Giant Bomb's 2016 Game of the Year Awards: Day Three

I found the Please Stop category odd this year. Seems it only affects people who buy games on disc and press people with advanced copies. Also, as Jeff said, if they stopped this practice it'd just mean worse games. The bigger issue I think is storage space since, as was discussed during the podcast, consoles just don't have nearly enough space for how big games have gotten. Wish the please stop had went in that direction.

@jeff@brad I'm fine with Day of the Tentacle winning best remaster. It sounds like they put a lot of love into it. So that's cool. But to not even mention Modern Warfare Remastered among a litany of shitty cash grabs is kinda wrong. Like so wrong Jeff or Brad should at least comment on it like "uhh we done goofed on that one" or something to that effect.

Jeff, instead of paying that $50, get Comcast Business' teleworker plan. It's made for people who work from home. It's more expensive but it has no cap.

It might be cheaper than paying the extra fee. Or then again, maybe it won't be.

Hah. That No Man's Sky photo is perfect.

@themasterds: But 'people who buy games on disc' is a large market and in part because people often can't manage those huge downloads. To have even that alternative now start to require huge downloads anyway is pretty bad.

The Disturbed version of the Sound of Silence is really good. Also, it seems that since I've given up watching TV regularly I'm missing out on a lot of these trailers. I never saw the Gears of War 4 trailers.

@afabs515: Or at least making it look more like a debate instead of a 'DOOM is the best game of the year by a mile right? Yeeppp. Okay lets fill in the rest.' one.

As someone who lives in the Philippines who pays roughly $50 for 5 mbps down with a 10 gb daily cap, FUCK DAY 1 PATCHES.

@hippie_genocide: I would argue that the COD4 remaster is the shittiest cash grab of them all considering that you have to buy another full priced game to play it.

In other news, local video game site declares latest release in most groundbreaking first person shooter series ever to be most surprising success of year.

Twilight princess is a great Zelda game.

Shenzhen I/O: robbed

PLEASE STOP: Game advertisements featuring loud, obnoxious YouTubers.

I didnt watch the video but, was Ratchet and Clank not considered for best remaster, or is that a sequel???? It's $10 at Gamestop right now, I was thinking of picking it up.

@sfw44: It's a re-imagining of the original.

For please stop a few things. Firstly the GB crew shouldn't have this arbitrary thing where they have to give a solution to the problem. That isn't their job. Their job is to point out a problem and for the industry itself to fix it. It's up to publishers and developers to get their acts together and hire consultants to help with solutions. Seemed like Jeff thought they should have to come up with a solution as well. No. The industry created that monster, they should fuckin fix it. Secondly bad PC ports is a problem, but a bigger problem is the shovelware getting thrown out on Steam and Valve's complete and total refusal to be the gatekeepers to their own goddamn marketplace. Think about this, in 2016 ALONE 40% of all of Steam's games were released. Total. 40% of all games on Steam that you can buy on Steam came out in 2016. Shitty PC ports is bad, but holy fuck. When the biggest marketplace on PC gets slammed with this shit it not only hides good games, but brings down the whole system. Valve for years has been hands off but it's time that they get their own shit together and get hands on.

I think it's unfair to complain about day 1 patches and unfinished games. It's far from ideal but also a very difficult problems for developers and publishers to solve. The same people complaining about massive patches would also complain about more delays, devs being made to work harder to get games 'done' or an increase in the price of games to allow greater development resources to get them finished. It's a no-win situation and I think there are other issues which probably deserved the award. This is the heart of what Jeff was trying to get at I think and it's not their job to find solutions but fans would be equally outraged by the realistic solutions which do exist.

There's one trend they forgot for Please Stop! Races in Open World games. So many open world games are padded out with race challenges that give very little reward.

The discussion about pop song covers in trailers is fucking hilarious.

And then egregiously charging people $50 for a season pass from day one, knowing how well the Star Wars license can print money for them.

Worst Trend deliberations were fantastic to listen to. As always it feels like an elephant-in-the-room state of the industry address.

dan was right all those computer games are stupid

DOOM's approach to patches are preventing me from playing it again because if I pop the disc in I'll have to download THIRTY ONE GB of updates, most of which are multiplayer focused which I have zero interest in. Why they didn't just make that stuff free optional downloads while making the nuts and bolts stuff a smaller, more manageable patch I just don't understand. I don't even have an official data cap to worry about, but that's a BIG chunk of stuff I don't really want kinda forced on me.

Best Fake Computer missed out Shenzhen I/O, which admittedly did only come out in November. Unfinished games on disc deserves to be the worst trend; companies feel like that they can get away with shipping what is essentially a broken product at launch and then fix it later. It's not acceptable and the only way we're going to stop them doing it is to stop buying broken games on release.

I absolutely love Stardew Valley, but it was not surprising at all. It is exactly what he set out to make.

I guess it makes sense that Dan was surprised, because he never played Harvest Moon.

Where the hell is Modern Warfare Remastered? Did they actually completely forget the most popular online game right now? Between this and the last two days awards, I'm losing my mind. And at this point in my listening Brad has yet to inevitably hijack an award that he always does once a year. I love GB, but these entire awards have been a giant shit show so far.

@tpoppapuff said:

Probably has something to do with the fact that to play it you have you buy an $80.00 "legacy edition" bundle with Infinite Warfare, and that's fucked up.

I don't think so. Console games had fewer issues than they do today before online patches became common. I'm sure QA was stricter when they only had one shot at getting it right.

It's still better than the other games on the list. It's also still a better value than the rest of the games on the list at their price. Also you could get the game multiple times for like $21-60 if you wanted it.

I have felt for a while that the Premium content trailer needs to be more modern. Do you think we can get the Lana Del Ray vocaloid to do a slow, sorrowful, and 'haunting' rendition of Lockdown?

Devs will only stop shipping incomplete games when we stop buying them at launch. Same with early reviews. Vote with your money people! #NeverBuyAGameAtLaunch #FollowTheMoney

How about GOTY 2012. Pretty much the same arguments, except they were complaining about "Day 1 500MB patches". If only we could go back to when they were just 500MB...

After the release of Frog Fractions 2, I never played the original but remembered it fondly from an old game of the year deliberation. So played it and then for nostalgia's sake wanted to go back and re-listen to the GOTY podcast. While skipping around I ran into the Stop shipping unfinished games argument, and it was total deja-vu