Giant Bomb Game of the Year exists solely for the podcasts. Yeah, I felt a twinge of...not sadness or anything that serious, lets say a briefly frowned when I realised that my no.1 game was going head to head with my no.2 game to see which even makes the top 10 list but considering nobody on staff had finished either of those games, hardly a big surprise. In fact I was a bit shocked that The Witcher 3 made it at all considering Jason seemed to be the only one in the room that was at all passionate for it.
Honestly, the whole thing was interesting & enjoyable. I've come away from it having bought Undertale, reinstalled Her Story to actually give it a proper look, & considering buying Invisible Inc despite preferring Rogue-lites to Rogue-likes. I also suspect I'll play MGS5 when it gets to about 50% off because buying a stealth game for £30 just isn't good value to me: I don't enjoy action games where I have to be patient & cautious. I'll also probably get Hacknet at some point down the line & maybe even consider Grow Home.
2015 was a good year for games, a lot of great things came out across a variety of genre, so of course some things you love are going to miss out. Mario Maker is the favourite game of the Giant Bomb staff in 2015 & that is far from a surprise. Of course their experience with it as "internet famous" will be different from yours, but then this was never meant to be an objective list, was it?
One game I'm maybe a little surprised to not get a single mention on this site during the entire week was Prison Architect. So I'll just mention it now. Prison Architect was really good in its finally release.
It blows my mind that no one on the crew manged to complete the best rpg in recent memory. I feel like The Witcher's story is really being misrepresented in these deliberations. Oh well, it's getting its props from a bunch of other publications.
Does it? OK, who on the staff traditionally is an RPG guy? Vinny & I guess Austin? Vinny is a father of 2 young children, Austin is busy with all his PHD stuff, neither guy has the time to play a 80 hour RPG in their free-time. Is it a shocker when The Witcher games which have never resonated with anyone else on staff still don't resonate with Jeff Gerstmann & Dan Ryckert? I'm saying no, it's not.
The Witcher 3 was awesome. Second favourite game of 2015. Still, as many wonderful, interesting moments there were, there were plenty times when shit dragged. Personally I've always kind of liked Dandelion so I didn't suffer the same fatigue at that part of the game but the fact so many people seem to have given up on it there says something about it being a problem. Also think there's a lot of things where shit just mattered more to me because I'd played the other games than if I was coming in cold to The Witcher 3. I wish they'd been able to finish Life Is Strange before the end of the year because that game goes places & really touched me emotionally in a way nothing else I played in 2015 did. But they didn't, they played 2/3rds of it & so obviously can't talk about the ending or the mad shit that went on in Chapter 4 & that's what it is. There's only so many hours in the year & there were a lot of really cool games in 2015. It's a good problem to have!
(This is less aimed at you fixerofdeath & more just a general comment) It's just a dumb, fun website end of year list. It doesn't matter. It's so disproportionate to see folk getting mad that their favourite didn't get picked. It's fine. Vote in the community GOTY, write a blog with your top 10, bang the drum for Undertale or Witcher 3 or Life Is Strange if you so wish. Maybe someone will get roped back into it during the January lull & we'll end up with Witcher 3 as 2016's Old Game of the Year? Though I doubt it will happen if people keep demanding people finish it, that just turns folk off, despite your best intentions.
Undertale not even being nominated for best moment/sequence is a crime as moments and sequences are what make Undertale so god damn great.
Undertale fans have quickly started to replace Witcher fans for most annoying. Which is really saying something. Listen to the podcasts, Undertale had at least one moment nominated (I skipped out on the podcast at that point because I've not played Undertale yet & may well do so). There are lots of great moments from 2015 games though.
So having gotten around to the second half of the podcasts, man...They didn't even mention Chloe Price from Life Is Strange & I'm a tiny bit bummed about that because Chloe was a really, really good depiction of a teenager, as well as everything else that went on in that game.
I enjoyed what time I've spent with Fallout 4 (though I've completely fallen off it in much the same way I did with Dragon Age Inquisition last year) but I absolutely agree with it being a disappointment. It just was. I accept the jank & the bugs but Jeff is right, they should really have started making some in-roads into them. It's not happened & it's a downer. At some point I stopped being able to interact with the BoS companion Paladin whats-his-face. Nothing I could do with console commands would repair it & by the time I'd noticed I no longer had an autosave, & I didn't save manually often enough. A similar thing happened when transitioning from zoomed in with the night-vision scope & the the colour got stuck in the transition but I at least had an autosave where I could revert that one. But it was fucked.
And coming after New Vegas I was also disappointed that Bethesda learnt no lessons from what Obsidian did & still don't know how to write characters or stories. It's frustrating & Jeff's right they clearly know they'll sell a bollock-load doing what they do so why change it? Well, because it could be better.
I am always surprised at how passionate people get about video game music. Unless a game has decent voice acting or some gameplay element reliant on sound as likely as not I'm going to mute it & listen to something else after a while. Whole reason I keep playing Paradox strategy games is that I can put on a podcast or just listen to some Acid Bath & whatever else comes on Winamp. The only time in the past few years video game music really struck me was GTA V, not so much the licensed music, YMMV there, but it was the Tangerine Dream stuff that would cut in at dramatic moments, I loved that stuff.
Well, my experience with the PC version hasn't been as great as I'd hoped for. Now granted, enjoying the actual game parts like I always do with Bethesda openworld messes, but apparently my monitor isn't big enough to run the lockpicking minigame. So now I'm waiting for a console command so I can just skip that shite. It's a fucking pain in the arse though.
It also keeps trying to run in windowed mode. Again, annoying.
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