MikeLemmer

I would also mention that Zelda feels like a game that would be utterly ruined by Achievements or any impetus to 100% anything. I find it funny the reward for finding all 900 Korok seeds is a golden poo that just lets you see Hatsu's dance again. It's the opposite of an Infinity Sword +1 or even a bragging-rights reward. It's basically the devs saying, "Look, don't worry about finding them all, just find the ones you can". Same with the shrines, in a sense; I don't feel any real impetus to find all 120 of them, other than "because I want to". After years of games encouraging us to become obsessive-compulsive collectionists, Zelda's utter indifference to "collecting them all" is a breath of fresh air.

The compulsion to finish everything makes our individual journeys less unique.

I am fine with it. If anything, the spoiler made me more interested in playing Nier Automata, so mission accomplished.

I go with SimCity personally, simply because SimCity for the SNES (and SimCity 2000 for the Mac) are the whole reason I'm into city-building games in the first place. They may be simple now, but I feel during their time they were everything you could ask for from a city-building game. (Well, aside from those damn power plants in 2k blowing up every 50 years...) Also, the mad lib newspaper articles were great. Seriously, the parody newsfeeds in recent games have nothing compared to them.

I will agree that Cities Skyline feels like the proper inheritor to SimCity now, but I've got too much on my plate to really enjoy it. Anno was also pretty good; I may have to return to that eventually. I like Tropico in theory, but juggling the various interest groups feels too easy, preventing the types of cascading catastrophes I want from my own Banana Republic.

Banished is just bad. It feels like a barebones survival simulator without any style to itself.

I think a healthy dosage of blindness towards the state of the public (and the public's spite towards the politicians ignoring them in return) is also involved.

Politicians: "Everything's going GREAT now!"

Populace: "No it's not." votes

Assuming you have things in the bag when you really, really don't isn't exclusive to console wars, after all.

@slag: Oh, true. I didn't think of it as one, namely because you can find most of those in multiple locations. Honestly, I'm more worried about getting good pictures of them than getting pictures of everything.

So here's a question for you: how far do you think you'll go to find everything in Breath of the Wild? Actually crack open a FAQ to make absolutely sure? Or just explore until you're personally satisfied?

Last week, we saw the release of Horizon, Torment: Tides of Numenera, and Zelda. I suppose you could also squeeze Nier: Automata into that as well, barely. That's a list of games you could make a legit Top 3 GotY list from. I'm having trouble remembering another week where that many heavy hitters were released. Can anyone else?

I suspect the key to fights like that is heavy use of charged attacks and attack-increasing food to squeeze as much damage out of your weapons as possible.

I must admit, I'm growing to enjoy the breaking weapons. It's forced me to utilize a variety of weapons and think more about how I hit enemies (and with what).

That's weird to hear, as I recall the Tyranny devs stating they were trying to go with a more "realistic" perspective of evil. Do you think it's a result of them just having a different aim? Not being able to commit to a more nuanced version of evil? Or just missing the mark / bad writing?

@csl316: This does seem like the type of game that would demo really, really poorly. It requires an hour or two of screwing around without someone egging you into getting a bow to really enjoy it.

Uh... if the community themselves can't contact them, what makes you think we have connections you don't? GiantBomb isn't even an MMO-focused site.