Giant Bombcast Game of the Year 2017: Best World

Thirty minutes in and I am just confused with this category. I thought this category would mean the best / depressing world you would like to be put in the most. I agree with Jeff and Jason on this.

I'm American, and agree entirely. Depicting a generic tribal society is not cultural appropriation unless we're saying tribal society in general is a culture. I'm sure you could draw comparisons between specific bits of dress or belief in HZD to Native American cultures, but if you do a little bit of research you could just as easily do the same for pre-Christian Europe or any number of places around the world.

It's too bad that I'm at work for the rest of the week and can only listen before I get home, because this category is a MESS and I wish I could be seeing the frustration on Jeff's face and the rest of the group.

Pyre? I think you got the order of those letters mixed up.

Please Stop: Best World

Hottest Mess: Best World

I'm with Jeff on this one.

If during a game of the year discussion it is confusing for the people participating in it, you can safely assume it is near impossible to follow for the people listening to it.

It really sucks that it wasn't even brought up for this and best music.

I still don't understand what this category is.

Whew boy, this is a crazy ride. I thought the wishy-washy approach to Best Music (is it best in relation to how it influences the game? is it best to listen to away from the game? is it both? does one approach matter more than the other?) was frustrating because it seemed like they had a hard time locking down a consistent approach. This is that times like, a billion.

I hate to complain about the things the team creates for us and like it when they try new things. But this didn't work. I'm with Jeff's frustration at the 20-25 minute mark. This should have been spiked.

Not sure what was so confusing about that category. It seemed like "World Building" to me. Everything about the narrative, cohesive vision, environmental story telling, lore etc. Something like "It's clunky moving around that environment mechanically" is not valid. (not relevant but also moving around in Horizon is pretty good mechanically.)

Vinny's argument against Neir was more that the environments weren't fully realized because there are various immersion breaking limitations, and not so much about the mechanics of it.

Wolfenstein 2 fails by having very limited and linear gameplay that doesn't allow you to explore and learn about that world as much as you'd want to. There was potential for a lot more.

I'd say Zelda sucks because it's just a very bland environment. Story beats are limited to a few small video clips scattered around the world which aren't even required. I think it's a very broad environment but I don't think they created a dense world. It's a lot of empty space. I think having four characters with weird Power-Ranger esque animal dungeon structures is dumb and doesn't make much sense? Why are there just a bunch of random magical puzzle caves in the world? Seems like it's there more for a gameplay reason and the story is just tacked on afterwards.

Horizon is what I'd argue for here. While the world is large, they still make it very dense, and there's various NPCs to interact with that have their own little stories. You have all the notes that fill in details. You have fantastic visual environmental story telling with certain dilapidated structures, the robotic animal design, finding small knick knacks from an "ancient civilization" which we knew as silly, meaningless objects but they almost worship them. You've got religious and non-religious beliefs based in this world. You've got the armor designs which tie into how people in the world handle and process the robots akin to the Native Americans (or other cultures/people/civilizations of the times) using every piece of the animal.

Also have no idea what this cultural appropriation nonsense is about. Not sure why people are injecting social issues where there aren't any. It's a game and, like many others, they used certain designs and a concept for inspiration and reference. It doesn't seem racist, it's just how people anywhere in the world would likely survive in a less technologically advanced environment.

Sigh. Horizon getting screwed hard this year.

Side note: This overall conversation about the various meanings and details of games and the words we use to describe them is great content IMO and stuff I wish they'd get more into. Would be nice of there wasn't a heated tone about it of course.

This should not have gone live, it wasn't fun to listen to at all and was just incredibly frustrating.

Honestly I kind of enjoy this wreck. There was not enough arguing in previous categories so I kind of enjoy the frustration here. At least this peaked my interest..

This was so frustrating to listen to. Also, "I'm with Jeff" is a T-Shirt I want in 2018.

Shouldn't it just be "best level design" if it's like how well designed the areas are and how fun it is to interact with the game world and not "the world they have created for this game and every aspect of it".

I'm with Jeff so far; you can read a fantasy book and be astonished by how good the world is and there's 0 interactivity. Random info texts and such that tell you more about the world absolutely should count.

Quoted for truth.

This category wins the Please Stop award.
WTF am I listening to?

This was rough to get through, having people argue they know exactly what this category means and then provide arguments that say otherwise was driving me nuts. I think folks in these comments are right, next year it needs to be best world building or best open world cause they are colliding in this.

Man this section was rough.

45 minutes in, and I still don’t understand what this category is. Yikes.

Alex created an entire weird category that not many people actually understand just to award AC: Origins. Jeff should have stepped in and shut this down.

Should have just cut the category so they could declare that

I'm with Jeff. I thought this category was about lore and the world the game takes place in. The lore surrounding a game is 9 times out of 10 my favorite part of it.

God they're making this difficult for themselves...

This category makes me sad. I love world-building in games and was hoping this would be an interesting discussion. And it was for a bit, when Jeff and Brad weren’t getting bogged down by semantics and everyone else was just having an enjoyable conversation about good worlds in games.

Yeah, this was a mess. Hope that if they want to do this again going forwards, they make a more specific category. Seemed like half of them thought it was best world building and half environmental storytelling. Is it about the elements/info that make up the world, or how those elements are used to make that world? I don't think how the player interacts with those elements should matter, it should just be about whether the info that's there is interesting.

That #3 pick is the most baffling thing they've done and probably will do all week. This category should win Biggest Mess but let's just act as if this category didn't exist like how Vinny thinks ME:A doesn't.

I’m with everyone else on here. This was a rough category to listen to. A majority of the arguments, discussions would’ve been better suited for the Best Style category. And gameplay shouldn’t be factor in this category.

The discussion here is certainly entertaining and tense, but Jeff was right all along.

Well, this was a bummer.

I'm with you. I expected this to be a category where Nier was the prototypical example - it's not about mechanics or depth of interactions, graphical prowess or, to an extent, artstyle, or how easy it is to move about that space. It's a space where interesting world setups, that present you with questions such as "How did the world come to be like this?" or includes interesting side details that put you in the wide world and context, can be acknowledged, even if, say, the main narrative falls flat so it doesn't appear in Best Story. As soon as Brad said it's about how easy it is move around the area, it felt like a waste of a potentially good category, especially when he said for other aspects "We have Best Story for that". You can tell an incredible stories in a bad world, and terrible stories in a fascinating world; the two are barely connected IMO

@borklund said:

Yea... cultural appropriation huh. Isn't this story hundreds or thousands of years in the future?

Being a writer, expressing any creativity at all seems like a fucking minefield these days, jesus. Zero Dawn is an incredible world, and easily is the most interesting character in this game.

Also - this category is fine, Vinny's interpretation of it is weird. With Jeff on this. Maybe rename it next year - "Best Environmental Storytelling"? Less vague.

When I think "Best World", I think about the world built divorced from the main story. If asked to recall the world of Wolfenstein 2, I would tell you about the fucked up world of a Nazi takeover and not the confusing level design. I think there is enough of a distinction between the world built around the story and the story itself to qualify for its own category, but once gameplay and game mechanics are introduced into the argument it becomes more of an environmental design debate and that's not what I personally consider to contribute to the overall world building. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm very much with Jeff in this one and don't really care about the outcome of this discussion if everyone has their own interpretation of what "best world" means.

Yep, that's what I thought as well. It should have been called "Best Setting" because Best world is kinda vague and confusing. It's about the history of that world, the interaction, atmosphere, and people you interact with to flesh out that lore. The Witcher is a good example for this because it's already a world that exists that you take part in, everything already exists instead of just be there for gameplay purposes.

I'm barely 10 minutes in and this is already off the rails. It's the worst part of these types of deliberations where people are arguing without actually knowing what they are arguing about. This is too generalized a category because there are too many things different people would say makes a game world good (characters, setting, environment, physical location, etc.) and no criteria were set.

#jeffwasright

Usually love these deliberations but I think the categories should be clearly defined up front before you guys go into this. I lost the thread and kind of tuned out a few times on the inconsistencies here.

Watching this is driving me bananas. One hour in and we're still trying to figure out what the hell we're even debating. Whew.

Ignoring all the other problems having a category when some of the best options for this category (Divinity 2, Prey, Xenoblade 2, Hollow Knight, numeours other JRPG, etc) weren't completed or really even touched by the crew basically defeats the purpose.

I am 40 minutes in and I still have no fuckin clue what this category even is. And you can tell from how quiet Jeff, Jason and to a certain degree Brad are, that they are not all on a single page either. Like arguing that you don't interact with the world in a shooter is super dumb. You interact with that game by shooting nazis. Same for Mario + Rabbids, its an XCOM-like, of course you are interacting with everything. You inherently making this an open-world games category. And then you also wanna strip away the story from it, which i have no idea how one can even do? This is super weird.

That was frustrating to listion to.

Those two are both part of it. Your using the environment, whether through visuals or design, as another tool to add to the narrative and lore.

This is what most of them kept trying to say. It's all part of it. Lore is just lore. Story is just story. Design is a thing. I think this category was arguing for which game did all of them the best, and cohesively meshed them together. This best vision per say. When producing and designing the game, everything from the broad perspective to the minute detail was considered through the entire development process.

I think Brad just kept wanting to talk about literal world/environment design in a mechanical sense and Jeff was jamming everything up by saying that none of it made sense when it seemed to make sense to every else except Jeff and Brad.

I agree with Jeff. This category is nonsense.

Best World should absolutely be best game universe and worldbuilding. This obsession with how you interact with it is completely missing the mark.

Brad dismissing worldbuilding as Story is also missing the mark. Story is the plot. Worldbuilding is the stuff on the periphery that grounds the plot in a universe. Wolfensteins plot is about BJ and Co starting a revolution. Wolfensteins world is about the idea of what if the Nazis had won.

@jellybones: I do worldbuilding for a living -- vis dev artist. And I have no idea how this category is defined. This is the first category of GotY I've skipped ever. I'm with Jeff, haha.

@cammy: are you a SUBSRIBER though?

I'm on Team Jeff. This was a difficult conversation to follow. There seemed to be 3 or 4 different running interpretations of what "World" meant in the context of this award. The one I thought it meant was along the lines of what Jeff was saying: a sense of time and place that isn't purely about geography. A setting.

Nothing wrong with their definition of the award being something else. However, it was never clear to everyone in the room (and apparently the people listening, judging by the rest of the comments) what definition they were rolling with.

As interesting as all of this conversation is, I'm not sure this category should exist or that this video should have been released. I like the idea of seeing behind the curtain but I would rather have the video where they actually break down the topic instead of the video where they conflate breaking down the topic with the topic itself.

This was a tough listen. Put me down for an "I'm With Jeff" shirt with everyone else. It took nearly an hour before the category was adequately defined and I found the definition made the category less interesting than two separate categories that would have made everyone involved happier. The name certainly didn't help.

Given the definition of the category established, Zelda had to be the runaway winner. That game feels like it will be the standard by which other open world games are judged.

It's funny that Brad was adamant about including world building and lore as part of the story discussion and not this category because I remember him arguing against Mass Effect 2 for Best Story in 2010 because he felt that the main narrative in it was weak and it was only propped up by the world building and lore (which I remember his not counting as story but I may not be remembering correctly). I'm not saying he is hypocritical, it's just interesting to see how the categories and perceptions of the categories by the staff have changed.

@tk_frampt: Brad describes the category saying it's about how the world interacts with the story, contradicting himself just after shooting down all of the world stuff in W2 as "just part of the story", and then further muddies it after giving that definition by immediately following it by saying it is "best open world" to him. This was the pinnacle of my confusion of this poorly constructed category.