RESULTS! For the Giantbomb Community GotY List!

Happy New Year! AND HAPPY GAME OF THE YEAR!

Two things are different about the way this is happening this year. First of all: I pulled blurbs from the submitted user lists. Secondly: data is not on a google doc, it is over here: goty.me

The most common request about this stuff was navigable data and specifically, a way to figure out which users voted for what. So I implemented a database and put it on the web. Yes, I know. I know that the design is, er... I'll be nice and call it "efficient". But it's simple to figure out. Click on a game and it will take you to the list of users who voted for it. Click on a user and it will show you the other games they voted for.

I hope to put the last 4 years of goty lists on the site soon (you guys kept those, right?), and also add the ability to compare users' lists to see who has the most similar taste. As well as other stuff. Maybe make it look less austere.

ANYWAY ONTO THE LIST

The Giantbomb Community's 2014 Games of the Year!

_________
	1. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor "Shadow of Mordor would earn a place as one of the best games of the year purely based on what it steals: Batman-style combat and Assassin's Creed traversal combine to form a package that, on its own, would be pretty fun to play. But throw in the Nemesis system- one of the most captivating and interesting ideas I've ever seen in a game- and you get this year's best game, hands down. Few games with purely scripted characters manage to have enemies as compelling and worthy of your hatred as Mordor does." - @nophilip "I've played close to 20 hours of this and have barely completed 30% of the main quest line. That's a great sign the game is just fun to play, even separate from the narrative, which DOES seem very good. I've had a huge amount of fun already, and I'm not even half-way through. No other game this year hit me like this." - @hashbrowns
	2. Dragon Age: Inquisition "This sets the new standard for Bioware gameplay and storytelling. Featuring a staggeringly detailed and enormous world, with what feels like near infinite content. Fun combat, great voice-acting, and a story that held my attention for 60+ hours, made this one of the best RPG's in recent memory. Makes me very excited for the next Mass Effect." - @ghosthouse "Top of the tree without a doubt is the latest RPG from Bioware. However, it wasn't as automatic as I assumed it would be. It took a while to get going and for the longest time I felt woefully underpowered playing as a mage. Some of the systems are not explained well at all and the first few hours can feel flat. HOWEVER, as I kept at it, waiting for it to get good, it crept up on me - I was hooked without even knowing it. Not since Mass Effect 2 have I stayed up till the wee hours just to see a quest conclude...and then roll right into the next one. Finding the party which worked for me, getting stronger gradually and just exploring the world, peppered with genuinely tough choices to make, won me over. I am 50 hours in and reckon there's still more than half the game to go and whole areas I haven't even been to yet. It can be a little overwhelming, but the sheer volume of quests to perform actually allows me to just forget about the ones I don't care about. Yes, it's janky as hell, but I have come to expect this from Bioware and it doesn't bug me as much as it should. Enjoying this so much, I don't want it to end." - @yodasdarkside
	3. Dark Souls II "Just amazing in almost every way. I didn't really care for the original Dark Souls, but this one somehow grabbed me and didn't let go. One of the few games that I actually wanted more of after completing. I cannot wait for Scholar of the First Sin (which releases on my birthday, conveniently enough!)" - @steadying "Is it as good as Dark Souls? Not quite, but very little is. Is it better than any other game released this year? Absolutely." - @enemylandlord
	4. South Park: The Stick of Truth "Absolutely nailed the look and feel of the show. Writing is fantastic and I was laughing throughout, the RPG elements were also well done and didn't feel tacked on. This is definitely the bar that has to be met when it comes to using licenses as means for video games." - @joe423 "I'm still shocked that this game, based on a cartoon series I find intermittently funny and cloying, is my favorite experience of 2014. The pitch-perfect parodies and nods to games like Skyrim and Call of Duty, the clever writing, the absolute bevy of references hidden across the world, and the best moment of the year - Canada - all packed into one amazingly entertaining role-playing game. It's hard for a game to be so on point for its entire duration, especially one from a studio with such a bad history of lukewarm game endings, but South Park: The Stick of Truth somehow pulls it all off." - @ocelotfox
	5. Wolfenstein: The New Order "Never in a million years did I think a Wolfenstein game released in 2014 would be my favorite game of the year. Partly down to the fact 2014 wasn't a vintage year for me and partly down to the fact that Wolfenstein was one of the best paced FPS games I've ever played make this my favorite game of the year." - @yesiamaduck "One of the most fun FPSs I've played in years. The shooting is a mix of old and new school, and killing Nazis is a strange nostalgia trip that feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the modern warfare equivalents that are out." - @butano
	6. Transistor "I already fell in love with the music, atmosphere and art of Transistor, before it was released. On top of that I was really impressed by the combat and different synergies and had fun playing around with it, even after playing through the game." - @khazo "I love how the gameplay mechanics reinforce the themes of interconnection. Each of your functions is a person, and in different positions they're capable of different things, but always tinged with their innate them-ness. Horizontal progression and total versatility is constantly available. The death punishment is pretty clever, because it forces players to try new combinations as they limp through areas, rewarding mechanical exploration. Enemies evolve in attack varieties and abilities, and the limiter system allows you to tailor the experience to that perfect level of difficulty frission. The art, not even so much the art, but the color palette. Everything is diffused and neon but the colors are incredible and alive and vivid. This weird electronic lo-fi fuzz jazz ballad stuff blows my mind. Logan Cunningham coming out of my PS4 controller." - @brodehouse
	7. Shovel Knight "Shovel Knight is everything I wish more games were. It's not just an ode to classic platforming games of the NES and SNES era; it's a celebration of what made those games so impactful. If Shovel Knight had come out back then, it would likely be up there next to Mega Man or Mario, with tons of sequels down the road. Shovel Knight isn't just well-constructed, it also drips with craft and charm. It's clear the developers loved the game they were making, and they wanted you to fall in love, as well. I would recommend to anyone who has ever enjoyed platformers to pick up this game, don your shovel, and enjoy the best indie game I've played in years and my personal favorite game of 2014." - @truthtellah "this is the number one game on this list because it's the number one game of 2014 not just on my list but on everyones list. people who have this as a number other than one on their list are deluded and should be sent to camps where they are taught how to shovel properly. like holes. not the book but the movie w/ shia labeouf" - @haygen
	8. Bayonetta 2 "I love a good character action game. Recent years have been so kind to the genre, and it seems like they just get better and better. One or two a year is just right, and somehow these amazing games just keep on coming. It turns out there weren't a lot of them in 2014, but the big one... oh boy. This game is just a perfect collection of over-the-top, insane, fast, slick, responsive, fun, beautiful sequences, and like a lot of the games on my list, it's just FUN. This is one of the best games of its genre, period. Patrick Klepek said that Bayonetta 2 gave him "Asura's Wrath feelings." Yes. I want more of that. Give me all the Asura's Wrath feelings, Japan. Make the WiiU my Asura's Wrath feelings machine." - @austinmorgan "Arguably the only downgrade made in the transition from Bayonetta 1 to 2 is that I don't hear Fly Me to the Moon ever. [At least not that I remember.] Everything else--from a story that feels more personal and [uh, sort of] makes more sense, to an even more prominent willingness to change up the moment-to-moment gameplay--is an improvement over the original, and the game still preserves the accessible and highly satisfying action mechanics that made the first so special for me." - @tizzzzzz
	9. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft "Sometimes I think about how I should have played more games in 2014. I look at Steam or my list of Trophies and question how many games or much time have I spent playing games this year. Then I remember how much I played Hearthstone, and then think "Oh yeah, that's right. I spent most of my time playing Hearthstone." - @clagnaught "At this point I have put probably somewhere around 1000 hours into this game, and I am still having a blast and looking forward to playing more with the new cards in Goblins vs Gnomes. Not sure if I can come up with any higher praise than that. If you haven't tried this game yet, please give it a shot, I have not had this much fun with a game in a long, long, time." - @mrck
	11. Mario Kart 8 "Its not a revolution as much as a rejuvenation. It brought me back to a series that had kinda fallen out of grace in the last few years. It doesn't do that much new, but it does everything a Mario Kart game should do, extremely well. From the fully orchestrated soundtrack to the frenetic 60 fps display of old and new tracks alike. What makes it so good, however, is that the gameplay loop behind it all is endlessly satisfying and hundreds of hours later still brings a smile to my face." - @atwa "There's an old saying: "Your first Mario Kart is your favourite." Indeed, for a long time, Mario Kart 64 was my favourite. But then this game came out. I spent a lot of time playing this game with my wife, and I think she spent an even longer time playing it than me! There's a great sense of speed, the tracks are varied and fun, and the online play, for me, was pretty much flawless. Mario Kart 64 will always be near and dear to me, but Mario Kart 8 surpasses it." - @bleshoo
	10. Diablo III: Reaper of Souls "What a difference 12 months makes. This time last year, Diablo 3 was a decent game with some fairly serious flaws. There was not a whole lot to do in the end game and the the drop rates necessitated by the auction house made it nearly impossible to find high-quality items. Patch 2.0 and the Reaper of Souls expansion, released together February and March radically overhauled Diablo 3 and made it something incredible. I've got 500 hours on this game and although regular Diablo play eventually had to make way for other games, I'm still poring through patch notes every time it updates and I'll be way back in next spring and summer." - @asky314159 "No game has had a turn-around like Diablo 3 with this expansion. Diablo 3 was a solid game with many problems, and Reaper of Souls does an admirable job of turning the ship around and setting the stage for more improvements to come. It added much-needed end-game content and a form of competition by way of Rift leader boards and Seasons, not to mention overhauls of many game systems for the better. Diablo 3 is in a very good position right now and stands to become even better with subsequent updates and expansions - but Blizzard really needs to quicken the pace on this to truly deliver." - @benjo_t

Hey, why are there 11 games on this list? Well, it's because Diablo happened twice this year. The pc expansion and the console release came out under different titles and if I add the scores of those separate database entries, it places higher than Mario Kart. Essentially, I'm treating places 10 and 11 as interchangable, because really I'm not sure it's fair to count the PC expansion and the console release of Diablo as the same game, but clearly they're not completely different.

And why is the 10ths place listed below the 11ths place? Well, that's just good ol' code embed tomfoolery.

...Eh-heh. I literally went through TODAY and deleted my lists that were in the 1-10 order in favor of keeping the ones in the 10-1 order. Whoops.

Also I think this year is the year so far that I've been the most out of touch with common consensus, with a whopping zero out of 10 games on my list in the aggregated top 10, my top three garnering postion 50, 38, and 26, respectively, as well as the fact that I've only played 3 of the games on the actual top 10, due to not really having that much interest in the rest.

If anything, I'd say that's a good thing though. I'd say that means that there was more diversity this year than most people give credit, and that there was enough quality to go around.

Although if you will excuse me, I'm going to sit in a corner being incredibly angry that somehow The Last of Us beat D4 by a single point. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrghhh.

Nice! A great list of titles!

I didn't even think of including Hearthstone despite being one of my favorite games. ha. For some reason, I felt like it was a 2013 game. Regardless, glad it got on the list. :)

If people find bugs with goty.me it goes without saying that they should point them out to me, I'll be tinkering with it for the next few days!

Awesome :D

I suppose it's a pretty predictable list, but that's how averages go.

There should be a count of how many people voted for a specific game. At, the moment, you can only tell by manually counting. For example, when you look at this page, the only way you can tell that there were 56 people is to add it up yourself.

Such few votes for The Talos Principle, Ether One, and Legend of Grimrock 2. All games which guarantee a lot of people would enjoy (if they played them), Especially The Talos Principle which I would consider to be better than Portal. Also, I have the dubious honour of being the only person to list A Story About My Uncle :o

@beachthunder: It's actually on the games page that lists all of the games, under "total votes". But you're right, I should add it to the game page too. I'm gonna head to bed, but if people have suggestions of data they'd like to see on pages, suggest them and I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

Personally, what I want to implement is an indicator that shows if someone wrote something for their lists or not. I don't want to recreate the gb lists on goty.me, because then I'd be rehosting giantbomb content, but something that would indicate if someone had something to say about their list would be nice.

And I was also thinking a separate page with comparison graphs of the top ten.

Hey, that's a pretty cool list.

@thatfrood: Wow that's awesome man! Thanks so much! I love the fact you included blurbs from users

The End result is very cool and feels honestly like perhaps the best and fairest list I've seen.

Btw I noticed Some people listed Diablo III: Ultimate Edition and some people listed Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, do you think those should be one entry or two? It's my understanding that Ultimate Edition includes Reaper of Souls and is basically just a console port, but boy I can see arguments either way since obviosuly a game like that would play profoundly differently on a controller. If they were combined It looks like it would be at 10 instead of Mario Kart.

I know, but the reason I bring it up is because you can navigate to a game's page via a user list page, meaning you don't see that number.

@slag: GODDAMNIT! I made a note of that even. Yeah, I don't know what to do there, I think I should fuse them, but which should I keep? Is the console version more significant? Or should it stay PC?

Daaaaaaaaaamn. I am way out of touch with the community. The only game I had on this list was Hearthstone.

Little bummed Divinity: Original Sin wasn't on the top 10, but still a solid list.
At least Wolfenstein was on it! Can't believe the crew had CoD: AW over it.

Im playing DA:I now, and it's making me really excited for a new Mass Effect game. There was one quest in particular, which I won't spoil, that really brought me back to some of the best moments in ME2.Its even made me excited for the possibility of a Mass Effect HD collection on new consoles. Its been long enough where I think I'm ready to go though the whole trilogy again.

Not sure why it didn't click with most of the bomb crew, maybe because of the fantasy setting? Hell I didn't play either of the other DA games and I'm still having a blast with it (kotaku has a great beginners guide to the lore if you're a newcomer). Definitely seems like a return to form for bioware after ME3. That game was really lacking in depth of content/player agency.

Hoo boy that's a very tough call to make.

On one hand maybe it should be the console version as I don't believe Reaper of Souls is a playable standalone expansion, and thus maybe not a true 2014 game (since it requires an older one to play it). But boy that doesn't quite feel right since I think most people felt Reaper made some profound mechanical changes to Diablo 3 that turned into the game people thought it would be at launch and it also has the most votes of the two by a significant margin.

Gun to the head, I'd say Reaper of Souls. I think that probably reflects what the community was thinking more.

I'd agree with the call to make it Reaper

(I'd also argue that an expansion can totally be on a GOTY list)

@ajamafalous said:

It is done. I will see about how to join the two on the site later, while also making it clear that a join is happening.

Interesting stuff. Appreciate all the work.

And to my fellow FF14 players.. Way to back me up guys :/ I've played two games that are on that top list.

Edit: Also, I'd count Reaper of Souls and Ultimate edition as one count like you did.

Edit 2: And I really like having the blurbs there from what people wrote. I kinda wish there was more, directly accessible from there? If that makes any sense. Like I click a game and it lays out what each person wrote for it.

I had a fantastic time this year with every game on this list (barring Transistor, which, in my opinion, was merely decent). I should probably make the effort to get back into Hearthstone. I kind of unintentionally fell off after Curse of Naxxramas came out.

It's also interesting to see Dragon Age that high on the list with how late it came out in the year. It didn't make my list, purely based on the fact that I hadn't touched it yet by the time I wrote my list. I'm still only halfway through it at this point, but I am having a pretty good time with it. I'm probably going to write something up about my thoughts on the series once I finish it (since I just played each game back-to-back).

Also, thanks again to @thatfrood for doing this again! It's really neat that you put these lists together every year. Thanks for featuring my blurb too!

Well this confirms that Divinity: Original Sin is the best game that nobody played. Fucking consoles. But Dragon Age is at number two so...meh not all hope is lost.

I agree with this list more than the official list, so overall good job Duders!

I put Reaper of Souls on my list, but I think that and the Ultimate Evil edition on consoles could be considered one game, at least for the purposes of this list.

Of the 11 posted I only played two of them, one of which I greatly disliked. I didn't even make a proper list this year anywhoo to submit and just stuck with a blog. Ah well, it wouldn't have made a difference it seems.

I hope this is the list/information jeff talked about maybe discussing in January (err.. this month). Various games here that they brushed off as "meh"

Interesting to see Bayonetta that far down and I'm betting its because not that many people have Wii-Us or something. I still don't have one :( But Bayonetta isn't my kind of game anyway.

Edit: Is there a way to see total number of users who submitted? How big's the pool...

@seikenfreak: 400 users

Nice. Great work on the site! goty.me is such a good domain name.

aw man, Alien:Isolation stuck at number 25, but just look at the numbers, 8 picks as number one, way more than any other placing.

pretty happy with the top 3, my next three picks but in reverse order.

also i must go back and give Transistor another shot, get into that ng+.

5 games from my list made it into the top 11, so can't be too disappointed. Just wish Alien Isolation got more love, as I find that game incredibly rad.

And hey I even got a quote on one of the games.

Dark Souls 2 was my number 1 and Dragon Age: Inquisition was number 2 so I wasn't too far off the user's top 3. I didn't play Shadow of Mordor because I don't really care for LotR or what I've seen of the Batman combat system.

It's interesting to see that 2 games in the user top 3 Goty 2014 games (Inquisition and DS2) aren't even on the site's top 10.

Huh. Kinda weird to see Transistor on here, I didn't think many people were that into it. Maybe I should finally get around to playing it.

Not too shabby. Only two games from my list made it on but both were in the top 4. Although I love how the high fantasy genre is pretty much dominating the list. Still I feel that this year was kind of barren for releases hopefull 2015 will be much richer in titles to choose from.

Gotta have to agree there. The blurbs are a very cool idea.

Thanks again for doing this. I always find the process to be fun and the results to be pretty damn interesting.

These are always super interesting. I guess I wasn't expecting DA:I to be so popular. I kinda burned out on it and looking back it didn't leave a great impression. I actually had it on my list, but took it out. Shovel Knight is another one, where the game seems well made an all, but it doesn't grab me in any particular way. Also, didn't expect D3 to make the list. I played the shit out of that game, but I figured most people would have forgotten it by now.

It's a good list, though. We have pretty good taste, you guys.

@seikenfreak said:

Yeah, it's not surprising at all considering how few people probably own Wii Us combined with how many played Bayo. It's different with a bunch of guys who review games for a living who all tend to have every piece of gaming hardware or at least access to it. I think it's a great testament to how good Bayonetta 2 is that it has been hanging on all of these lists. It was my Game of the Year, and not by a small margin.

Thanks to @thatfrood for putting this together and to everyone who participated!

No Destiny makes me proud of you lads

@donpixel: It might not be in the top 10, but it still placed relatively high at 14 with hundreds of games in the running!

And I admit that I'm partly to blame for that. The Giant Bomb community is not wholly immune to that stupid stupid game's addictive qualities.

That's a terrible list.

I totally forgot to submit mine for this. Six of mine made it on there, though, so it seems pretty solid to me.

I like this list better than the sites list though I am still mystified how Shadows of Mordor is game of the year. It is fun sure, the nemesis system is cool, but it is still a one trick pony.

I think over it as a symptom of how horrible this year was for AAA Games

It's a game that no one really hates, so it's probably easier to reach consensus on, than a lot of other games that came out this year.

@thatfrood: Great work. Thank you!

I clicked through A LOT of people's lists, and I'm a little surprised that DS2 was only at #3...It really seemed like a tighter race with Mordor. The only other shocker for me is that Transistor is so high and Destiny didn't make it in at all (behind Jazzpunk?!). I guess I didn't click through enough lists, but I didn't follow them during the last push. Time to look at the data!

EDIT: Only 5 people voted for 1001 Spikes...shame on you!

I clearly see a problem with this list. Lightning Returns is nowhere on it.

Hey, my blurb got pulled. Cool!

Looks like I was alone with all but four games on my list, and Luftrausers and Borderlands The Pre-Sequel were the only ones more than two people had voted on.

Would be kinda interesting to see a list of the outliers, like games put as number 1 on only a single user's list or something like that.

It's a number of factors:

• Timing - It came out early enough that lots of people played it, but not so early that people forgot it (see: The Banner Saga).
• Availability - It's available on five different platforms.
• The Nemesis System - Whether you like the game or not, it's the best new game mechanic this year.
• Quality - It's still a damn good game, even if it doesn't seem to be a popular individual Game of the Year. It appears in so many top 5s.
• Accessibility - Of the games in competition for the award, the style of gameplay it goes for has the widest appeal.

It's still a damn good game (#4 on my list). You can't obsess over this stuff much. I mean you can pick almost any site's list to death. Eurogamer just put out their top 10 list and Destiny was in second place!

Interestingly, If you order the list by "Average Rank", i.e. the average position on the top 10 list, Lightning Returns is 5th at 4.09. It's knocked to 44th more to do with the relatively few people picking it (despite them tending to put it high on their list if they do pick it). The same seem to be true for the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor which is 34th despite having the second best average rank of 3.52.

This is a great list.

I think there will be a lot of duders who might give Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare a shot because Jeff praised it. I was getting a bit tired of CoD, a series I typically like, so I didn't even give it a shot. I was on vacation when they game came out and missed Jeffs review entirely. Had I had that knowledge in November, I probably would have bought it and it might have made my Top 10.

I loved Transistor and had some fun with Diablo 3, the rest I didn't play or care about. (missing Alien: Isolation :()

Not a surprising list of games, if you add up the votes of hundreds of people. Surprised to see Transistor on there, though. I guess "the public's opinion" I got was a bit skewered by Giant Bomb not really being into it all that much.

And not enough love for Bayonetta 2 ;_;

Disappointed none of the underdogs from my (unwritten) list made the cut. And I was only lukewarm on the top two here.

The PT vote was strong.