Giant Bombcast Game of the Year 2019: Day Four Deliberations

@clearbrook: 100% disappointed they only played what was essentially the prelude to the full Shadowbringers theme. :( But hey FFXIV got a mention at least!

Well this is it, the official death of any GotY excitement. This combined with the complete disregard of the fantastic premium content (Ranking of Fighters, Demo Derby, Game Tapes etc.) in favour of trash like the DK64 feature, and Abby shrieking pretending to be scared of games, I think next year I will not renew my subscription which I have had for years. It's a shame, since GotY was something I looked forward to every year, not so much anymore

LATER ALLIGATOR got fucking ROBBED!

Isn't it an MMO thing? I think most MMO's since at least EverQuest 2 - probably earlier than that - let you click items, map locations etc. and automatically bring them into your chat message. I'd also argue that aside from most RTS games since Tiberian Sun or Age of Empires II having map pinging, Battlefield 2, Operation Flashpoint/ARMA and Left 4 Dead all essentially had that too. Didn't even the Halo games implement it around 3?

Gris should have been in the best style category

I know it came out last year, but in December, so it was too late for the discussion

Don’t know if it would have been in the top 3, but it deserved to be mentioned

Oh man, that Camera is way to zoomed into Brad. *yikes

Hot Butter Ice Cream is such an ear worm omg

@fisk0: I don’t have a high enough familiarity with MMOs to claim there haven’t already been games which handle comms as well as Dota, but it’s definitely more robust than what you’re describing. It doesn’t simply put the name or tooltip of the target into your text log, it’s a contextually relevant message based on what you’re pinging and when.

Items will have specific prompts based on their use case (“group up for my mana boots!” With a long on your current location), buildings will have status information (“does anyone want to use the shrine to heal?” Or “the shrine won’t be off cooldown for another 2:30”), and abilities have a variety of different responses (“beware this enemy debuff,” “I think we should save our glyph of fortification for later,” “My stun is still on cooldown for 3 seconds,” “I need 100xp before I can learn my ulti”). All by simply holding an affirmative or negative modifier and clicking.

It may not be the most advanced comms system in gaming (I haven’t played everything) but it’s certainly far more nuanced and helpful than anything in AoE or Battlefield, and I’ve only played through Halo Reach, but none of them had anything of the sort.

If not liking Death Stranding is cool we should consider Alex the new Miles Davis

hottest mess is gone...in a year with anthem and fallout....

christmas is ruined...

The inability to get Best Music right is as consistent as it is disappointing.

I haven't played Control yet as it's not out on Steam, but as far as i can tell most of what carried its story so far in these discussions is that no one has apparently looked at SCP.
I'm sure it does its own thing but that wasn't apparent in the discussion, i get the feeling when i eventually get to play it it'll feel like a high budget SCP spinoff.

Hey, at 40:50, that's a glockenspiel. Those are metal. :)

Just want to point out that Best Story went to a time loop game with no voice acting and the few characters that you actually see in game don't move around or do anything. Not saying it's a bad game, but that it's amazing a game with such limited resources could win this category in 2019. I would expect Best Story would require voice acting as a bare minimum standard. A game where the story is entirely told through text, and vast majority of it being old text logs from the past, wins Best Story, and there's something cool about the fact that is even possible. Giant Bomb has never picked something like this before.

I have no interest in battle chess or whatever, but how do you not list that as one of the most innovative multiplayer things of the year? For crying out loud, it created a new genre. AN ENTIRE NEW GENRE! That Valve, Epic, and Riot (three of the biggest publishers ever?) to race each other to win over fans. Like just...I don't know. I understand these picks are subjective but at some point you have to step back and just be like "well, this was one of the events of the year so..."

What I took away from Day 4 is, I should play Judgment.

They are way to kind to Control. I know I'm in the minority that didn't love it, but I thought the story fell so completely flat. It felt like the ending of Lost all over again with how it builds up these great mysteries and then is just like "eh, weird stuff happens right?" Just compare that to Outer Wilds where every mystery is so neatly wrapped-up and everything comes together so beautifully. I also think it's silly to say the brother plot isn't the focus when that is the main goal at the start of the game and is what drives every major story beat. Where that went was also underwhelming. It felt like the game was rushed and they had to decide to cut the story early. Great world, atmosphere and flavor text but the narrative is just bad.

The multiplayer thing of DS & the letter game vs Apex really stands our to me.

The former is about engendering a sense of team work, comradery, etc, amongst strangers on the internet playing videogames.

Apex is about trying to systemically mitigate the horrors of strangers on the internet playing videogames.

That they're given equal weight, in a sense, I think says a lot about what multiplayer games are these days. I don't mean that in a nice way either.

I'm with Brad there on the idea of the one engendering a bit of hope in other people not all being awful.

Apex's stuff is just this slippery slope of saying the terrible people are here to stay, but if you mute chat we have context sensitive voice clips that say "Thank you" so that you don't feel bad about playing on a team of white supremacists.

Apex's systems are a fresh coat of white wash on top of the internet's usual poison. I don't know if that's "cool".

I'm not sure it's not actually bad.

GOTY was fun this year but I wish there had been more categories.

I just bought the Shadowbringers OST. Has like 88 tracks on it and it's all I'm thinking about right now. Too bad Shadowbringers is attached to an MMO otherwise I could recommend it to more people.

This is so wild I'm playing The Outer Wilds and Days Gone right now on my PS4 PRO. One is completely mired in annoying controls and a crazy amount of graphical bugs, while the other hasn't been mentioned once during this video.

Man...cutting MonsterBoy early from best soundtrack???

That hurt. Like I don’t even know who you guys are any more. Lol.

Skimmed the comments and haven't seen anyone make detailed timestamps like years past (for specific games, like in Best Story). I know I'm coming to this late, but on the off-chance anyone else cares, the SW Jedi Fallen Order story spoilers end at about 3:29:30.

Jeff's joke about that song sounding like a football broadcast jingle... perfect.

So their "cool multiplayer thing" winner is a system that allows you to circumvent communicating with your teammates. They're also not exactly some groundbreaking thing, seeing as pings have been in various games for years. I think almost everything else they listed for the category was better than the Apex stuff, but eh not my awards.

Outer Wilds seems overly twee. Banjo, harmonica, and some whistlefuck.

No mention of RE2?

Jan talking about best music was probably where I got the most out of this video.

Super late pass, but the fact that Porcupine Tree - Fear of a Blank Planet, was the end credits to Control, automatically makes it number one for me.

@hassun: I'm listening now. Thanks for posting this. It's pretty good

The game is as well!

Do other Europeans cringe everytime they say EDM

@doncabesa: I would have been surprised if it was. MS would have to make the game of the millennium before games journalists would give a shred of cred

"Adachi you motherfucker!"

#stillathreat