This might be an unpopular opinion, but I feel Tears of the Kingdom is overrated. Yes, it has some welcome quality-of-life improvements, and yes, it has more content than its predecessor, but I find the characters less interesting, the environments less inspired, and the encounters more repetitive. Every time I pick it up again, I get bored within a couple hours and go back to another play-through of Breath of the Wild.
I would vote for Baldur’s Gate 3 over TotK without hesitation.
It’s an unpopular opinion but as I see it, TOTK is wildly overrated, as is BotW. Yes, they are very polished and certainly good games but the 10/10 across the board made me doubt my sanity. The latest Zeldas are basically Ubisoft open worlds with a couple mechanics borrowed from Garry’s mod. It’s fun the first few hours but the lack of variety and absence of any writing really make it dull IMHO. I managed to finish BotW for the novelty and the occasional detail (the lightning hitting you when holding metal is a nice touch) but I’d die if my life depended on me remembering any character interactions. BG3 Otoh, not only is it also very polished, it has sublime combat and absolutely unforgettable characters. Truly a masterpiece.
I played FarCry 3 forever ago and to this day I remember the plot and Vaas Montenegro. I remeber Siegmeyer of Catarina, from DS which for all intents and purposes has a not so intelligible story. This just to name a few. I spent the same amount of hours on BotW as FC3 much more recently and can’t for the life of me remember any characters. I found them bland and uninteresting. That’s just me and I completely understand people who love it.
Far cry 3 did have memorable characters but IMHO BOTW is a vastly more enjoyable game to play. The difference in gameplay is massive to me. I never finished Far Cry 3 as it was tedius to play, whereas I happily finished BOTW enjoying every minute.
Different strokes to different folks. Perhaps my longer experience with games makes me more blasé with the mechanics or other features of BotW. I found FC3 and BotW equally tedious in terms of core gameplay loop, except FC3, actually had a plot and occasional sublime moments that made finishing it less of a chore. BotW is an empty sandbox with a handful of enemies (even less if you consider more HP and different colour as not counting as new enemies) and forgettable characters and story. The technical side of it is quite impressive as is the visual design, however everything else is painfully mid.
That said, I disliked the combat in TW3 or the Batman and Spider Man series for being too floaty and unresponsive so, I’m overly picky I guess.
IMHO BG3 completely destroyed the curve. Even if you don’t like the genre, you have to tip your hat to what was accomplished in that game. It blew away Skyrim, Fallout 3, and all the classics in the genre and completely set a new level. The last time I was that impressed with a game was probably Ultima IV.
I personally don’t care which game wins the awards. I’m there watching for entertainment. I see lot of discussions and people take the awards too serious in my opinion. It’s like taking IGN scores serious. :D
What’s wild to me is, that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom didn’t appear once on this list.
It won awards, but it didn’t get the “overall game of the year” award from any of those 5 outlets. And, compared to baldurs gate 3 I think its quite easy to understand why. Totk was a well polished experience but it suffered quite a lot from “mile wide inch deep” syndrome IMHO. Probably one of the best games Nintendo has ever made, but it isn’t as good as baldur’s gate 3.
It’s quite remarkable how Larian slowly climbed their way to the top of the industry. While they have been around since 1996, they only created eight “proper” games prior to Baldur’s Gate 3 (if we don’t count their obscure educational titles) and most of them only received review scores in the 7/10 range. It would have been far more likely for them to remain a mid-tier developer that eventually faded away, like so many other studios producing games of similar scope and quality.
I would wager that prior to “Divinity: Original Sin”, which was their true breakthrough game, most, especially outside of Europe, had never even heard of this studio.
It says a lot about the passion of their team, I think. Larian was not even on my radar until a little while after DOS2 came out, and while I enjoyed dos2 I burned out in act 3. It was, however, plain to see that they poured buckets of care and attention into the game, even if it wasn’t exactly for me.
With Baldur’s Gate 3 made an upward trend in quality and kept the same love, care, and attention. If that level of care and attention is present in their previous titles (I have no idea), then I think it was all but inevitable that they’d find this critical success.
What’s wild to me is, that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom didn’t appear once on this list.
Makes sense to me IMO. 2023 was a stacked year, and while TotK was a pretty good game, it was way too close to Breath of the Wild for me to even consider it as game of the year. Other games that could’ve won the award over it include Alan Wake 2, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Hi-Fi Rush, and Octopath Traveler 2.
It’s the 2022 expansion for Outer Wilds, which released in 2019. Just as much a masterpiece as the first entry. if you know nothing, you owe it to yourself to play them.
I tried OW and couldn’t stand feeling dumb. I gave up after not figuring out how to advance in the water world with the vortices. This is the same reason I despise most point-&-click adventures; needing to hunt down and trigger the one event that will advance everything is infuriating and shouldn’t be hard.
that’s a shame. i’m not going to force it on you if you don’t enjoy the experience, but i will say that there are no mechanical progress gates at all in Outer Wilds, no intended order to do things in, and multiple interleaving threads to pull on. if you get stuck in one place, going to another may let you learn how to proceed. if it feels like you’re missing something, you probably are, and going somewhere else may help you find it.
it’s been my game of the year five years running, if that means anything. the dlc only cemented that position even more.
I could not figure out how to get off the water world. My spaceship was stuck in the trees and I just spun in water spouts. It was really annoying and not fun at all, so, yes, the fact that I couldn’t get my spaceship back up in the air was definitely a gate. What was I supposed to do in that situation?
explore the island you got stuck on. look around for details. sit down and watch the spectacle until you can continue. there’s no rush, and no such thing as wasted time.
or to be more prosaic, you go back home automatically after a short while anyway. not only that, every island gets thrown around by the storms periodically, launching them clear out of the atmosphere every five minutes or so. it’s just a matter of observing your surroundings, and something will happen.
I think it’s cultural differences. In the west, we abhor pay to win and predatory aspects. But in Korea, China and other countries in that region, players demand it.
So then it comes down to which market region you’re targeting. If you’re not a NA/EU mobile developer, how do you choose? 🤷♂️ Can’t keep everyone happy.
Yep, getting people to pay $40-60 bucks for a mobile game is basically impossible, and as a result the business model is either F2P or $3-5 bucks with egregious monetization to earn back the costs.
Not that it succeeded long term, but I salute Apple Arcade’s venture on this. It’s a subscription service that aimed to highlight iPhone games that had no monetization, and were usually small indie games with a fun idea.
Shoutout to Slay the Spire, Balatro, and Slice & Dice. They all cost a bit (around 10€) but are excellent ports of the originals and among the best mobile games. Slice & Dice even started out as a mobile game and was ported to PC later.
Wild Rift is my poor man’s League (although the skins are way more expensive than on PC). Don’t have a PC to play League on and WR is a good, chill alternative. Plus, I can play with my SO
Making a good game is hard. Making brainrot garbarge is easy, and people play it just as much. So what is the point? I knew a guy who was cheap as fuck. I didn’t know his girlfriend as well, but people said she was pretty much the same. Once i remember he made fun off someone spending like 60 dollars on a video game and he said he’s not a “gamer”. A few month later we talked about some video games that we liked and i didn’t really include him in that conversation because of what he said before.
He chimed in and said that he’s been playing clash of clans since release. Now i hardly even know what coc is, except mobile pay to win garbage (imo) so without even thinking, i asked if that game is even playable without spending money. He said oh no, he spends around 500 buchs a month. We were all shocked a bit, and he realised how ridiculous that is and immediately threw his girlfriend under the bus saying that she spends at least 1k a month for candy crush.
Most mobile game developers just want to attract whales. People who spend thousands of dollars in their app. They don’t care about everyone else because they don’t make any money off anyone else.
CoD mobile is good… when played in an Android emulator on PC. It’s basically CoD: Greatest Hits, and it’s way better than Black Ops 6 (or any console/PC CoD, for that matter). All the best maps from the old games are there. Takes me back to the days of MW1 & 2 on the XBOX 360.
The only issues is that it takes some tweaking and the right emulator (Gameloop) to get a steady 120+ FPS, and it can take dozens of matches before game starts pairing you with other mouse and keyboard players (instead of just bots or controller/touchscreen users), but once you’ve established your rank, it becomes ton of fun cause you’re not just destroying everyone you match against. It becomes a legit challenge.
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