Giant Bomb's 2016 Game of the Year Awards: Day Five

Reinhardt!? Yall are boring as hell.

Hitman is absolutely deserving of goty tho. For as good as DOOM's campaign is ultimately I can't get over how it's one third of a game where the other two thirds range from "cool but not for me" to "who even cares"

I figured this would happen. The communities enthusiasm over Doom's awesome single player seemed to blind them to the lack luster or bad multiplayer, which is not something Jeff would overlook when they have to consider the whole game. The ballooning size of the multiplayer patches that a majority of players just don't care about is also an issue. If half of the game's real-estate is devoted to unwanted content, you have to take that into consideration.

Hitman on the other hand has been played all year. It is literally the year of Hitman. It's not only a really great game to play, it was the most dominant thing on the site. I don't know if things would be different if they didn't do elusive targets for us to watch and enjoy.

I'm looking forward to seeing how Brad feels about this.

How did Mafia 3 not even get in the top 3 of best story? the fuq?

Zero Time Dilemma should have supplanted Firewatch for 3rd place.

Hyper Light at number 8??? wtf

Happy that Hitman won.

Im okay with this list, even though Overwatch my goty.

Just like Mario Maker, Giant Bomb really showed that Hitman is THEIR game of the year.

I love Doom for sure, but Hitman has consumed my life for the last 3 weeks.

Hitman is an amazing game that deserves all the love it gets.

Hyper Light Drifter made it on the list! Hyper Light Drifter made it on the list! Hyper Light Drifter made it on the fucking list!

And Reinhardt is best Overwatch character!

Can't contain excitement! Gonna explode now!

Downloading. 3 & 1/2 hours. Wow.

Uncharted 4: Sam didn't want the treasure to get rich, he wanted it to finish the journey their mother started (and to screw over Rafe). If you're going to talk story beats, you at least have to get it right...

The underdog pulls it out! After four days of DOOM getting fellated for everything it was the least bit good at, it tripped and faceplanted at the finished line. It's only the SECOND BEST GAME OF THE YEAR! I bet those devs are crying themselves to sleep tonight.

Obviously kidding there. It was a pleasure listening to the deliberations. Would I order the list differently? Well duh. But I'm not a committee of smart games journalists.

EDIT: And huuuge props to Jason for delivering Hyper Light Drifter to the top ten. One of the strongest synergies of art style, music, and combat I've ever played.

best story runner up doom???? after all those unskippable expository dialogue dumps about stupid mars shit??????

@dijon said:

No, but, like, see: It's ironically terrible.

Back in day one, they cut a game "something dungeon" out of best style, said it was a Lovecraft game but it wasn't Darkest Dungeon. Anyone know what it was?

A couple things from the Top 10 list without having listened to the podcast yet:

• Uncharted 4 won best story but isn't even a part of the top 10? I can't wait to hear that argument.
• Thumper got on when only Alex truly loved it. He must have fought like hell to get it on there.
• Hitman won which I am super surprised seeing.
• The indie bottom and AAA top(The Witness not withstanding) was interesting to see. I don't play many indie games so I can't speak to them but it's weird seeing how it's broken up that way.
• Some of these choices are super interesting (Hyper Light Drifter) when no one really seemed to put them forth hard in the other days.

Huh. I was sure Doom had it in the bag. I really need to listen to the deliberations now.

Hey! Stardew Valley got the honorary #10 spot! Last year it was The Witcher 3 that got the "Almost none of us played this but someone is fighting for it" spot, and the year before that... Destiny?

Did not expect Hitman, but looking back to the amount of content generated by it, that makes sense now.

only way I'll accept Overwatch award is "Tracer Presents Best Overwatch Character" cause she's the best.....after Mei

Overwatch, FF XV, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D World Tour, Shantae, KOF XIV, SF V (I had fun with it), XCOM2...

I played Thumper, it's okay, but for me it doesn't beat warp striking fools in the face in FF XV.

Kinda sad to see Uncharted 4 get shafted based on what feels like the sole reason being that it's a fourth Uncharted game. It looks amazing, plays well, has a great story, likeable characters, etc. Yes it's a been there done that type of thing, but that should hardly be a negative against it since it's very very hard to improve on what was almost perfection with Uncharted 2. As for the criticism that it's just combat zone, platforming, and rinse/repeat that very same argument could be made against Doom. It could be made against almost every game out there now. Just feels like the criticisms are very flimsy just for the sake of being criticisms.

As a man with a preference to ladies' feet, that UC4 screenshot shows that no matter how beautiful graphics have gotten these days, the uncanny valley is still real

Also, Mei is bae, and is the best Overwatch character followed by Pirate Torb

It got something though (for best story), while Final Fantasy XV isn't even on the top 10. FF XV is more robbed, a contender for GOTY in my book.

Oh shit.

Everyone seemed to like both games a lot, so this podcast's gonna be something.

The whole premise of a lost brother not mentioned in any of the other Uncharted games means that Uncharted 4 cannot POSSIBLY be the best story. While I enjoyed the game well enough, in terms of story, it's no Last of Us.

Edit: You know what...I take back my comment...It's just a horrible year for video game stories in general. Your runner's up were garbage too. Doom didn't have a "story." It had no plot...No build, climax, finale. Firewatch had lot's of building and a climax, but the last hour of the game came down to a note left on the side of a cliff.

I'm not offended...mostly because I have nothing better to offer...

I may sound like a kook here, and it may involve watching a tie-in CGI movie, but I found Final Fantasy XV's story very well done. A bit minimalist (mostly brief cutscenes), but it worked, hit me in the heartstrings, and is a memorable journey.

Was this year really so bad with storytelling that UC4 actually had the best story?

Can someone please explain Stardew Valley to me? I played a bit of it and it seemed like a Harvest Moon (obviously) with slightly more update to date, but not nearly as up to date for a 2016, mechanically.

Is there something about it that I am missing? Is it a story thing, hidden secrets thing that makes it great? Seems kind of meh (and slightly frustrating because it doesn't have controller support and the mechanics could have been done better) and I loved Harvest Moon back in the day.

Scrolling down to this comment section is maybe the worst decision I've made all year.

YO on behalf of Austin Walker I'm here to say I strongly disagree with the bullshit that is the "Best Overwatch Character." Why?

Because you didn't pick Bastion. And as we all know, Bastion fucks.

It's not about how good or bad he fucks, he just fucks, and that makes him superior to Reinhardt.

Giant Bomb usually puts the actual best game of the year in the number 2 spot. So no surprise here.

Still listening to the podcast but why even have the Overwatch Character of the Year if nobody knows or cares about the lore?

@stordoff: It did. Alex talked about it a bit, not a lot though.

How dare you, sir. That said maybe you had a really lucky year, so your worst decision is still a good one?

Having listened to this, rather interesting to see Jeff out bulldog Brad for a 2nd year in a row to keep his choice of number 1 out, except he started the avalanche but then convinced everyone else to hop on board.

Uncharted 4 didn't even make top 10???

Uncharted 4 spoilers: I think the crew is misinterpreting Sam a little bit. If he was only trying to get rich he would've continued working with Rafe. He betrays Rafe and ropes Nathan in with the drug lord story because (as revealed in the flashback) that quest is part of their mother's legacy: what she was studying before she died. Sam calls it her "unfinished work" and you get the impression that he and Nathan had been looking for Avery's treasure for many years before involving Rafe, and whereas Nathan was able to move on with his life Sam has been obsessing over it all this time.

Sam's very tragic. Unlike Nathan he would've been old enough to know their mother, and when you combine his mother committing suicide and his little brother abandoning him to a Panamanian prison what links those two events is Avery. It makes sense that finding the treasure with Nathan as a family would take on special significance moreso than simply getting rich.

I disagree with this completely, mostly because I've known SO many people who have had close people in their lives die prior to meeting them and it often took me YEARS to find out. It was 8 years into my marriage with my wife before I found out my father-in-law had a sister that died when he was young. He simply doesn't ever want to talk about it.

Like or dislike UC4's story all you want, but that isn't a disqualifier alone.

I do not understand the love Doom gets and am really pleased with Hitman getting the number 1 spot. Blood Money was released back in May 2006. It took it a decade, but the series is finally back.

The right game won. o7

YES. Whoever fought for Hitman during the deliberations, well done sir(s)! Doom would have probably won if the multiplayer was better.

In any case, this goes a long way to making up for the Witcher 3 snub last year.

You realise it is a site consensus right?

Hitman was probably the right choice for GOTY based on the discussion in the podcast/video. If there were different arguments that could be made to swing it for Doom, they simply weren't made.

Really, to me, it was Drew's words on Hitman that actually started giving the game momentum to win, not any digging in on Jeff's part. Brad, Jason (and Alex, to an extent) were absolutely not budging against the "Doom should be #2 because the multiplayer is bad" train. It was Drew's laying out of what he found great about the game that seemed to kindle everyone's warm feelings for the title.

What a great year for games, seriously. Don`t care about how the list turns out, I only come here for the deliberations and they were good! Well done sirs.

Hahah awesome to see Jeff stand up for Mei and Dan standing up for Stardew Valley enough to get it in at number 10. Can't believe the beautiful angel Ryckert did the deed. Great list everybody. 2016 was pretty good for games!

@sah_din said:

We can thank Jeff and Dan, with a nice assist from Drew and Vinny. What a season. What a season.

I don't have a horse in the 1/2 race (I've only played the demo of Doom and the prologue/tutorial for Hitman), but there is no argument that could convince me of Hitman at 1 and Doom at 2 given the staff lists.

I kind of called this way back in the community GB GOTY 2016 Prediction thread. DOOM took the role as the community favorite to win GOTY just like Bayonetta 2 (2014) and Phantom Pain (2015) before it. Like those other titles in their respective years, DOOM is the runner up for GOTY. Lesson is, never count out the competition even if we're ready to believe they'll crown one game game of the year. Hitman seems like a good choice for GB's game of the year considering the content we've gotten from that game this year.

I'm also listening to the deliberations right now and while I feel for Alex losing his son, Zenyatta, feeling happy for Vinny winning the fight to give Reinhardt the award.