows that you either haven't played Diablo 3, or haven't played very much of it. The entire game centers around the vast array of unique legendary items, especially all of the class-specific ones. They are all quite different and can change the game so much (and are so rare) that many people completely change their entire build if they are lucky enough to pick up a certain item. There are multiple class sets as well that are each meant for different specializations and builds, not to mention gems, resists, and more. It absolutely is not "just equip the higher number." In fact, if you do that you are playing Diablo wrong and are never going to progress into the higher difficulties.

It's just a top ten list, chill out people. You guys are acting like someone is getting murdered here.

The list is their opinion, end of story. Get over it, guys.

The fact that Destiny, a game that at best was mediocre, somehow beat out Wolfenstein was a shocking moment during what I figured would be a pretty predictable top 10.

That argument was super entertaining, and that's why I come to this site and listen to their podcasts. Would I have put it in my top 10? Nope. However that made for some great discussion.

Oh, I know all about that stuff. I did say ''if you actually beat the whole game''. Which I did with friends on PS3 while playing around master 3-5 difficulty. I know you have to make a specific build and all that stuff when you get above nighmare but at that point you saw ALL the goddamn content twice and most of that time was pushing the same buttons over and over again bearly paying attention to what was going on on screen.

You can't really blame me or Brad for being more into the shorter, more involved grind to actually new rewarding content in the end game of Destiny.

going to say it outright. Brads argument for his passion games ruins the podcast every year. It sours the atmosphere, gets tedious and throws the idea that it's a group decision out of the window. If any other game on that list had one backer and 5 people going meh then it'd have been kicked to the curb but brad just wont let it go and boils the podcast down to a tedious war of attrition that not only brings out the worst of himself but Jeff as well. It makes them both unlikable and I always have to shut the blighter off and it's always sparked by Brad. Every year, I don't dislike brad but come goty podcast time he gets overbearing.

I don't want to diss Brad or attack him, but he came across as overly stubborn, perhaps childish, in the Destiny "debate" (I'm not a new listener, so I know this isn't new for him). Everyone else who was the sole person who loved a game simply said something to the affect of "I'm just glad we talked about it, I'll have it on my personal top 10", but Brad on the other hand won't let Destiny go. It didn't deserve to be on the list simply due to the lack of content and the worst mission design in years. I rarely agree with Alex, but I'm glad he was around, since he seems to be the only guy willing to argue with Brad and Jeff. Vinny, Patrick, Dan, and Drew are too cordial to do so.

I will say it was entertaining, especially Brad basically saying "Alex, you just got two games on the list... be grateful and shut up" with the guys reacting lol. I'm near the end of the last episode right now, so far everyone has been reasonable and calm besides Brad. The drama is nice to hear, but him basically bullying the nicer, more lowkey guys is a little annoying.

Think this was addressed on the podcast, but two points here: (1) Diablo 3 wasn't on the list, so I don't see how the comparison matters and (2) fwiw, I didn't enjoy Diablo 3 either. To each his own, but I personally do not enjoy the circularity behind playing a game for better loot so that I will play the game better. As I said above though, we're all entitled to different tastes. If everyone had the same opinions, these discussions would be boring. It's more important to me that these podcasts be entertaining that it is that I agree with the ultimate product, and I really enjoyed these.

Destiny, despite all of its obvious flaws, is till far and away my game of the year. I enjoyed my time with that game more than any other thing I played this year by a healthy margin. I enjoy everything about playing it. I think one of the main problems with the arguments people make for or against this game is that they are comparing it to the wrong game. There is some vague commonalities between it and Diablo, but not to the point that I actually find them relevant. Realistically I find it to have far more in common with WoW not that that's the most apt comparison either, but I feel it has far more merit than the Diablo comparison. The vast majority of my time playing it was spend with one other friend. Figuring out how to beat Nightfalls with one other person was some of the most fun I've ever had with a game. I'm glad Brad is so passionate about it because I am too. He is shockingly stubborn about things of this nature though I will certainly give you that. I'm pretty excited to actually hear the conversation over the next day or so when I find time to listen to it.

@pyrodactyl: The OP basically addressed Brad's claims point by point. If you ever get around to reading the original post, let us know.

I feel like Vinny had the most reasonable, but least convincing to an angry audience member, argument. The Site Top 10 represents what they were the most passionate about. Syndicate got on the Top 10 one year solely because of how much Jeff loved it. Patrick similarly got ZombiU on one year. The same has happened for other passion gamers for other individual members. Vinny wanted it on the list, if low, because of how passionately invested Brad was.

This makes the list very different from any that one person would make, but I respect it reflecting the diversity of opinions in the staff.

And while I think some of the rebuttals in this thread are absolutely correct, they're also a little unfair, as you've been given free rein to assemble facts to argue something outside of a group. In face-to-face meetings, it can be really hard to maintain composure and fact check. I know I'd be slipping all the time.

Not sure why people are mad at Brad when Alex did basically the same thing to get Jazzpunk on the list. People kept coming up with reasons it shouldn't be on the list, but he ignored them because it was his passion game. Brad does the same and he's hated. GOTY time is weird I guess.

I think Dan made a very apt comparison when he said it sounds like a racing game where the driving is really good but all the tracks suck - which as a person that played probably close to 80hrs of Destiny if not more, sounds about right.

I would have also argued that Destiny has a lot of smaller design problems that are crazy in this day and age and with other better games (WoW) to compare it too: having to go back to the hub to decrypt things, refusing to allow matchmaking when things like LFR in WoW make it plainly clear that people want it, remarkably small inventories, etc. As silly as it is to get a bit annoyed with a Top 10 list that isn't mine (and I'm sure I'll slap myself in the head later for being so dumb), Destiny making it onto the top 10 and Shadow of Mordor winning over any of the other games on that list are just absolute insanity.

I had my fun with Destiny but the bad stuff was bad enough that no amount of fun that can be squeezed out of it justifies giving it a pass. It doesn't deserve to be on any "Top" list of anything, its a beautiful well playing shallow pile of garbage.

They sold it as a Halo MMO they should be crucified for not delivering if World of Warcraft released with one faction and 4 starting zones and A raid it would be ripped to shreds. They could of at the Bare minimum reworked the planets open areas for more difficult combat at end game literally just throw Ogres and Wizards everywhere Something Anything, had NPC's with random quests, big events OF ANY KIND ANYTHING not just in the "open" world but in the singleplayer stor...oh wait there is no goddamn story.

Brads last 3 personal GOTY Mass Effect 3, Dota 2 and Dota 2. Now with Destiny, and his complete Flip flop on GTA V. Last year it sucked but wait, updated graphics and first person added now it has become great. Brad is really starting to annoy me. Destiny wasn't even on the big list of games when the discussion started, it was added halfway through and when it beat out Wolfenstein. I tuned out. Dan's the new guy is why Mario Kart made it. Alex was really upset last year and was kinda of ignored, so he got his way this year with some games. Just as a make up to him. I love when Drew replied to Brad's statement "if you like Bungie shooters and looting you will like Destiny". Drew didn't seem to agree. The fact that the staff is saying that Wolfenstein the new order is only the 4th best FPS game this year is really sad and pitiful.

Just more excuses for them to not put Dark Souls 2 on any list. It's kind of weird how many people there like Dark Souls now and it still doesn't even get a runner up in anything. Dark Souls 2 isn't that bad, or even a bad game. It's just not as good as Dark Souls. That doesn't make it a bad game or anything.

But who cares? It doesn't change anything. It's just fun. My list is the only one that matters to me anyway.

@cornbredx said:

This is the thing I can't wrap my head around. If you want to talk world building or level design, sure, it falls short. However when it comes to the mechanics and interacting with the enemies and environments, Dark Souls 2 is leaps and bounds above OG Dark Souls. The combat alone is smooth as eggs.

@oldirtybearon: I like both of them for different reasons. I think they're both pretty solid.

Dark Souls 2, for me, is still better than anything else that came out this year.

But ya, I liked the first Dark Souls more. The world building is so important to the game, and some stuff just feels random (like enemy designs, and the changes to the bonfire system). I know why, and it's fine, but I like Dark Souls better in comparison. That doesn't mean much when playing either/or to me, though. Again, they're both solid games for different reasons- the most important similarity being the basic game play mechanics which are mostly fine in both games despite small differences ( with 2 being more like Demon's Souls).

Is this about the seeming preemptive strike against Smash Bros? After years of this I can see the strategic level planning at work for a lot of the seemingly "chance" commentary.

I think that was also Jeff and Brad emptying their mags on Smash Bros a little too early and vociferously. That and Jeff's biases are well known to the point of ribbing about it. I think both Dan and Alex was also smart to sacrifice the one for the other.