AV_Gamer

@sethmode: You could be right about Baldur's Gate, but I also don't think Spider Man 2 makes Top 3 based on the review video they did. They liked it overall, but Dan didn't like the main story and stopped playing after doing all the side quest, which is interesting since most people are claiming it might be one of the most powerful stories of the year, and both Jeff's thought the bloat of original Marvel's Spider Man was back and not as tight as Miles Morales. But we'll see. One thing that makes 2023 exciting for this years GOTY is that anything could happen.

I don't think Starfield is going to get any love this GOTY cycle. And that's because it didn't live up to the hype. It's a solid Bethasda game, but most people were looking for something special and were disappointed.

Its going to come down to a debate between Baldur's Gate 3 and Tears of the Kingdom. And I think BG3 will win in a stunning upset, with Super Mario Wonder coming in 3rd.

EDIT: Then again Super Mario Wonder might be the dark horse winner as the SAFE pick for GOTY to avoid a real debate. As I'm sure everyone will say they love it.

Looking at the other examples, I say 2023 holds up well against them. If not the best, then at the very least equal to those other great years in gaming.

HiFi Rush

Tears of the Kingdom

Baulder Gate 3

Street Fighter 6

Spiderman 2

Resident Evil 4 Remake

And more

and this is before Super Mario Wonder comes out, which I also think will be a good one.

Earlier I picked no, but I wasn't sure if he was talking about F2P games, or free games you get through subscriptions. If he is talking about subscriptions, then I say, while there are games I played a little bit of and decided it wasn't for me, I've also played plenty of games over the years that I finished, the most recent examples being Saints Row Reboot and Callisto Protocol. So overall, I disagree about free subscription games being just demos. In fact, PS Plus for example, does have a demo feature called Trials if you want to try a game before deciding whether to buy it or not.

@allthedinos: The whole Amico story will be remembered as the moment Tommy Tallarico was exposed as a fraud his whole career.

I believe physical media still deserves a place in society, but then, I would say the same thing about movie rental places. However, I also mostly moved on to digital, which is why I got a digital PS5. Because most of my PS4 games were digital, and it was one hundred bucks cheaper and backwards compatible. One of the benefits of physical media when it came to movies, was that the best picture quality and sound codecs came from the disc, not a digital stream. This was especially true when UHD disc became available. But many people don't care about that. Just like most people don't care about lossless audio. As long as the video and music is distortion free enough, they don't think about it. As an audio and video head, I do think about these things which is why I play games and listen to music using premium audiophile headphones, but even I'm not THAT dedicated most of the time to get a UHD disc player and just settle for the streams, even though the bitrate is lower which means less visual quality.

Thanks a lot. The video fix my issue.

If it helps others like it seems to be doing, then this thread should be pinned.

Blizzard is already going downhill. This won't change that. In fact, I believe this deal will incinerate Blizzard's downfall.

Sadly, a lot of people are cynical now-a-days and this has factored into many reviews from gaming sites. I've played many games recently that have gotten bad reviews, but are actually not bad games at all. Reviewers seem to nitpick the littlest of things and make a big deal about them instead of focusing on the many positive things about a game. This is one of the benefits of having Game Pass and PS Plus, as I get to play many of these games in time and judge for myself. Recent example is Callisto Protocol, which is this months major PS Plus monthly free game. If anything it was a victim of being released around the same time the Dead Space remake was released. Reviewers made those comparisons and of course Dead Space would come out on top, because it is a superior game overall. But Protocol is not nearly as bad as people made it out to be. It's actually a decent shout out to Dead Space. Ghostwire Tokyo is another example. If people listened to negative reviews all the time, we wouldn't have gotten Evil Within 2, because many reviewers were brutal on the original game. Of course there are examples of games that are genuinely bad, like Red Fall, but there are also games where its over exaggerated like Gotham Knights, at least on PC. Again, Game Pass.