Game of the Year 2016: Day Three Deliberations

Day 3 Hype!

Awww Yeah!!!

I'm enthused-

the closer we get to Hitman GOTY

@bathala: Doom has to take it, everyone's ranked it above Hitman so far

Fuck me, Please Stop is nearly an hour and a half of this podcast alone

@ilkanta: it might be Vinny's out nowhere Witcher win

Me is excite

"Hey! Pretty Baby! Come'n save me..."

Am I missing something, or did they totally miss out the remaster of Modern Warfare? Seems insane that they wouldn't even MENTION it

Seems like they removed that Assassins Creed remaster solely based off that Polygon video. I have never cared about the Assassins Creed franchise but that video is misleading and unethical. Video that explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rol6HJ1uVjs.

@expensiveham: completely agree about the AC remaster especially because the visuals in fact are much better

Also the lack of Modern Warfare remastered is insane

@matoya: Maybe because it was only available in one edition, as opposed to being a seperate release?

Pretty sure I mentioned in the deliberations that the weird face bug is also in the original game, could be misremembering though.

Oh Dan...

I'm actually really surprised the guys actually did these once a day.

I'm calling it now, the last one is going to clock in at 5 hours :P

Please feed Alex, he needs lunch so bad.

Listening made me realize that I totally forgot about HackMUD. Pretty sure it shows up on Jeffs Top 10 somewhere in the upper ranks.

@expensiveham: Just picked that one up. Good that I've missed that trainwreck. Its only unethical if they willfully misinterpreted the quality of the game, which they sort of didn't considering the game still looks bad for 40 bucks. Beside that, a ton of video game news sites agree that the remaster is lackluster.

Heres the Article: http://www.polygon.com/2016/11/17/13670084/assassins-creed-2-remaster-xbox-one-comparison-weird

Polygon updated their article accordingly to the criticism that showed up. They even said that the NPC still has a similar face after testing it on another 360. So the randomizer, at least from Polygons side, is acting strange. Read the article. Sucks that this "randomly generated" NPC turned into a similar meme than the Unity vertex error face guy. I call it the "Wall Guy Syndrome". Can't say the video that counters Polygons criticism made me change my opinion that the remaster is still not a good remaster.

I'm alergic to hyperbole. Instead of jumping the gun, link to both forms (The Polygon article and the YouTube video) so people can make up their own minds instead of reading/listening to just one side and then go "yep, thats true" :)!

Even if Polygon fucked up 100%, people are already saying that Polygon has to go bankrupt and stuff like that, which is also 100% fucked up. I don't even own the remaster, the classic ACs work just as fine and the slight graphical remaster doesn't warrant 60 (40 right now, but thats still too high) bucks for such a lackluster effects and texture remaster. At least Skyrims 64-bit remaster, while still dreadful on certain accounts, is an amazing addition for modding.

Why does Giant Bomb continue to massively overplay the bugs on the Skyrim Remaster?

You did, that face was in the original game and so was that animation glitch Alex mentions. The changes in lightning and shading just made the weird face more obvious, they ended up removing it in a patch. My point is that consensus in the grouped still seemed to be that they made it worse with the remaster, if any of you would have played it yourself or looked at any other coverage you would have known that is objectively false. I don't think it belongs on the top 3 at all, but you guys are spreading misinformation by giving the impression that the remaster is worse.

I'm sorry, but I have to get this off my chest before I continue. Ratchet and Clank for the PS4 was robbed. Since when was excellence considered a disqualifier and not a merit? Remasters and Remakes have the same primary function for translating an older experience to a modern medium and with this condition in mind, Ratchet and Clank is a masterful piece of dedicated polish in a straight to port filled medium and deserves lavish praise in recognition of that. In fact, this disqualification seems to indicate a lack of competition in this regard, nothing more.

Not to mention that the graphics category should have had a better debate for it imo. Many have compared the graphical quality to that of dreamworks and without hyperbole as it is astonishingly beautiful even without the PS4 Pro patch. I recently watched an Unreal 4 engine remake of an area in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and one of the comments mentioned that the game now looks like what their imagination made the game appear in their memory. We all experience this nostalgic filter that is inevitably frayed when we go back, realizing that Spyro was pixelated and sparce in detail compared to our imagination, but Ratchet and Clank managed to craft a world so beautiful and elaborate that they've gone as far as to eclipse nostalgic filtered reverence and give us a world worthy of a memory perfect beyond degradation.

Came here for the promised balloons and strobe lights. I demand a refund.

@leafthehero: I interpreted them leaving it out of the remaster talks as a compliment to the game. As they noted, it's new code.

The original video seemed to be what everyone based their opinion on so I did not bother linking it, its linked and parts of it are used in the video I linked.

I don't think its a good game either, all the Assassins Creed games I've played have failed to grab my interest. All I am saying is that the polygon video is unfair and misleading, they are cherry picking stuff to cause a shitstorm and get views.

Don't know why you are bringing up people saying Polygon is bankrupt, I've never said anything like that and i fail to see how that is relevant to to my comment.

@cyberphunk: I view these awards as accolades celebrating the successes of the industry. I feel it should have been given recognition. I highly doubt it will receive any award outside of this category going forward. Wouldn't it be nice if this sort of quality became more commonplace in remasters/remakes due to receiving high levels of prominence in gaming outlets such as this?

Besides, the criteria was how well the developer managed to enhance the original experience through modern technology, justifying a newer iteration, something this game epitomizes. I fail to see how putting in enough effort to use new code causes it to fall out of this category.

Please Stop: delaying Persona 5...

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered deserved at least a mention? Raven Software did a really nice job with that.

Shenzhen I/O had the best fake computer! Surprised it wasn't mentioned. I wonder if they even know about it.

Downloading to listen to while testing out my new Italian made espresso machine. Oh hell yes.

Game and movie trailers with sad/creepy/etc pop song covers are the most hilarious thing and I f'ing love that it's more and more common, lol

#pistolInMyMouth hahahahha

I'm with Alex, I've had so many problems with the Geforce experience. It seemed to start out ok a few years ago but it's got so bad I had to uninstall it so my games would actually run well.

As long as discs exist, as gold cert months before release exists, there will be and MUST be day one patches.

The time between is spent fixing and improving past cert.

So what you really want is no more disc and cert day before launch.

To put a fine point on it, even if you delay the game, if there is a disc version, there is time between printing and release that can be spent on more changes. It is a cat chasing its tail.

EDIT: Ok I see the guys are talking about the more egregious cases and abuse of gold cert. Yeah that really sucks

When it comes to the VR vendetta thing ("I don't have this thing, so I want it to be bad") that's the most dramatic perspective difference I think I've seen between a site that covered a lot of VR games this year and an audience that largely haven't had any opportunity to try it at all. Know what my worst trend nomination is? Hours of videos and podcast talk about something that's impossible to show people on video or adequately explain in audio.

I don't think I've complained about this in the comments more than maybe once the rest of the year, but if you're gonna mention complaining about VR in the worst trend category I'll use this opportunity to say maybe cover it when there's a way to watch it that makes sense. So far it's been like watching Wii party games and the fun bits is watching people hurt themselves in front of green screens. The experience you have playing VR games does not translate to a regular video.

Anyway, I'm happy with the winner of that category. I got a PS4 copy of DOOM for Christmas and was looking forward to playing it yesterday, only for it to take 4 hours of downloading to set up. Fuck that.

@expensiveham: Sorry, I was just making a comparasion about hyperbole and when I saw the youtube comments they made me bummed out since they sort of proved my point that theres quite a lot of enraged folks who see things in Black and White. Either Polygon does good shit or they're ethically corrupt and untrustworthy forever...same applies with everything. I think that approach is the wrong one. I worded myself wrongly and I didn't want to imply that you think that way though. Again, theres a reason why people don't like the YouTube comment section :P.

And I dunno man, I think creating a bad reputation for their own company seems a bit far reaching and conspiratory for my tastes. I'm pretty sure they just didn't do research, because regardless of their intentions, these bugs still exist and thats bad. Both SupJamChan and Polygon acknowledges this.

Because you wrote that Polygon is acting unethical I had to sort of scratch my head on that, from their statements it seems like it is the first time they encountered this bug and that the "Strange Face" still appeard on anothers testers machine. Furthermore, you can still report ethically but still wrong about something since I have my doubts that you that would google every bug or "mistake" you see in a game that wouldn't cause a crash every time.

By the way, the link to Polygon has an updated part where the author explains his sentiments, probably regarding the criticism of people like SupJamChan. I should've wrote before that they updated the article as a response to the criticism from the public when I posted that link, but I thought you would click and read through it. Whether you agree with them or not is up to you, but please at least consider reading through the stuff they've added.

Really weird to me when they say they hate all the other Hitman games. Blood Money still plays even better than the new one and has better and more unique level design.

That Disturbed cover of The Sound of Silence is beyond reprehensible. It's an abomination.

Dan's apparent boredom always when hackmud is played or talked about is the best thing ever.

#EngageWithThisShitPizza

#PistolInMyMouth

@jeff is gonna be the greatest social media specialist that DiGiorno's has ever had.

It's interesting that Jeff drew a line about the day one stuff because they were "out of their depth". I dunno, that's always going to be the case when people outside of game development try and reason about game dev decisions that seem bad. Like the PC gaming discussion - I totally agree that games released on PC should come out better! But as a game developer, I also know that a lot of the blame rests on the shoulders of the people who write graphics drivers (and a lot of their troubles can probably be attributed to decisions made ages ago without enough foresight, and so on). Big, expensive AAA games often fare better than smaller games cause they can pour more money into QA; but even then there's only so much coverage you can get of different machines.

So it's a hugely complex problem, but to be clear: my point isn't that people outside of game dev should stop complaining about these things cause they don't know what they're talking about. I'm saying it doesn't matter how much you understand these issues, keep talking about the things that suck from a gamer's perspective. Maybe the problem of day one patches is complicated, but that doesn't mean it's not a hassle. We want to know what players like and dislike; it doesn't matter how much they understand about how to solve it.

Resident Evil 4 should win Least Necessary Remaster every year that it comes back out for the rest of time.

@dray2k: I read the article and the update weeks ago. Regardless if they misrepresented the product intentionally or not does not really matter. Sloppy, bad journalism with no research is just as bad. Polygons misrepresentation has had an effect on consumers and other journalists as can be seen in these deliberations.

Not going to bother responding to any future replies of yours, I've made my point and don't feel like arguing someone who seems dead set on blindly defending and making up excuses for the bad practices of a billion dollar company.

9 mins Alex got the top 3 for the category

Someone needs to do a supercut of the times Alex says "Say my piece" and "Eat/Ate it's lunch".

The digital utopia they talk about is still awful until ISP's actually become less shit and not run by the government. I'll buy digital only games but I'd never buy a digital copy of something when I can buy a physical copy less than 2 weeks after release for already half off.

I have no problem with putting a disc in, getting the day 1 patch to download, and just playing something else or walking away. I'd love to have the ability to pre-load patches like Vinny said.

DOOM winning best surprise, is of course the only thing I believe DOOM should win outright with what surrounded that game. I cannot be the only person that thinks Machinegames did a way better job with turning Wolfenstein into something extraordinary. It's still the best shooter I've played this gen, with DOOM being great but not near as good. The crew keeps talking about the characters of DOOM as well, and unless I played a different game... the characters outside of pissed off Doom Slayer are just weak.

It sounds weird to hear them argue that they would rather a game's release get pushed back six weeks rather then spend two hours downloading a day one patch.

I feel like you can let the Arbys thing slip because they're sponsoring Eleague and those ads are really good.

PLEASE STOP: Advertisements for your game featuring loud, obnoxious YouTubers.