Game of the Year 2018: Day Four Deliberations

I was all for this moment as well. They were bad people and I saw it as Dutch being protective of his family...it wasn't until much later that I started to feel that he was not a good man....or at least his whole person was a facade.

That family were slave owners and were dirt....sure it was brutal but they kidnapped a kid and we needed to get him back. We've been killing the law and others all the time in this game without batting an eye.

Styyyyyyyyle category is dead.

Love live the new Style category.

This is why we can't have fun things.

Late to the party, but I seem to agree with everyone else. The best Style isn't as bad as best world but that's a super vague category that should just be combined with looking for some kind of general aesthetic category. I get where they were coming from with Hottest Mess, but I think it's tone deaf to do what they did. And if they want best debut to be Best New IP they need to call it that. I would prefer the category to be an actual debut, like a team or studio's first game. That's not a new thing for this year, I seem to remember The Last of Us winning that award which was just silly. That could be a really interesting category.

Really bummed that they didn't bring up Deltarune during Best Music, it blew everything else this year away for me.

Why doesn't this player remember my video/audio choice? I have to keep switching to video when it loads the audio.

Oh, Vinny... you're the best.

I paused this pat-way to buy and play through Florence. Thank you, it was truly special. It's simultaneously lovely and tragic how much it affected Vinny. ❤️

@winship: Same lol

Man, hearing Vinny get choked up when talking about that moment from Florence is best moment of the deliberations for me. That's some real impact right there.

How in the.. was the PS1 Classic not the Hottest Mess? That thing is a joke.

The argument about intent regarding Red Dead 2 is literally nonsense. I am an academic writing two books right now. I intend them to be clear, informative, and lively reads. If I use poor grammar, misspell words, and don't connect chapters (bugs, if you will), my intent does not matter. Red Dead 2 absolutely does not deserve to be top 3 in best style.

Best style's kind of a weird category. That's starting to get so muddled it's bleeding into other categories.

A bit disappointed we couldn't celebrate the mammoth soundtrack in Octopath (it's like 86 tracks for $20) and some of the great remixes in the Persona Endless Night collection. Oh well just how the cards land with the staff's time so that's fine.

Also reminder that Persona 5 got robbed for Best Style.

I've never seen a hot take yell obscenities and walk itself off a cliff before but here we are.

Yeah the FFXV comments were out of left field. In fact almost every person I know that's touched that game is completely satisfied. Heck most people beat the base game after 100~ hours and feel satiated enough to never even bother with the DLC, only because they had enough to move on.

Eh it's disappointing but not a hot mess. I'm still legitimately playing and enjoying the 20 titles on there. Heck it's letting me re-live RE Director's Cut from my youth and my very first playthrough of FFVII. Also you can adjust settings by plugging in a keyboard from a random array of available ones and just pressing the escape key. That's oddly fun!

'Best Style' needs to go away. I enjoy every aspect of these deliberations but basing a category off a concept so vague and ill-defined is beyond frustrating for me as a listener, year after year.

Also, holy hell, Jeff really hates RDR2 beyond simple dislike, which borders on disturbing to me. He seems genuinely offended at the game's existence.

Not sure but I think Abby liked Obra Dinn. Sheesh. Give it a rest.

Am I missing something or did they not list the winners anywhere? I just wanna see who they picked and listen to the discussions here and there.

I guess there's an audience.. I've been playing RE Director's Cut on various devices over the past 20 years. You can run these games on just about anything now and in most cases they run smoother. That thing has so many issues it's hilarious. Most of the games have frame pacing issues on there and half of them don't even run at full speed.

Sony putting out a disappointing product vs. peoples' livelihoods be destroyed as part of a larger exploitative workplace culture, or Bethesda's fuckup resulting in the leaking of a ton of customers' personal information.

Jeff's dismissal of the news that FF15's planned DLC was canned was kind of off-putting. I have no interest in the game, never having played it, but I can totally sympathize with someone who may be invested in a game and then things you were told were coming down the pipe are just canceled out of nowhere. But Jeff was kind of like "so what" about it. I don't know; that moment just stuck out to me.

The RDR 2 moment about Strauss is kind of funny to me, because I actually managed to sequence break the game a bit there. It was very odd, since it seems like a fairly large oversight for a game like RDR 2. When you get the main story mission to go to Annesburg for the first time, you meet Mrs. Downes (the wife-turned-prostitute) in a cutscene there, and then side missions are related to that fact that you saw her there. However, the first side mission involving her and her son in Annesburg popped up for me at the same time that the story mission did. I always go around clearing side missions before story missions whenever possible, so I went and did that side mission. The intro cutscene to that side mission clearly intended that you've already seen her in Annesburg, which I had not at that point. It really threw me off and made me wonder if I missed something. And then afterwards I did the story mission where you see her in the cutscene, and I realized that I managed to sequence break the game.

when in day one or day 2 was dead cells discussed?

Wow, best STYLLLLEEE really clarified what that award is for this year for me. Vinny describing it as "being the game style that other games seek to emulate" helped sort out these winners, and to the category's benefit I believe.

Is anyone able to back up this claim Brad keeps making about RDR2 being the biggest most expensive game ever made or biggest launch in history? From what I can find online, GTA 5 had a bigger launch and has made more money than RDR2. I doubt they spent more on development and marketing for RDR2 than they did on GTA V, but I can't find any hard numbers for that.

Jeff "Thats-the-part-where-for-me-it-was-like..." Gerstmann up in here

It really feels like the names and definitions of a few of these categories need to be evaluated. Multiple staff having differing definitions of what the category means, why something is or isn't eligible... It ends up mostly being people individuals or a small minority going to bat for a game in an ambiguous category because they know it won't win in a "big" category and they just want it on the board. It's OK to have people debating which is better, because the weird categories are probably more subjective and subject to taste, but I feel that if year after year, people are arguing for one over the other because it seems easy to argue a game in a poorly defined category, or because they can argue that the competitor arguments don't fall into the definition of that category, then it's just a bad category.

TLDR; the "style", "moment" and "debut" categories are once again a stressful and confusing debate. I think there needs to be a round table discussion like GOTY where you decide to either get rid of, change the name of or establish a comprehensive definition of each of these categories with all of the current staff.