Best of Gaming 2017

I know we have a PC gaming “best of 2017” type thread, but with some sites starting to do their best of lists and awards and podcasts, and with @triggercut indicating he wasn’t going to run a Quarterlies this year, I thought we could at least get a thread going where we talked about our GOTY stuff but not have it be restricted to PC.

In fact, I invite folks to talk about any gaming experience they found worth mentioning or sharing with from this last year, even if the game in question wasn’t from 2017 per se. No requirements, just a thread to talk about all the fun gaming that was had by all.

To kick things off, I put together my own top 10 list for the year and stuck it in a PDF. Enjoy!

https://1drv.ms/b/s!AmNmjcQQs-85yCtEtuHkg4o4yJhb

Not ready to put up my list yet, hoping to have time to play a couple more games next week.

I really liked your list Scott.

I definitely need to play this game. The demo was really intrigue, and I think this might be the most ‘Richard Holt’ game realised this year.

I was really worried that this game would drop the ball and be bad, or that it would just feel like more Warhammer 1. What CA did with the Eye of the Vortex campaign is my strategy gaming high point of the year.

I do not like the ‘enhanced’ textures in this game. Also. FF9 is the best FF.

This game is definitely my game of the year, but only partly because of how good it is. This is not the first game I’ve played with my son, but it is the first game that we both really loved and explored together. And as such I’ll probably remember it forever.

Now I have to re-fight the urge to play Battle Brothers.

Thanks for the PDF Scott! Very interesting read and a few on there that I hope to play soon. I’m sure I’ll be adding my own list over the coming days/weeks!

ArmandoPenblade’s Games of 2017*

#3. Tales of Berseria - I bet this game is neat. I really like Tales of games.
#2. Torment: Tides of Numenera - The first hour of this is really wordy
#1. Age of Rivals (Steam) - Way better on PC. Played this an order of magnitude more than anything else! SO GOOD BEST GAME EVER???

* Read: “Games released for PC in 2017 that ArmandoPenblade has also actually opened/played in 2017.” Strictly speaking, between these three titles, I have 17.6 hours on Steam, 15.3 of which are in Age of Rivals.

PUBG is easily my game of the year and they haven’t even officially released it yet. Sure it’s crazy hard. Sure there’s been issues with cheating, but I’ve never been so addicted to a game. The general idea is so freaking simple, but I just find it so much fun. My shooting skills are only okay, but I love trying to outsmart people. (Which fails 99.999% of the time).

Squads are great too even if it can be frustrating trying to organize 4 people to not die horrible deaths… :)

I can’t even think of anything else that I played this year that comes close to that game for me.

26 minutes. I wondered how long after I started the thread before someone would name a game they loved that I hadn’t heard of, and it was 26 minutes. Age of Rivals looks awesome so I’ll be picking that up very shortly. Thanks!

Snark aside in my post, Age of Rivals is legitimately a ton of fun and surprisingly deep. It’s probably the first competitive deckbuilder I really got into, which makes me super late to the party, but something about that game just clicked for me and I probably dropped about 30-40 hours into it between the Android and PC versions.

I might’ve missed a discussion why that is. I was going to get it for iOS…

I generally just don’t enjoy gaming on a tiny (comparatively) phone screen as much, but the extra screen real estate lets me take in a lot more information at once, which was really vital, esp. early on when I was learning what cards did (and even near the end, since you continuously unlock new stuff for the first couple dozen hours, there were new cards that it was easier to read/study on PC).

Plus for multiplayer, having it up on a second monitor so I could do stuff while my opponents made decisions was a boon.

I don’t want to hijack your thread, but there should be a Quarterlies! I’ll check with @triggercut to see if he is ok with me running it, and I’ll put it in it’s own thread.

My favorite thread of the year!

Top 5

  1. Nioh - I really liked this on PS4, and I love it on PC. It has better resolution and it’s easier for me to jump into. I breezed through the content a second time and I made it to the loot endgame, which I never really explored on PS4 because I was burned out after 100 hours. The broad movesets match my preference for Soulslike games: I get to play an entire campaign with the familiarity of a single weapon, but there’s enough variety in the attacks that I don’t get bored. The grind and the relative lack of enemies do get on my nerves after a while, and the multiplayer is a little weak. I’d still call this a flawed all-time favorite, kind of like Bloodborne.

  2. Bayonetta (PC) - It’s a classic, but I think I like this game the least out of the “big three” character action games (with Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden). I have no strong pull to come back to it, though I plan to give it another chance to build up hype for Bayonetta 3.

  3. The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile (PC) - This is a fast 2D brawler with satisfying, immediate attacks. Some of the combos are seared into my brain’s pleasure centers. It’s kind of a 2D Ninja Gaiden, which helped drive my current enthusiasm for that series.

  4. Aztez - I was a beta tester for about 18 months. I enjoyed watching the game improve over time. It’s a casual-friendly experience since it’s so easy to start up and smack some enemies. I’m pretty burned out now though, and the disastrous launch means there’s been no post-release support to suck me back in. That’s a shame.

  5. NieR: Automata - This is a tough game to place. I was really impressed with the experience while I played it, but now I hardly remember anything about it. The flashy combat was too shallow, and the side quests felt like empty completionism. In the end I treated it a lot like The Witcher 3: I kept the difficulty low just to get through the story.

Also really enjoyed

  • Hollow Knight - A borderline 3/4 star game. Good simple combat and addictive enough to 100%. Yet I’m not sure why.
  • The Surge - Another solid effort from these guys, but the slow combat and mazelike campaign means I’ll never play it again. Debating the DLC.
  • Nex Machina - A nice arcade style twin-stick shooter with a shmup 1CC/scoring structure that I plan to dig into.
  • Absolver - I was surprised I didn’t like this multiplayer brawler more. The world and drop-in multiplayer just don’t do it for me.
  • DoDonPachi Resurrection (PC) - Like most Cave shooters, initially I wasn’t impressed, and then I slowly got sucked in.
  • Bleed 2 - Neat and short action game.

Meh

  • Vanquish (PC) - I just don’t like linear shooters anymore.
  • Brigador: Up-Armored Edition (PC) - A lot of indie games end with a pleasant shrug from me.
  • RUINER - Kind of a disappointment. Floaty, spammy combat.

In Progress

  • Yakuza 0 - I’m only a quarter of the way into the game. So far I love the Japanese setting and characters, but I dislike the Japanese game structure. I suspect it may end up a lot like NieR: Automata in that sense.
  • Fight’N Rage - Looks like a nice 2D side-scrolling beat 'em up, but I’m a little worried I’ve lost interest in that style of game. We’ll see.

Favorite old games played in 2017

  • Ninja Gaiden series - These were the last games I needed to play for my historical dive into melee action classics. I borrowed a friend’s PS3 to play Ninja Gaiden Sigma, which I enjoyed enough to keep it a little longer to play Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. I thought I was ready for a break, but I couldn’t shake the game from my mind. I ended up buying Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge for the WiiU, which I had purchased for Bayonetta 2 and The Wonderful 101. It’s considered to be the worst in the series and the framerate is rough on that console, but at least I could play to my heart’s content. That still wasn’t enough though, so now there’s a used Xbox 360 and a scratched up copy of Ninja Gaiden 2 under my Christmas tree. I’ve said for years I’d never own a 7th generation console. This series made me do it. (Now port them to PC so I can throw it in the trash…)

What the fuck?

  • PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds - I’ve played this game almost 150 hours. It’s fun to shoot people, and occasionally it’s very thrilling. But holy shit, it’s just not that great. The loot game is a shameless time management exercise that would make a casual shovelware developer blush. Sure, sometimes you find something different, but usually you come out of it with roughly the same gear. What’s the point? Someone make me a battle royale game where the looting is already done for me so I can get straight to killing. Give me a smaller map while you’re at it so I spend less time running to my death. If it wasn’t for @Becoming and his friends (and plenty of alcohol) making the experience enjoyable, I would’ve stopped playing this months ago.

Hey man, let me help out with a script to aggregate the votes. I’ve been meaning to come up with something and was going to bring it up somewhere. This is a good a place as any.

I’m on the fence about how we end up with approximately 4 of these threads every year now. Can people just not wait to talk about things?

I think they pop up early because people want to get the word out to other people, since there’s still time this year to play one more game. So if Scott spreads the word, and I buy the game in the Christmas sale, maybe I’ll vote for it in the quarterlies, so getting the word out early might get certain games more attention in the quarterlies too? I don’t know, that’s my theory. And I like the idea. I usually find at least one game from these early threads that I get in the year-end sales. And then I usually vote for that game in the Quarterlies.

My other theory is that it’s the holiday season, and that triggers the same sense of nostalgia for them that New Year’s triggers for me.

@Rock8man has at least part of it. I started this thread when I saw other sites putting their GOTY stuff up (and we are only a few weeks away from the year ending, with no new games coming up in that time due to the holidays) and this is the thread where any game, not just PC’s, can be discussed.

It feels like doing this sort of thing is good for people that maybe missed out on something, or skipped it for a variety of reasons, so if they research something based on someone else’s enjoyment or inclusion of it on a list they have time yet to try and score a copy for Christmas, or during the upcoming Steam sale.

Also, why should we wait to start a thread like this? What is gained by doing so?

Personally, I’m less likely to redo a whole list of reasons why these games are my favorites for this year if someone asks in another thread a month later. This same thing happened last year, where about a month before the quarterlies someone made a thread about “Game of the Year” and then in the actual quarterlies thread there was a lot of “Here are my picks, just go over to the other thread to see my reasons” and it was just a mess. In my opinion, clearly. Obviously other people are totally cool with it.

Only picked up a few things in 2017.

Mass Effect: Andromeda
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
The Golf Club 2
Horizon Zero Dawn
Star Wars Battlefront II

Refunded Battlefront II, suck at the Golf Club 2, suck worse at Horizon, didn’t really enjoy Origins as much as I hoped, so I’d have to go for Andromeda as my best of 2017.

Yep, I went there.

My apologies for making a thread you are not cool with!

image

That’s true, I am not actually sorry.