This was such a good podcast. It felt like the culmination and ultimate justification for investing so much time in constructing these silly GOTY lists every year. The kind of podcast you might have hoped they would end up doing eventually, to give it all meaning, but they never would because that would just be stupid, right?
The one thing I'm taking away from this before they go into next week is that I think they should be far more ruthless with what they end up putting in the bottom 5 of the staff top 10. These placation picks so folks get their horse in just leads to weaker lists. I know it probably won't happen but I'd love to see the gloves come off a little more. Those lists from the last 5 years have games in them that they know don't hang compared to some of the things that were left off. Maybe a smaller staff will let that atmosphere come back.
@mittens: I listen to all the podcasts myself. I don't feel like it's the same stuff regurgitated. I think you get more of a recap in the context of how it sat in the year and you get both coasts interacting. Along with spoilers that's the discussion I like to hear.
To your point of the loss of good persuasive arguments I can see that side of it but I often felt those arguments were more often than not reduced to them stating the same opions they are now in this format but were also tasked with ranking them against each other. Leading to some tedious arguments. Most of the well constructed debates were kind of rare too I think. I remember Austin's contributions and the Mass Effect Bioshock Dlc thing the most but everything else is a blurry mess of them fighting. Hopefully you'll still get that ranking and debate at the end but they've made listening to it a lot more pleasurable in my opinion.
Chiming in to say that I think the new format is way better and actually allows for focused spoiler filled discussion of the games from the past year. It is not a rehash of what we have heard in the year's casts because of this and they are able to give every game its due now without having to awkwardly fit them into a category.
The notion that the site overwhelmingly rejected the format from last year is not true in my eyes, you are just seeing more folks vocal because it's a change from what they normally did. If you take a moment to think about what you're losing from the format change, you'll realize it's mostly needless bickering and time wasted trying to give value to subjective views. You still get all of these perspectives with this new format but you save yourself some painful listening from these "passionate" arguments.
I don't really understand the complaint that people are bored listening to them talk about the games one by one. What else is GOTY but a celebration of the year's best and worst. I'm glad they've dumped most of the old format, they didn't take enough time in those days to actually discuss the games. It always just boiled down to jamming them into a list and moving on.
@tikicobra: I definitely don't want to defend the game to death because I wish the quality of the dialogue was far better and I think some of your points are valid.
At the same time though I think some of them are a matter of perspective. They've somewhat sacrificed the cohesive world to have this planet gimmick but Destiny has the same style of planet based areas with a section of planet that you explore and do missions on.
They have a score on the loot now which I've found a little better for comparing stuff. It's not perfect because the rarity seems to skew it more than it should but it's useful to make me second guess if I should keep something or not at a glance. I've found many of the common weapons you'd think are junk are actually the more reliable straight forward variants that are good if you want a decent default weapon with no weird effects on it.
Armor and crafting absences are a design decision in my eyes to reduce the amount of loot you're picking up. I think they want your focus on offense and then have some shields and skins to at least somewhat cater to defense and looking different. If they add a bunch of armor parts and gun components to pick up it suddenly might get even worse on the inventory management side of things.
The missions can be fairly fetchy or "go here shoot these guys" but there are some interesting missions I've done already about 10 hours in. I can't speak to whether there are raid style or more involved puzzley missions later but earlier games did toy with those ideas during the endgame.
I just think the arguments that it feels old are a little unfounded from what the crew are saying. It definitely doesn't have live events, faction currencies and those sorts of things from GaaS implementations but it doesn't need those for what it's doing.
I do not understand what these drastic improvements to the genre in the last 7 years are that isn't one of these games as a service type improvements, that they feel Borderlands 3 is missing. They repeatedly say those aren't even something they necessarily want, yet keep saying the game feels old and that they could have done so much more. They fail to really give any examples of what could have been added.
I do agree the general murder everything vibe is incredibly grating and a collect as junk option would be lovely, but I'm glad it's a more pure experience and isn't bogged down by Destiny style bloat.
I haven't finished the whole video yet but the way Alex and Brad quickly tried to fill in the 3 slots for most disappointing, pushed an exaggerated disappointment with Fallout 76 and then dug in their heels for an hour just so Red Dead wouldn't be on the list was pretty not cool.Brad even marked off Sea Of Thieves as the winner before they had even knocked it down to 3.
I absolutely adored when Vinny rightly spoke up and set shit straight.
I think the new format is far better than the the way they did it in the last few years.
They would spend so long just ordering lists, bickering and propping up games they wanted to defend more than actually talking about them. It's the one time of the year where they can actually talk in depth about all these fantastic games without having to tip toe around spoilers.
It was very frustrating last year having to listen while some of them filibustered for their favorites at the expense of the discussion and I thought to myself then they should really just focus on talking about the games. I'm glad that is happening.
I kind of can't believe this game has been in development for almost ten years, still looks as functional as it did back then except with some slightly nicer graphics and with a few additions and still has not officially released yet. Is it just him working on it? Is the team really small? Maybe he explains it during the 90 minutes but that just seems ludicrous.
allprox's comments