OK, let's choose our GOTY and our biggest disappointment of 2015

[raeior]

Quite a tough decision for me: If I go by how much feelings the games evoked my GOTY would go to Undertale or Beginner's guide. Maybe it would go to SR:Hong Kong but I haven't gotten around to play that one although I loved Dragonfall and Returns so I'll probably like that one as well. Other candidates would be Pillars of Eternity or Cities: Skylines. Oh well I guess if I have to choose one it would go to Beginner's Guide.

Biggest disappointment:
Probably Witcher 3. I recently finished it, it is not a bad game but it made me remember how much I despise all this open world nonsense. It completely kills any resemblance of pacing this game had. The weirdest thing though was that they try to reduce this problem during the last few hours of the game but completely fail to do so. Everyone tells you how you have to hurry otherwise something bad will happen and suddenly everything is really grim dark..and then CD Project decides to insert a mandatory "Yes we know that escort quests are boring as shit so here is a escort quest were the escorted npc takes this up to 11" quest and a "this npc has a hilarious accident" sequence. After that there are several sight-seeing tours through some nice environments for pretty much no reason other than "hey look what our designers can do". I was also shocked by how bad the main story becomes at some point. Quests like the bloody baron were so much better than that.
I still plan to play the DLC because that is supposed to be a much more focussed experience so maybe that will make me like the game more.

 

[RJ 17]

While I do believe this was the best year for games that we've had in a very long while, sadly I didn't get to play many of the big ones. I do have Witcher 3, but I just haven't gotten around to playing it yet as I've been working through my backlog. I have played through the intro bit and I'm certain I will retroactively declare it as my GotY for this year as what little I've experienced combined with everything I've seen and heard leads me to believe that it truly is an amazing game.

Buuuuuuut for the sake of this thread, I'll stick with games I've actually played.

And on that note, my GotY would be MGS5.
I think my handicap of having never played any MGS prior to this other than MGS2 actually benefited my perception of this game. I've a number of friends who are huge MGS nuts and they said they didn't like MGS5's story specifically for its lack of actually having a story. This was useful to me as someone who wasn't all that invested in the series to begin with, as such it allowed me to focus on the gameplay more which is - I'd argue - MGS5's strongest point. So to me it was pretty much just a fantastic and fun stealth game, and I like those.

Biggest disappointment would be Arkham Knight.
That's to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy the game, but I can't deny being disappointed by it. Quite simply: it wasn't as good as I was hoping it to be...but such is the price of admission for riding the hype train, is it not?

I still say that the story is great, Scarecrow makes for a really fun villain, I love the way the way Batman's "imaginary friend" (vague for spoiler purposes) is used, and the fighting as as fun as ever. There was, however, the giant elephant fucking an overweight gorilla in the room: the Batmobile. Look, I understand. They wanted something new and spiffy to really set Arkham Knight apart from the other games. Something they could hang their hat on as a real game-changer. And truth be told, the city is big enough to warrant having the Batmobile as a means for travel. But good god, you want to talk about contrivances, look no further than all the BS ways they just shoehorn the Batmobile into that game. They should have had one or maybe two big set-pieces to play around in the Batmobile, the rest of the game it's used for travel...they SHOULD NOT have had an incredibly tedious and long side-quest that requires you to do tank battles with drones, they SHOULD NOT have made The Riddler's challenges frickin' obstacle-course races, and they most specifically SHOULD NOT have made two boss-fights based around stealthing as a tank...it's a frickin' TANK! It's not meant to be stealthy!

So yeah, Arkham Knight would have easily been my GotY by a long shot if Rocksteady hadn't masturbated all over themselves with the Batmobile.

 

[Silence]

Witcher 3, but the year was really damn good over all.

I missed out on a lot already.

Biggest disappointment: Undertale. Fucking hype.

 

[Amaror]

GOTY: Witcher 3, just f***ing amazing. Great Combat, Great Graphics, Great Story, Freaking amazing Sidequests. Just pure goodness.
Disappointment: Fallout 4. While the game isn't that bad. The Exploration is still great fun and the combat is also pretty good, it was just a giant disappointment. For one they just pumped the hype up way too much. The developers kept hyping people up by telling everyone that there's just so much in the game and they are purely not showing any gameplay because it would spoil us all out of discovering it ourselves. Well turns out the reason they didn't show anything more was that there wasn't anything more. And that freaking UI. The Skyrim UI was also bad, but i can forgive one game with a bad ui if the game is still good. But that is their next game now and the UI is even worse, which i didn't think was actually possible. It just shows that Bethesda doesn't give a crap about their players, particullary not the ones on pc. They just want to keep dumbing down their Rpg mechanics to sell as many copies as possible and it's quite frankly disgusting.

 

[stroopwafel]

So yeah, Arkham Knight would have easily been my GotY by a long shot if Rocksteady hadn't masturbated all over themselves with the Batmobile.

I'm one of the few that probably really liked the Batmobile, though, admittedly some of the tank battles dragged on a bit too long(most of which were relegated to side-quests anyway). Even the Batmobile itself I thought handled really well and gave the game more variety compared to the previous ones that could get pretty repetitive. During the later part of the game Arkham Knight really nailed that rythm of Batmobile/brawling/stealth action as missions start mixing up the gameplay with increased focus. Really I found that one of the most complete 'Batman experiences' to date.

The main story was awesome as well in Arkham Knight, but the story bits in the side-missions were a lot weaker compared to the previous games. Still a fantastic game though, espescially with how gorgeous it all looks.

 

[-Ezio-]

isnt that a bit harsh? far as i can tell fallout 4 has no more bugs than witcher 3 had at launch. hell witcher 3 still has quests i cant complete.

No, for someone who holds the company in contempt, it seems just about right. He's already posted his fury over the game in several Fallout 4 threads, so now you're probably in for an earful as well.

well.. you weren't wrong. O_O such rage.

 

[Chester Rabbit]

GOTY: Yoshi's Woolly World

Disappointment: Mario Maker such a nice idea...too bad that all the content anyone can ever think of is absolute miserable shite meant for people with the reflexes of a squirrel looking for masochistic challenge and nothing else. Also the lack of Mario World assets is just inexcusable.

 

[1-800-STFU]

GOTY - Undertale. Bloodborne is a close second.

Disappointment - Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. I just didn't like the gameplay on the 3DS. A game like this needs a major console or PC release.

 

[Cycloptomese]

I don't have much of a dog in this here fight. I spent a good chunk of the year in an MMO. I'd be tempted to say Witcher 3, but I haven't quite finished it and I don't like to pass judgement until I've played a game to the end.

One game that I did play to completion that I thought was excellent was Ori and the Blind Forest. It didn't really do anything new and innovative, but it's definitely a game that does what it's trying to do extremely well. It's got tight platforming controls, beautiful visuals, and exactly the right amount of challenge. I'm not really a big platformer fan, but Ori is just such a well executed game that it kind of transended its genre a bit for me.

GOTY for me: Ori and the Blind Forest

I wasn't really disappointed with anything this year.

 

[distortedreality]

My favorite game this year was definitely TW3. Echoing others I see, no real surprise there. Undertale was good, surprisingly good, but I didn't get as much enjoyment out of it as I did with the Witcher. I still haven't touched FO4, but can't see it surpassing TW3, based on the general consensus of "a newer and slightly better FO3".

Biggest disappointment? I guess it would have to be Shadowrun Hong Kong. Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed it, thought the characters were excellent, the gameplay was good, and the story wasn't half bad. I guess I just wanted it to be as much of a step up as Dragonfall was. Considering what's left in the year, the only game that may change this is the new Starcraft, only because i'm excited to finish the story but am dreading how the ending is handled.

 

[major_chaos]

GOTY: Fallout 4. Just about every change they made was for the better and I'm loving every second of it. It most certainly has flaws but the pros far outweigh the cons.
Honorable mentions: Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Undertale, Destiny: The Taken King.

Biggest disappointment: The Witcher 3. This game wowed me with its amazing story and characters, its just a shame that to get to them I have to wade through a overly padded uninteresting fantasy world, dreary combat that never changes, and RPG mechanics that seemed designed to waste my time and gate progress rather than give any sense of achievement or advancement. If Telltale can just make a version of TW3 without the gameplay I would buy that shit in a heartbeat.
(Dis)honorable mentions: Type 0 HD, Hotline Miami 2(not a bad game, just far worse than the original).

 

[Ishigami]

I haven't bought or played many games this year.

Disappointment: Metal Gear Solid V - The Phantom Pain

I consider it rather solid in the gameplay department. Everything seems to work as far as I am concerned and visually it is pretty to look at despite taking some noticeable short cuts here and there.
What broke it for me was that it is pretty repetitive all in all as you infiltrate every place about 3 to 4 times and the story makes it rather redundant and quite honestly down right stupid and anticlimactic.
The presentation is a mixed back with gorgeous cut scenes that feature often annoying camera angles/movement while the bulk of the story is actually driven via radio com during approach and departure.
The open world does not benefit the game. It simply pads it out with travel times and the bosses are forgettable compared to what the series featured in the past.
Ultimately it is not a bad game, it is a decent game, it was just not worth the hype and it is a disgrace to the MGS legacy as far as the story goes. MGS3 already is what MGS5 wanted to be.

(Dis-)Honorable mentions:
Life is Strange: Way to end a game making every choice meaningless. Butterfly Effect the video game. Game that did it better: Shadows of Memories
Fallout 4: Bugs.
World of Warships: A business model to ruin it all!


GOTY: - Undecided

Witcher 3: Pretty strong but I have yet to finish it. Using it as mod platform.
Rise of the Tomb Raider: I really do like the reboot and this one seems better in every aspect. Waiting for PC release.
StarWars - The Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire: I'm having fun, currently playing thru all classes I did not play back then.

 

[happyninja42]

GOTY: Life is Strange. It's been a long time since I had a game effect me as much as LiS episode 2 did. When a game is able to actually trigger my emotions in a genuine manner, that game holds a special place in my heart. I'm super glad I took the chance on the game. It didn't end as well as I'd hoped, but it's a time travel game, and those always end up messy. Overall though, I can't recall another game that came out this year that I had as much fun playing, emotional investment, or anticipation for the next episode.

Biggest disappointment. Uh....I dunno, can't really think of much. I haven't played too many new releases this year. Probably Alien Isolation I guess? I got that, and was instantly frustrated with how psychic the alien was in finding me. It was obviously cheating when there was no way for it to find me in some scenarios, and yet it did. It stopped being scary and intense and just became fucking annoying with the alien AI.

 

[Lightknight]

Game of the year so far for me? Honestly it's Fallout 4. The settlement feature won me hardily over though I have a huge penchant for the fallout landscapes already. Bloodborne would have been higher up if it'd be easier in a way that would have allowed me to enjoy the landscape rather than just trying to focus on every pile nearby or potential enemy. Destiny's Taken King has actually taken a mediocre franchise and made itself very enjoyable with tons of stuff to do. Wish that had been the release version or I wouldn't have a sour taste in my mouth for them. Pillars of Eternity gets a nod too for scratching a very particular itch.

I do see a lot of Witcher 3 callouts. I did like the game and understand its listing but I'm a little tired of fantasy worlds at the moment. Fallout 4 hit the sci-fy spot just right.

GOTY so far: Bloodborne[footnote]But I'm holding out hope for Rise of the Tomb Raider if I can play it before year's end[/footnote]

As somebody who was at best mixed towards the Souls games, I was really surprised at how much I loved pretty much everything about Bloodborne. The atmosphere, visuals, the energetic and yet still careful combat, the grim story were wonderful and I found something very calming and enjoyable about making my way through the decrepit streets and woods. The only parts I didn't like were the boss fights, but I hate the boss fights in all of these games and summoning a Co-Op partner can at least make those things fun.

Disappointment: Call of Duty: Black Ops III...'s campaign.

The Zombies and Multiplayer of this game are fantastic, a right balance of CoD's style with elements of Titanfall, classes and the like. A huge improvement over the mediocre multiplayer and co-op offerings of AW/Ghosts and a rightful successor to Black Ops II even if it doesn't surpass it. Dead Ops Arcade 2 is just a delight and makes DOA seem fresh again after five years of me playing it relentlessly.

Spoiler: The campaign is fucking atrocious (Rant incoming)

Treyarch's admirable attempts to change the formula such as more open level design, movement systems, new enemy types/variety, actual boss fights and cybernetic powers akin to BioShock's plasmids ultimately turn out to be the game's undoing. All of said features are either mishandled, underused, or better utilised in the Zombies or Multiplayer.

Even if these things were handled well, they're let down by how horrible the campaign is otherwise. Glitches are abundant, and crashes are frequent, and they're strictly campaign only. Co-Op is damn near impossible as it crashes during the cutscenes of some missions. Some of the cutscenes are unskippable for arbitrary reasons. A lot of the missions are relentlessly padded which undermines things like the boss fights. A lot of the set pieces are straight up copied from previous games, and they're not even the good set pieces from previous games[footnote]There's also a boss fight which is basically the last battle from Halo 4. A different franchise, but a terrible game to copy ideas from.[/footnote]. The story is just an incoherent mess consisting of 99% exposition and bored voice acting, and serves only to highlight the reasons why World at War and Black Ops II worked so well.

Ugh. I love Black Ops III on the whole. Hell, I'd say it was a great game on the whole but it's prevented from being up there with CoD 4, World at War and Black Ops II by its absolutely abhorrent campaign and I am left utterly disappointed because of that.

The only worse campaign in this franchise was Ghosts.

Ditto on the disappointment. The tech and the characters were so interesting and the general setup of the story is great. But the actual missions? The cutscenes? What the hell? Some of the stuff that happens is SOOOOOooo ridiculous to the point of complete breaking of immersion. One early example in the spoiler below:

You are on a ship during a typhoon. A "rogue" ship is apparently being pushed towards you during the storm so the moment after you smash up the cabin of the ship you're in that ship suddenly crashes through the cabin's back half and your characters run up and jump on the listing ship which in turn carries them back to land and into a building. I'm OK with mission impossible crazy stuff. But that doesn't even make sense.

 

[dyre]

Not a particularly unique opinion, but:

GOTY: Witcher 3, albeit I'm only ~50 hours in
Disappointment: MGSV...it's like the entire budget was devoted to the engine and chapter 1

GOTY:
Witcher 3. A game that made me see how far gaming has gone, and how inferior it still is to literature. A cold but beautiful shower.

Gaming is a more difficult medium for storytelling, possibly the most difficult medium because of the huge amount of user interaction and the number of moving parts. I imagine even if Tolkien wrote a game, it would be vastly inferior to his books. I will say the Witcher series, while not exactly Margaret Atwood material, is leaps and bounds above what passes for fantasy "literature" these days.

 

[Wintermute_v1legacy]

I've only really played 2 games this year, so my GOTY goes to Life is Strange, because the other game is Age of Empires II HD.

However, I feel like binge playing every episode of Life is Strange was a mistake. I should have bought this game when the first episode was released, instead of waiting for the whole thing. I think the game would be much better if I had to wait between episodes.

 

[rgrekejin]

GOTY: I know it sounds like an echo in here, but Witcher 3. I'm hard pressed to think of a single thing I didn't like about this game. The writing and dialogue were superb, the characters were amazing, the world was incredibly immersive, the developers clearly listened to the fans and continued to implement small changes to the game as it went, and it looked utterly phenomenal. I'm genuinely looking forward to the 2nd DLC coming out so I can play through the game again, it's very rare I ever say that about anything.

Biggest disappointment: Easy one for me, Batman: Arkham Knight. The game was still fun (not too difficult to do with the Arkham games), but considering this was supposed to be the magnum opus of such a great series (I consider Arkham City one of my favorite games of all time) I was hugely disappointed in Knight. The Batmobile was basically subtraction by addition and felt totally out of place, the story was all over the place and had huge plot holes, I guessed who the Arkham Knight was within about 3 hours, they basically completely gave up on trying to have boss battles after having largely excellent boss battles in City, and it also contained the single most disappointing game moment in history (for me):

Spoiler

The Deathstroke boss battle, if you can call it that

Like I said, the game was still fun, but I honestly thought the much maligned Arkham: Origins was an overall better game.

Well, I was gonna post my opinion, but this is basically it. Witcher 3 was fantastic and establishes a new paradigm for how an open-world game can still be story-driven. Akrham Knight had a lousy story compared to the previous series entries, and the presence of the Batmobile resulted in a lot of crappy level design. I haven't logged enough hours in Fallout 4 to have reached a definitive conclusion about it yet, but so far all of the changes they've made seem to have been for the worse. The menu system, dialogue system, and levelup system are all worse than in 3/NV, although none of them are worse enough to be dealbreakers.

 

[Frankster]

GOTY: Templar Battleforce

One of the surprise gems of this year, was a close call between that and Renowned Explorers as far as im concerned.
I made it easy on myself by not including Age of Decadence as a contender since that has been in early access for a while.

Disappointment of the year:

Pillars of Eternity. I expected more, so much more, from this game, not least due to the amount of buzz it got and how much kickstarter monies went into it.
That it came from Obsidian, only makes it hurt so much more, goddamnit...

 

[Fappy]

I always struggle to remember what came out when. I'd say my GotY (despite initially thinking it came out in 2014 for some reason) is probably Bloodborne. The game was everything I hoped for and more. Such a stellar fucking title and it got me mega hyped for DS3 next year. I am really enjoying Fallout 4 currently, but it is too early to place right now. I don't think it has a chance at being my GotY though. I played a bunch of other stuff that ranged from okay to pretty good on PC and Wii U.

As far as disappointments go, I'd probably say Witcher 3? It's a great game, but I just couldn't really get into it. The world failed to pull me in and I gave it a long time to try. I may return to it someday and change my mind, but for now I'd consider it a mild disappointment.

 

[Godhead]

GOTY: Kerbal Space Program. I enjoy rockets and space and stuff, this game scratches those itches pretty well.

Dissapointment of the year: Pillars of Eternity. What could have been a great game was crippled by overflowery prose, puttting a hatchet to most of Avellone's work, and a combat system that required min maxing.

As a note, these are the only two games I've played that were released this year, and I've been playing Kerbal Space Program for close to four years now.

Captcha: weakest link