Omission of Horizon Zero Dawn in GOTY

@sd_ds: But see, I took most of the stuff people take issue with regarding her and Nier (particularly the "boooo") as her goofin' on the whole thing, so that's kind of my point. It's a little silly to try and interpret if it's rude to Alex and it's impossible for it to be rude to you because she's not speaking to Nier fans, she's speaking to Alex. You're just getting to listen in. I'm not trying to dunk on your take per se, I just, there's a lot of time being spent digging into the minutiae of points of this that fundamentally are unimportant because they're taking the video as if Abby made this YouTube video calling out all members of the Nier community or something. It's a window into their deliberations, nothing more, nothing less. You can be upset about anything you want to be upset about, don't let me stop you, I just think it's important to step back and reflect on the importance of being upset about how a person argues to another person and trying to perceive what that person's arguments mean to that person, much less what a good or bad argument would be to those 6 other people in that particular circumstance. It's just such a crazy thing that the community still has itself worked up over to the point that I long for the time where we were all just mad that they didn't play more of the Witcher 3.

@sethmode: She knows it's being recorded, therefore she knows Nier fans are listening, and as a Nier fan I thought that was really fucking lame of her to treat that game like a joke.

@sd_ds: That wasn't really the point. And besides, it still was the number 3 game of the year so if anything, wouldn't you say the jokes on her if that were the case?

It was at number 2 and she stonewalled to get it to 3, so not really.

@sd_ds: Well, call the videogame police. In a thread about a game that was left off altogether, no less.

Sorry for voicing my opinion, I'll be sure to take it to the authorities next time I disagree with something.

Night in the Woods came out in January. Tekken, Zelda and PUBG* came out in March. Nier came out in April. The list is made up of 5 games from the first half of the year and 5 from the second half of the year. The top 3 game all came out by April.

I like Horizon a lot, it's in my own top three. But I can understand how it didn't end up in the GB GOTY Top 10 and the time it came out has nothing to do with it.

*PUBG can pretend it released in December, but it released in March when they started taking money for it and put out the game that's still pretty much what they have now sans some polished up menus.

where's the hollow knight got shafted thread at? Do we really need one of these for every game that didn't win?

OK. I guess my previous hint was too subtle.

The OP made this thread to discuss Horizon, so don't derail that discussion by turning this into yet another string of general GOTY and Abby complaints. There are already more than enough places that you can (and likely already have) made those comments and critiques.

Yo, you've made about 15 total posts and comments on Giant Bomb and 14 of them have been to complain about Abby. Please chill or take a break or something. We get it, you like Nier and don't like Abby, let it go.

Collectively, they have shitty tastes/opinions. I don't know why this is still news to some people . I figured this out 5 years ago .

My understanding is most of the staff played Night in the Woods recently, specificaly to make it before the GOTY deliberations? Correct me if I'm wrong. I can not comment on Tekken because I didn't even know a new one of those came out last year, I am not following fighting games at all. Zelda - as said before, the staff seemed really up on it, way more then now, when it was new. Nier was played here and there in different chunks among the staff and also many of the staff members pushed to finish it specificaly for the awards. PUBG is a separate case because it's a multiplayer only game and they streamed it for a long time. All I'm saying the time in which they play the game definetely matters, they have been consistently unable to eliminate that from judging all the games at the year's end. It's a hard thing to do, I'm not saying it's not...

I got back to Original Horizon when the DLC came out, I usualy play games more than once, with a couple of months break, so this was an ideal oportunity to start a new game as the DLC is only aviable in the later-game stage, but I burned out a couple of hours of the second playthrough and ended up loading the original near-endgame save and play the DLC from there. The game is fantastic, I love the world and the combat, but the game is pretty long and I will need a longer cooldown before playing it again, I think.

OP- i don't mean to be overly blunt- but sorry the staff didn't like the game as much as you did?

GOTY discussions are always a firehose of the most subjective opinions being fired in every direction. sorry if you feel the game was robbed- but uh, weird that you think it's somehow abby's fault that NO ONE ON STAFF cared enough to keep it on.

that's the thing about these discussions- a voice that champions a game (see: brad filibusters, jeff w/syndicate, austin w/ invisible ink) will always beat out apathy. and i got NOTHING from the crew for horizon.

Horizon’s really good overall but it felt like a bit of a slog to me in the end to get through the story (the main plot was very interesting but I spent hours on the shadow carja and brother/sister tangents and thought they overstayed their welcome).

I also agreed with the sentiments of some of the staff that the world wasn’t much fun to traverse and a bit too barren.

I can understand why it wouldn’t be in the GOTY top ten.

That said I once saw the video game Dream Daddy kick a really cute puppy square in the face so Horizon should definitely have finished above it. Vinny and Abby were both laughing when it happened. It was awful.

I think Jeff got lost in the hype when it first came out. That game was a pretty traditional open world game with pretty graphics.

1. If lists are so arbitrary and meaningless why have them at all? That’s not a flippant comment, I’m serious.

2. I was more aggravated that people who put 2-5 hours into a game, if even that much, were ready to completely dismiss stuff. Hearing Abby and Vinny talk about AC:Origins showed exactly how much time they put in.

3. Also more aggravated when it came to discussing Hellblade Abby would say, “I heard it did x which is bad” or “i heard you dont get important cutscenes if you don’t get all the collectibles”.

4. Many of us called this on Horizon. I didn’t expect people to go out of their way to say it was “culturally appropriating” stuff negatively or that the “combat was bad” or the “creature design is bad” but I fully expected them to forget about it because of the release date.

Must've missed all those points where she did so.

Anyhoo, it'a a real shame that after listening to the podcasts, I had to grab my copy of HZD from the shelf and take a massive shit on it. It got ignored by the crew and didn't even make it to the Top-10 list, so what kind of a dumb idiot would I be to play it anymore?

@glots: you should just throw your ps4 in the garbage considering the disk probably contaminated the console while it was in the drive. I felt disgusted even replying to you...I think I need to take a shower now just in case.

I will say that I thought Aloy could have been a contender in the Best Character category; she somehow seemed both believably human and yet purely good, and was both well written and acted.

@spankingaddict: Same here.

Yes I get it it’s only a list, I respect everyone’s opinion. It just seemed like in every category she was the the first to say no one really wants HZD on here do they. Nothing personal but It didn’t even seem she spend any time with it. If Jeff had out right axed it with the caviots he gave it would be no big deal.

I was specifically listening to all of the podcasts to see where it would land, so this just stuck out to me.

Shocked it did get in on best debut....barely make it on for best looking. That’s all I said my peace

@puck2dag: again I feel like you're misremembering if you think Abby was the big anti Horizon voice at that table. Brad had nary a kind word for that game for nearly the entire 5 days, so let's at least point the (albeit silly) finger in the proper direction.

The people who liked dream daddy (People btw, not person) made a better argument than the people cared about horizon (which there were none). There were also nine other games people agreed were better than horizon as well.

We should probably stop bumping this thread (and potentially even lock it) since it's been explained a million times over:

• Horizon wasn't even close to the list, and this was predictable months ago. It had nothing to do with Abby and it's not fair to put her on blast about it. I say this despite the fact that Horizon was my GOTY.
• Horizon got a 5/5 from Jeff because he recognized that it was an awesome game and a promising start to a new IP. With that said, it's not Jeff's "kind of game", so it would have surprised me more to hear him fight for it than vice versa. Jeff simply isn't a story-heavy, open-world, RPG guy. With reviews, it seems like they try to maintain some objectivity and reward games that appeal to people who they are designed to appeal to. But with these GOTY lists, it's purely subjective -- "which game does the author enjoy most?" If there's anyone that I would have expected to stick up for Horizon, it would have been Vinny because Horizon is a Vinny-ass game.
• There's definitely an alternate universe where Horizon makes this list. I think there were two things that really hurt its critical reception-- (1) it was released right before Zelda, so most critics rushed through it or dropped it entirely and (2) it received way too much promotion before release, headlining multiple Sony E3s. IF the game was announced at E3 2016, and then released in holidays 2016, I think the internet would have lost its mind over this game.
• If you have an issue with Dream Daddy making it, please recognize that it made it at the expense of Yakuza O.

Horizon wasn't that good

Horizon was a decent Far Cry clone with a tiny bit of monster hunter thrown in. Thats really it. There was nothing all that remarkable about the game besides the visuals.

@chaser324: I suggest a mod name change. Or just close the damn thing altogether. This has little to do with Abby.

What bothered me was Abby "confessing" that she didn't enjoy playing PUBG. She said she enjoyed hanging out with the crew more, IIRC, she doesn't like the game AT ALL. It just seems so weird, why was she even playing and "spicing" things up, if she didn't enjoy it? Anyways, just my one random note from the GOTY discussions. Might have a few later if I ever recover from the traumas caused by Best World discussions.

Pushing Dream Daddy was another thing, okay, it was Abby's one game that she wanted to push, but she had very strong opinions about other games that she didn't even play properly.

This thread has been totally derailed into yet another argument about Abby and Dream Daddy, which has zero bearing whatsoever on the staff's general opinion of Horizon Zero Dawn or why it didn't appear on their GOTY list.

Locked.