Shadow of Mordor is just ok, has a very limited gimmick, and did not deserve to win GOTY 2014

The impetus for my finally playing Shadow of Mordor was a bunch of people naming it in a forum thread on games they just couldn’t get into. This was an inauspicious start, but I’d always intended to play SoM (I bought it at launch from Dell only to have the shipment delayed months) and I was very much in the mood for an open world game to just run around and cause havoc in. Having finished the game now I can say that it held my attention well enough, but I have no idea how it earned the plaudits it did on release, or how it became game of the year in a year that also featured Sunset Overdrive, Forza Horizon 2, and Shovel Knight.

I think of Giant Bomb GOTYs as titans of the industry, the best of the best. Games like Uncharted 2, which was polished to a gorgeous sheen, The Last of Us, which was a haunting and intense survival journey, or Saints Row the Third, a game I played on PS3 in 2015 when we were well into the 8^th generation and had a heck of a fun time with. Shadow of Mordor is not that. It’s just okay. Nothing special. A fine game, a good even, but it is nowhere near top tier.

If I had to give it a grade it would be 7 out of 10, and on the Giant Bomb scale I would round down to 3 stars. It’s a mechanically mediocre, kind of ugly, game that barely tells a story and has a cute gimmick that it doesn’t do that much with. More on that a bit later.

Shadow of Mordor tells the story of Talion, a ranger in Mordor, which has been overrun by uruks, who is killed with his family at the beginning of the game and merged with a long-dead wraith. The pair then proceed to exact brutal revenge on the uruks who have invaded Mordor. The idea of a dual-character, half-ranger half-wraith, is a good one, and the game does a fair amount with it. Most of the time your character presents as Talion, but he switches to wraith form at various points, such as when climbing wraith towers or using his bow. The wraith also speaks to Talion throughout the game, and it works to add a companion character and a relationship to a game that’s mostly about you, alone, in a very hostile world (though there are some other, living, NPCs you interact with.) Talion can also access the wraiths powers to do things like teleport, slow time, stun enemies with the wraith’s touch, and even come back to the dead (even within the game's fiction.)

Unfortunately the game squanders this cool premise on a hum-drum story, which is boring for two reasons: 1) Talion is a boring character. 2) There are no real stakes.

The first issue is common in games, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. Talion is another brown-haired 30-something male protagonist who is mad because the bad guys killed his family. We have seen this a million times before. That’s not to say you couldn’t do something good with it, but the game doesn’t. Talion is stoic and strong and super boring. His wraith sidekick fares a little better, but has relatively few story quests focused on him, and isn’t fully fleshed out.

The second issue comes from the license itself. We already know the story of Lord of the Rings. We know who the important players are and how events will play out. Talion, not being part of the main crew, is naturally forced to the sidelines. Nothing he does really matters and I don’t think the developers could have done much to fix that. They try, by focusing much of the story on helping particular NPCs escape Mordor and trying to create stakes in the survival of Talion’s friends, but Talion’s friends are boring stock characters and I didn’t really care what happened to any of them. The game is between a rock and a hard place. It needs to introduce familiar LOTR concepts and characters, but it can’t really do anything with them. It supplements this with lore, but in the end it’s just a bunch of LOTR flavored weak tea. Also there’s an interlude with a dwarf hunter that’s very different in tone from the rest of the game and silly to the point of parody. The guy talks non-stop about how much he loves hunting, and how hunting is his mistress but doesn’t nag like his wife, and is a very cartoony comic relief character in a grimdark game. I did appreciate the lightened tone but the whole thing was out of place.

I will say that the game ends well. It doesn’t make up for the mediocre material for most of the game, but it does go out on a high note.

If Shdow of Mordor’s story is a let-down, the gameplay is at least adequate. Picture an Arkham Batman/Assassin’s Creed hybrid and you’re pretty much there. You run around and climb like Assassin’s Creed, often dispatching foes stealthily by leaping out of bushes or off ledges, and then when forced to fight you engage in a slightly clunky form of Arkham Batman combat, with combos, finishers, and all the fix ‘uns. It works for the most part. There were times Talion didn’t go where I wanted him to, and others when the camera made combat impossible, but the controls are generally solid and enjoyable.

There are also several upgrade trees and ability systems, using multiple forms of in-game ‘experience’ currency and runes. You get more health, you unlock abilities, you equip specific powers, it’s standard stuff and it’s fine, if a bit convoluted. The gameplay does change fairly radically because of this, though. When you start out you will have to be more stealth focused, since large numbers of enemies are very difficult to deal with. By the end of the game combat posed almost no challenge to me, and while early on I avoided large packs of uruk, by the end I just ignored them. It makes for an empowering progression, but it also makes things boring. My play time for the game was above average, so maybe if I had focused more on the main path it would have been different, but I was ready to be done with Shadow of Mordor well before I was. I’m glad I stuck it out, thanks to the good ending, but the game could have also scaled its challenge better. I should also note that particularly frustrating early on are large groups of uruk, who are very difficult to deal with when you don’t have a lot of powers, and fairly trivial later on. If you’re finding a combat challenge frustrating you should go power up a bit and return. A few mid to late game abilities make all the difference.

Oh, and there are forced stealth sections. I HATE forced stealth sections. Unsurprisingly the only place I got stuck in the game was a dumb forced stealth section I had to play 10-15 times to advance.

I would add that Shadow of Mordor clearly suffers from having versions for the 360 and PS3 as well as the 8^th gen consoles. I have to think that having two maps you can travel between instead of a larger, unified, area was a concession to having to cram everything into half a gig of RAM. It also meant that the game had to be playable without the gimmick of the nemesis system. I think that is the reason why the gimmick feels a little tacked on, and not essential to the SoM experience.

That’s right, the much vaunted Nemesis system was kind of a bust for me. The theory behind it is that Sauron’s army has 20 or so captains or warchiefs who struggle for power with one another, and that you participate in these struggles by killing captains you don’t like and defending those you do, and eventually you “brand” enemies, making them loyal to you, and guide them to positions of power. These named uruks exist on the map regardless of what you’re up to, and can attack you if you come within range. They have strengths and weaknesses, which you can scout out beforehand, and unique appearances, and they taunt you when you engage in combat, even remembering if they killed you the last time you fought or if you had to run away. I appreciated named enemies roaming the world to run into, at least when they weren’t trying to gank me when I was low on health and arrows after a mission,, but I’ve played MMOs and this didn’t feel very different than the named enemies that wander those zones.

I should also note that I played the Xbox One Game of the Year edition and had two fairly major bugs, once getting stuck in a wall that I was able to teleport out of after about 90 seconds of moving around within the wall so I could get a bead on an enemy for a shadow strike, and once having a slow-mo effect get stuck on and being forced to abandon the mission in order to return the game to normal. Nothing shocking, but not great for an AAA game 3 years after release.

But maybe that’s unfair, because Shadow of Mordor isn’t really an AAA game. It’s more of a solid B-tier game that got elevated because it launched early in its generation and had a neat gimmick. Its uninspired gameplay, limited gimmick, and weird structure (with its pair of similar maps making it feel like two similar games in a series rather than a cohesive whole) just aren’t quite ready for prime to time. The graphics in the game are just okay (with some admittedly brutal execution animations) The open world activities other than the main quests are limited and repetitive. Do you want to save exactly three captives over a dozen times, or find 32 hidden runes, or do 30 weapon challenges? Have fun with that, I guess.

That’s not to say it’s not fun. It is fun. You clamber over ruins, you fight ghuls in the moonlight, you torment the uruk armies like a shadow, dropping hives of insects on them from above and luring caragors into their strongholds. Some of the named uruk are really cool looking, with fun little comments and interesting combinations of strengths and weaknesses. Wading into combat with a horde of enemies only to convert a bunch of them to serve you and turn the tide of battle is satisfying the first 20 times (until it becomes boring.)

Would I recommend Shadow of Mordor for people who want to play through it before Shadow of War? Not really. This is not a game you HAVE to play. The story is lackluster and whatever other charms it has will probably be better in the sequel. I would just wait for the next game. That’s not to say I would caution against it if you’re the kind of person who just has to play everything in a series (like I am) or have it in your backlog (like I did.) It’s a good game. If you’re comfortable with a 7 out of 10, enjoy. Not every game can be a home run. But if you’re looking for a masterpiece GOTY that you just have to play before the new one comes out…nah. You’re good. Wait for Shadow of War. I kind of wish I did.

This post reminds me why I love GOTY time so much. Not so much for Giant Bomb's choices, but for how people react in sometimes spectacular ways to choices they don't agree with.

I did legitimately forget that Skyrim won that year, but I also do think that it was something of an "Oscars" effect, where it's really hard for a comedy to win best picture over a "serious" drama. Skyrim is a dark serious game with "themes" while Saints Row the Third is a crazy romp, and in the end I think that, and Skyrim's size and scope, led to the victory.

Skyrim was a good game, but I don't know that time has been too kind to it, and I think it's really weird that they'll have put out 3 new versions in a couple years soon.

Tropical Freeze is one of the main reasons I keep thinking about buying a Wii U. Honestly, I would if I didn't think it will get ported to Switch, or at least might. Given how popular Switch is looking I think all the Wii U stuff that isn't intensely gamepad focused (like Wonderful 101) will probably end up there sooner or later. At least I hope so.

Giant Bomb's game of the year isn't about what game is more "deserving" of the title. It's about the game that the staff as a whole liked the best.

You're preaching to the choir here. Most of the community and even the staff has agreed since 2014 GOTY that Mordor basically limped it's way to the finish line by virtue of releasing in a really slow year.

I disagree! Shadow of Mordor was pretty amazing and a ton of fun rightfully deserving the spot that year.

That is all

I think every person who has ever worked at GB would find the idea that their GOTY selections are "titans of the industry, the best of the best" pretty funny.

Decent review of SoM, though.

I think most people agree that Shadow of Mordor wasn't the best game of 2014. Did it deserve to win GB'S GOTY though? Of course it did.

Bayonetta 2 was the best game of 2014. It's also the best game nobody played.

@frodobaggins: What was better in 2014? I see people rag on Shadow of Mordor, but what were the 2-3 games people think were more deserving of GotY in 2014?

Yeah, I just couldn't get through SoM. But my biggest issue with the game is probably it's visual setting, it just grained on me the entire time. The nemesis system I never really figured out why I needed to bother with because I didn't quite get what it was supposed to be doing. I am sure I could have read up on it, but it wasn't really a priority when the game itself didn't really entertain me enough to even get to the second zone. In some ways, I am glad I played it but since I already had reservations about the game when it came out I sort of regret not listening to my intuition and saved some money.

Saint's Row The Third always felt more like a moment in time for this site rather than a historically better game than Skyrim. I do admit that if GB had given GOTY to it I might have disagreed at the time given that I liked Skyrim more, but it also quite fits in with the website in a way.

I don't actually think it was that slow a year though. It was the year of Mario Kart 8! And I've named some other games that I also think are better than SoM as well.

Frankly, I think the real issue is that this was the first full years the 8th gen consoles were out so there was pressure to name an 8th gen 'big' console title as game of the year. That's something that was resisted in the past when, for example, Shadow Complex won Xbox game of the year, but I think it was a factor here.

I should add that I don't really care about the GOTY stuff. I only mentioned it in my original post because it's one of the reasons I played the game rather than waiting for Shadow of War, but I am not a big GB GOTY guy. I read the recaps but don't listen to the podcasts or watch the videos other than the individual top 10s. I'm too spoiler averse.

I didn't devote a lot of time in my post to the GOTY stuff for this reason, but I should have known, given this community, that that would be the focus.

Now to prepare some hot takes on Mass Effect 2. Just kidding. That game was great.

Bayonetta 2 was the best game of 2014. Sadly it had no chance of winning since it was on Wii U.

My GOTY that year was Forza Horizon 2, but I understand the Shadow of Mordor pick. It was a really good game, especially on PC where it also looked really good and ran really well (those Xbox One screenshots look terrible).

More than anything Shadow of Mordor is in a genre that appeals to most people. It's an approachable third-person action game set in a recognizable universe. It would be hard to play a lot of video games and not like any third-person action games. Other games that year had a much more limited audience. It's hard to convince someone who doesn't like driving games that Forza Horizon 2 is a great game. It's one of the best driving games every made, but if you just don't like driving games, you're not going to think it's the best game of the year. Bayonetta is in a similar place. It's an over-the-top action game with an absurd story that takes a ton of practice to play well. The story and character design will already give it limited appeal, but what makes that game great is the combat system. Unfortunately, if you don't have time to learn the combat system, or just don't want to bother, the rest of the game isn't very special. That makes it a hard sell to anyone who isn't already into Platinum's style of game.

This review makes me want to reinstall SoM and play it more.

Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dark Souls II, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Wolfenstein The New Order, Far Cry 4, Forza Horizon 2, Destiny, Mario Kart 8, Divinity: Original Sin, Fantasy Life, Bayonetta 2, Shovel Knight. Just to name a few. Oh, and Super Smash Bros. for the WiiU was huge that year too.

I really liked Shadow of Mordor because of my own fan-fiction I was creating while playing the story. I sort of made-up backstory, daily lives, and motivations for any orcs that I decided to capture or kill. I was more engaged with whatever story I was coming up for the orcs than the main story. My favorite was this one orc I kept killing over and over again. I think I killed him at least 5 times, and each time he came back more messed up, starting with a plate on his face, to just straight up wrapping his whole head in a cloth because of how fucked up he was. He also changed his weapons from a two handed axe to a sword and spear in an effort to finally defeat me. After he miraculously came back after I decapitated him from our last encounter, I felt compelled to give him a break and just take him into my army and bump him up to Warchief.

I really think people need to get off this idea that games don't "deserve" to win an award.

@spamfromthecan: DA:I is not a GB crew game, People were very down on DS2, and I am going to assume you put Destiny in there as a goof.

Shadow of Mordor was a very well made Assassins creed with one extra gimmick, I totally see why people got into it, but if I remember correctly it only won GOTY 2014 from GB because it was a somewhat weak year in hindsight. I want to say someone even said as much during deliberations in 2015...

@bisonhero: well, seeing as you ask, the games I was specifically thinking of when I wrote that were Dark Souls 2, Bayonetta 2, Divinity and Shovel Knight. There are others that are maybes though, Smash Bros, Broken Age, South Park etc.

Basically Brad behaving like a 5 year child you just said "no" to. That podcast pretty much made stop listening to the bombcast. I just couldn't bring myself to listen to that anymore.

@boozak said:

Hell, I bought it that year and haven't played it yet.

Shadow of Mordor was ok, but given that I don't remember what actually happened, I never felt invested. It is surprising to me that it could get a lot of GotY accolades, because in my mind, it's just a refined Assassin's Creed game, but maybe it was a slow year for ground-breaking game experiences.

In the end though, I stopped getting upset about GotY awards a long, long time ago.

Abrasive Post Title of the Year.

Shadow of Mordor was a perfectly fine open world game with the nemesis system bumping it into a pretty good one that was flawed but really interesting. 2014 was a really weak year for games, and I understand why it won Giant Bomb's award bc it was the one that most people were able to say was okay enough to win. It's a shame though, because Bayonetta 2 is the best character action game of all time and it sucks that because the story is kind of inconsequential it was pretty much out of the conversation entirely.

@bisonhero: Bayonetta 2 is the pretty easy choice here, but I think Wolfenstein, Shovel Knight, and even stuff like Dark Souls II, BoI: Rebirth, and Diablo III: UEE were far better and more enjoyable games than Shadow of Mordor. That's not to say it's a bad game, but it was just the perfectly agreeable choice, which was honestly disappointing from GB, especially considering how both Best Game picks for the best two years didn't end up to be the one that most people thought were the easy, agreed-upon choice months before GoTY happened. (It's also why I think PUBG is gonna be the surprise GOTY winner this year, but that's a different story).

The nemesis system was what kind of made that game. Without it, it would have been a pretty forgettable Assassin's Creed-like. With it, it was sort of interesting, and at least makes me curious about the next game in the series, just to see if they can get it to work on a larger scale.

Maybe a better title for Shadows of Mordor would be "Game of a (Weak) Year." It was good, but not great. Personally, I did finish it and enjoyed my time with it, but at the same time it isn't something like DOOM or ME2 that I gravitate back to over and over again. I seem to remember 2014 as a really down year in general.

This brings up a question, though. If there were ever another really down year, would the GB staff consider leaving the Game of the Year award "open?"

Really? Cause stuff like this is actually why I skip almost all types of GOTY content (besides the skits). They're always walking the line between "lol it's just an opinion" and in the very next breath - "you're wrong if you think game X is better than game Y". And let's not even talk about the absurdity of comparing two entirely different titles, oftentimes games that aren't even from the same genre.

It just feels downright stupid at times. The dumb arguments that spawn from it are even more asinine and annoying to listen to. The kind of anger and vitriol that spawn from it are things you reserve for real world problems, not video games.

And no, I'm not saying you can't like a game. Disliking something is fine. The process of knocking down a good title with a passion and toxicity you find on most forums makes for bad discussion (and it's mostly just to bump another game up the list). It's even weirder witnessing a team of professionals do the same.

You're right! If there is any game worthy of GOTY 2014, it would have to be Divinity Original Sin. I'm not even kidding.

As for Mordor, I really enjoyed it. The two zones seemed way too small and somehow still not very interesting (a very 'my first open world game' feel) and the nemesis system could be really cool IF you screwed around with it. If you were just playing the game, most of these Orcs did not stand a chance and you never saw the most interesting aspects of the game.

It was a pretty cool game though, and I hope the sequel improves on the open world aspects of the first one. So far it doesn't look like it.. it just seems like even more systems and orc ladders stacked on top of the first game. I sure hope they hired some designers from devs that made better open worlds in the meantime.

The funny thing is, although SoM probably wasn't my personal GOTY that year either, in a list of all of GB's GOTY winners, that game was one of the few I'd even come close to agreeing with. So few of their picks even come close to the radar of my lists. But who cares? It's their pick, not mine.

SoM wasn't mind-blowing, but it was fun enough for what it was. Especially since I don't even like Assassin's Creed. If I could make only one change to that game it would be to add a higher difficulty.

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's got one, and they all stink.

I 100% agreed with the GB crew in 2014. Having gone back and replayed SoM a month ago in anticipation of the sequal, I have to say it hasn't aged as well as some of the other games from 2014. The graphics at the time were stunning, where as now they're slightly above average (playing on PC both times with graphics maxed). The nemesis system was a big part of why I liked that game so much. I killed or took over every damn orc at one point. Every. Damn. One. That is not at all required, but for me was a result of how the nemesis system allowed me to play out stories in my head. I'm shocked the nemesis system hasn't been completely ripped off in subsequent years (much like SoM and others ripped off Arkham Asylum's combat system).

TLDR; I think that you having not played it upon release lost out on some of the magic the game provided at the time. Context is important when revisiting games from 3(!) years ago. But, you know, to each their own and all. One of the best things about Giant Bomb's GOTYs is that the fires are stoked for the community long after they happen. That's pretty neat.

EDIT: It's also worth noting I'm a hyyyuuuuugggeee Tolkein fanboy, and was thrilled at the time to have a LOTR game that didn't suck.

I'm the complete opposite as far as Tolkein goes, but I still loved this game: So it's got that going for it as well!

I loved Shadow of Mordor but Bayonetta 2 was undoubtedly the best game of 2014 and I'm still salty that it didn't win.

It's nice you put in all that effort and included screen shots, but it's not even worth reading. How can you argue that the game didn't deserve GOTY, when they have a podcast where they hash it out and came up with their subjective opinion. The guys on this website liked the game enough to give it their GOTY, you didn't think it was great. That's kinda it. I don't agree with most of their awards, but who cares? People like things I don't like. I get that.

@hunkulese: I'm right there with you.

Why is comparing two different titles that aren't in the same genre absurd? Maybe you are missing something about what a GOTY list is? Your post makes me think you are looking for something empirical that you can go over and measure for "fairness-sake," and that is not what a GOTY is.

Remember, this is a personal list made for entertainment, not some university-style canonization that students are going to use as a reference. Its very nature is as an argument, (Semantics edit: it isn't a discussion like you mention in your post, remember "Pros v Cons = Debate," "trying to persuade others = argument," "Discussion = two or more people talking about a subject" since members are trying to persuade others that means this is an argument) and like all arguments (defined as "a reason or set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong,") the person arguing has to provide a reason why the game is deserving. If a member of GB fighting for a specific game cannot give a good reason why it is better than something else than the game deservedly gets pushed aside because it lost the argument.

For example, the 2014 GOTY was between Shadow of Mordor, Bayonetta 2, and Far Cry 4. Nobody on staff really played Bayonetta 2 so the podcast was just one member saying "I swear its good," but the rest of the staff didn't play it and said that they didn't like the original Bayonetta, so it was pushed aside for FC4 and SOM (two games that the staff actually played). This doesn't mean that Bayonetta 2 was trash, it doesn't mean that SOM or FC4 are actually better games, what it actually means is that, "out of the games they ACTUALLY played, these two other games have better arguments for GOTY than the other one"

My opinion is the same as GB's reason for doing these GOTY lists in the first place. They do mad traffic because people on the internet like lists and if you are going to do a GOTY I would rather have a podcast showing us the arguments than reading a one paragraph blurb that only highlights some of the reasons why.

For you though, what else are GOTY lists supposed to be and if you think making decisions based on the opinions of the editorial team is unfair then how else would you do it?

100% in agreement. 2014 was a very lean year. Shadow of Mordor was an above average game with a neat gimmick but it was not my cup of tea at all and finishing it felt like a slog.

All of the things which people hold up as being brilliant aspects of this game are things i hated about it, and they are things which are being focused and dramatically expanded upon in its sequel, so i knew for sure during its announcement that i wasn't going to play it.
Without going into too much detail i don't like the nemesis system, i don't like how named enemies with random invincibilities constantly introduce themselves, how if you happen to be within proximity of other named enemies they'll join and bring more enemies and invincibilities with them, the complete lack of anything worth doing or seeing in the world. I'd be more concise explaining my dislikes but it's been years since i played it, i really like the Batman Arkham games, i like the mechanics, i like open world games, i like third person combat and i like stealth, but after 7 hours i couldn't keep going, i wanted to keep pushing as i remember Brad always saying that it gets better the further in you get but it was torture to go on, i was so done.

Opinions are fun.

I really liked Shadow of Mordor but to each their own I guess.

The people who decide game of the year don't agree.

Yeah Bayonetta should have won that year, but 2014 was just a year the guys didn't play much of anything. And yeah it had all those other games lik Divinity, shovel knight, etc., happened that year, and they were great. But the guys either didn't play those games, or no one had a strong argument for them. I even remember them just grabbing Bayo 2 and SoM as 1 and 2 at the start and just stacked the rest. Also it gave us Jeff's Destiny rant, and that was a memorable moment.

But, to the review on hand, I understand why you feel bad about this game. I also HATE forced stealth, and man it got repetative, you hit the nail on the head with that. However, I did have a blast with the nemesis system, and I found my self ignoring the faults of the game because of it. I generally agree with you though, feels like a B tier game.

I think you guys should remember how down a year 2011 was.

I enjoyed SoM enough to beat it. That doesn't make it GotY, but it makes it good enough for it not to be worth getting worked up about it being GotY.

I just remember SoM being just fun to play as an orc murder simulator. Felt really snappy and intuitive. Nothing much else about it waa spellinding. The presentation was sharp, even if the world it was showing was fairly drab. I also feel like I was the only one who saw the true beauty of the Nemesis system, being as shitty at games as I am.

Shadow of War looks good but there also seems like so much stuff to juggle/handle. I'm guessing/hoping they ease you in fairly gently, or it doesn't feel as cumbersone when actually playing.

I think they said even during those deliberations that it wasn't a very strong year, at least as far as AAA GOTY worthy games the crew could agree upon. Not sure if that true in highsight considering we got Tropical Freeze, Persona 4 Ultimax, Dark Souls II, Bayonetta 2, Danganronpa, The New Order, and Guilty Gear Xrd (though that was released too late for deliberations), but most of those games were too iterative or too limited in appeal to get much traction.

Now that's crazy talk!

I remember at the time agreeing with them but in hindsight Bayonetta 2 and even Mario Kart 8/Smash 4 were a lot better. 2014 wasn't a great year in general so SoM seemed to win by default because it was the only decent game on those new platforms.

Well there was Guilty Gear Xrd but of course that had no chance of winning.

Are people still on about Skyrim vs Saints Row The Third? Saints row had zero impact compared to skyrim. Skyrim coming out on the switch is a big deal, no one outside this website cares about saints row the third (and I like that game!).

Put up any poll skyrim vs saints row to a large audience of people. Saints row will never win...

@counterclockwork87 said:

This site's Game of the Year has never been about "which game impressed the largest percentage of the overall gaming population." By that metric, you would usually just assign GotY to whichever game sold the most number of copies, and the staff's opinions would be largely irrelevant.

The staff picks a Game of the Year that made a big impression on them. People still argue about Skyrim vs. Saints Row The Third not because of any objective measure of which game is more influential, but rather because at the time the staff was much more passionate about Saints Row yet that GotY was one of the few times that the staff allowed themselves to be convinced that they should vote for the "bigger" game even though not all of them felt very strongly about Skyrim.

This guy gets it.