It's time for the 2017 Quarterlies! Vote for Quarter to Three's Best Game of 2017

[Brooski]

It’s time for the Quarterlies! Vote for Quarter to Three’s Best Game of 2017

First of all, Happy New Year to all the Qt3ers!

While this annual tradition has been called a lot of things, I associate it with the words “Quarterlies” and Chris @triggercut Hornbostel. Unfortunately, the last three of those words are unable to join us for the awards he has been running for so long, so instead of a lapse, I wanted to jump in and keep them going until Chris has time to take them over again. Since 2017 is now officially over, and no further games can be released in that year, it is time to shake off our hangovers and vote. There will only be a few rules changes. Where possible, I have preserved Chris’ wording.

Rule 1 is simple: just list your top 5 games of 2017. I’ll keep track of them. Put your picks in order* (see below), so that this is a weighted choice. Your first pick will get 5 points, your fifth pick will get one. That way I can aggregate popularity to come up with a final set of winners.

Please provide commentary on your picks if you are at all inclined to do so. I love reading them, others love reading them, and those that post early might even be able to sway later posters to their way of think with honey-tongued arguments. This isn’t really a rule, more of a suggestion, but I’ll call it Rule 2.

Rule 3 is that revisions are fine. Period. I have revised this rule but you’d never know it.

What games were released in 2017? Besides Star Citizen, I have no idea. Feel free to list any game–console, PC, mobile, etc. that you like. The official religion of Quarter to Three is Platform Gnosticism. Boardgames are expressly eligible. We’ve discouraged listing Early Access games in this space in the past but since Early Access is becoming harder and harder to tell apart from just being a bad game, go ahead and list whatever. That’s Rule 4.

Rule 5 is where it gets interesting. For every platform beyond one on which a game was released, it gets a bonus point. So if a game was released on PC, PS4, Xbox One, the Wii, the Vita, and the Dreamcast, it gets 5 bonus points for each vote it got. HOWEVER, if it was released on the Switch, even if it was released on other platforms, it is considered to have been released on the Switch only, and gets no bonus.

Rule 6 is that Rule 5 is canceled because did you think that was for serious? C’mon.

Voting closes at 23:59 Pacific Standard Time (America) on Friday, January 12.

[*]SPECIAL BONUS NOTE: This year we have the fabulous @arrendek using his hacking skills that he learned in the NSA fighting South Korean terrorists to help me tally votes. He has a script (sp?) that will do a lot of the work for us, just like the new tax plan. However, just like the new tax plan, you have to do very specific things. Actually, just a couple:

[a] Post your votes on separate lines, with a number next to the place in your list you are assigning it.

[b] Bold your choices.

[c] You can put other stuff in your list, including discussion/explanation (which is encouraged) and stuff like platform but please do not bold anything other than the name of the game. Don’t even bold the platform, like (PC) because this is what the South Korean terrorists used to break the NSA’s scripts (sp?) before. @porousnapkin did a great post in the Best boardgame of 2017 vote which you can see here if you want to see the best possible format.

(d) If you screw it up, we’ll fix it. Just like the tax plan!

Get voting!!!

[arrendek]

Thanks, Bruce! Your spelling is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_language

For more info on how to get your vote automatically tallied correctly, you need to let Discourse do it’s auto numbering thing. This means using “1.”, “2.” etc, not weird things because you don’t like how Discourse is doing it. You’ll see Discourse “take over” your numbering in the preview side (it spaces things sort of nicely and moves them to the right) if you’ve done it the way we need it for counting. One thing Discourse can’t do is count down, so you need to go from 1 to 5. This is actually a problem with html’s ol implementation, I’m pretty sure, so don’t blame the wump directly. Also, don’t try to bold the numbers in your list, only the game name itself. So,
1. **Game Name** (not **1. Game Name**)

Here is the link to the current counts https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BKPOlM08nU0Gxr19BmIZ_xAI6HtXB_3YaHtBXgJK2KM/edit?usp=sharing

You can check your vote and make sure it was counted correctly in the individual votes tab. I’ll get the script running every 15 minutes (so you might need to wait a bit to check on your vote).

My actual game of the year list (subject to edit) as an example (using slightly different allowable formats of commenting on the picks):

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I had to play it a bit to get over some problems I had with it but once it meshed I fell in love with it.
2. RimWorld This is probably not okay as a vote but I need to put this game in here because I have played it more in 2017 than any other game I have and enjoyed the crap out of it.
3. Slime Rancher
   The kids love this one, and I spent quite a bit of time with it too.
4. Gorogoa
   Pretty awesome puzzle game. Short and good.
5. Opus Magnum
   Zachtronics did it again.
6. Heat Signature
   Good stuff. Tons of fun. I like fun.

Edit: How to do Discourse “special” number formatting

1. Make sure you start each line that is a list with a “1.” or a “1)” and a space just after the “1.” or “1)”
2. Increase the number by one for each line
3. Keep the formatting, consistent, i.e. now we’re at “3.” not “3” or “3#” or anything crazy, or even “3)” because we started with “1.”

I can do a lot of other text if I want, but eventually

4. I’ll start another new line with “4.” and it will keep up provided I separate the line that starts with “4.” from the previous line of stuff that was unnumbered by a blank line
5. And bold your titles, by either highlighting text and clicking the “B” in the editor or typing “**” around your game title like so: **Game Title**
6. Keep going if you have more titles you want to highlight for honorable mentions etc, it doesn’t matter to the vote script (it will ignore extra numbers)
7. Do not highlight the number in the list, or it might break the list format, i.e. **1. game title**
   8. Testing that thought right here - yep, it broke (so, Don’t do this)

Edits to your vote post are totally fine at any time.
Only your first post with votes counts, so don’t make a new post to change your votes or separate your list into multiple posts.

[Alistair]

1. Elex
2. Ghost Recon: Wildlands

This is really a vote for a genre, and I put the smaller guys first. Elex is an open-worlder with hand-crafted quests and writing, and middling production values. Wildlands is an open-worlder which relied more on systemic content to fill its vast and beautiful landscape along with super high production values.

They both let me go to some fascinating place and have adventures, which is what this hobby’s been giving me for 35 years now. Yay gaming :)

[kerzain]

Do expansions on 3 year old games (Hearthstone) count?

[moss_icon]

1. Tacoma
2. Pyre
3. Stories Untold
4. Breath of the Wild
5. Mass Effect Andromeda

[forgeforsaken]

1. Horizon Zero Dawn
2. Nioh
3. Prey
4. Super Mario Odyssey
5. Little Nightmares

Honorable mentions (or what would be my 6-10): Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Lost Legacy, Hellblade, Nier, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, Ruiner

Haven’t played/in process of playing games that could maybe have made it: Yakuza 0, Divinity Original Sin 2, Hollow Knight.

[Mark_L]

1. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

This game made me create a memorial photo of one of my soldiers who died fighting one of the Chosen. I posted it on my Facebook wall. I think my brain needs a CT scan now.

2. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Yes, this sort of means that there are two XCOM games at the top of my list. 2017 seems to have been an embarassment of riches.

3. Spirit Island

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

4. Total War: Warhammer 2

My dinosaurs ride dinosaurs and kill elves. I really don’t know what else you’re looking for beyond that. Also, a giant hamster wheel that shoots lightning. In my total war game. The only way this could be better is if these factions were unceremoniously dropped into, say, a new Rome 2 expansion.

5. Monster Slayers

It turns out that iterating on Dream Quest was a great idea. Who knew? Oh, right. Nerdook Productions knew.

[jsnell]

1. Prey

   Prey is amazing. The Talos 1 space station where most of the action of the game happens is the best environment ever done in a game. The level design is sooo good, both visually and structurally (secrets, alternate routes, sequence skips, etc). And then it’s filled to the brim with juicy audiologs and emails, detailing the lives and schemes of the 100+ people on the station. I had to find out everything I could about all of them. There was very little about this game that I didn’t love.

   Having Prey possibly be the swan song for the immersive sim just makes it hit that much harder. To me, the tepid response to Prey is the biggest crime in games this year.

2. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

   It’s been a couple of decades since I’ve been able to play a multiplayer shooter for more than half an hour. They just don’t hold my interest at all. I couldn’t stop playing PUBG. It’s like a proper old-school roguelike: you put all this effort in for a buildup, and then throw it all away in one ill-considered move. It feels like there’s actual stakes involved. So once you reach the top 10, the tension is just unbearable. The first half a dozen times I got to the top 3, I just totally froze. Everything I knew about the tactics of the game and everything I’d learned about actually shooting a gun just went out the window.

   It’s been something like 4 months since I won my first game, and I could still retell the story of the last 5 minutes of that game. I could probably retrace my movements pretty exactly.

3. Horizon: Zero Dawn

   H:ZD nails the core gameplay loop of fighting giant robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow. It feels so good. They also have the most likable protagonist in a game this year, and an epic and gripping sci-fi backstory. I absolutely had to know what had happened to create this fucked up world. The best part is that they actually both deliver the full story, and have it make perfect sense; every time I thought they’d just slipped up and left a massive plot hole in, it got resolved in an hour.

   The main place where it falls down are the side quests; the writing is good enough that you’ll probably want to do them, but the actual implementation tends to be just tedious Witcher-visioning.

4. Opus Magnum

   The best Zachtronics game so far. It’s a programming puzzle game. Unlike a couple of their most recent games, it returns back to the SpaceChem roots of having to fight awkward physical constraints. And unlike all of their previous games, they’ve finally removed the artificial restrictions on solution size. So it’s now usually trivial to make a solution that works, and then you can start to iterate on it. That’s a lot more compelling a workflow than having to spend an hour just trying to get something that passes the tests in Shenzhen IO.

   A big thanks to all the players in the Qt3 community: the game would be just a shadow of itself without the friendly leaderboard competition.

5. Dead Cells

   Incredibly fluid 2d movement and combat, that never got old for me. I know the early access label has turned a lot of people off this game. But it’s really good. It’s been really good starting from the first release.

[Ex-SWoo]

1. Total War: Warhammer 2
2. Persona 5
3. Prey
4. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
5. Horizon Zero Dawn

Honorable mentions : Nioh, Zelda (didn’t play enough to really tell yet but I enjoy the open world)

I surprised myself at how much I enjoyed Warhammer 2 , especially since I was pretty lukewarm on the first one.

[Gigglemoo]

1. Slime Rancher
2. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
3. Monster Hunter Stories
4. Injustice 2
5. Forza Horizon 3 Hot Wheels (dlc expansion)

(edit - accidently hit post before adding #5)

[Chappers]

1. Divinity Original sin 2
2. XCOM2 war of the chosen
3. Unexplored
4. Age of rivals
5. Nioh

Bearing in mind that there is another 50+ games I didn’t spend enough or no time with, this is my list.

Top 2 choices are way above everything else. Divorisin 2 is everything I want in a top down party based RPG. Interesting quests but not too narrative heavy, amazing combat system, many different ways of solving quests. It is the first RPG that has truly enchanted me since the Ultima series.

XCOM2 : WOTC refines the original formula to make it even better, just a lot of fun.

Shout out to Unexplored a real time but pausable roguelike randomly generated levels, decent boss monsters, constant new content from the developers. You should try it if you are even remotely interested in this genre.

[Nightgaunt]

Thanks for organizing, @Brooski!

1. Race for the Galaxy
   Simply spent more time playing this (against the Hard AI 1-on-1) than anything else. And just as I hit 1000 games and was burning out, the new expansion came out and now I’m playing (and losing) again.

2. Hollow Knight
   Beautiful, evocative, exquisitely tuned, inventive, and huge. Is this is ultimate Metroidvania? Few games compel me to 100% them; I’m not there yet with Hollow Knight, and that fact keeps itching at me.

3. LogISTical
   The most continuous hours I played this year in any game because it was so addictive. And that was just spent completing… a third? of Australia? The amount of content in this game and its expansions is absolutely absurd.

4. West of Loathing
   The best joke delivery system since Monkey Island. Also, surprisingly fun to look at and even thematically cohesive, considering the silliness.

5. Hob
   Virtually tied with Gorogoa, but I’m giving it the tilt for sentimental reasons because its the last Runic Games work. Another that I had to 100% because exploring it was so satisfying. With some more polish in the level design department, this would have been a masterpiece of 3D platforming, but it’s still gorgeously realized and a rich gameplay experience.

Runners up:

• Gorogoa (best looking game of the year, plays like nothing else)
• Super Blood Hockey (perfect reinvention of NES Ice Hockey)
• Cat Quest (my kind of RPG)
• Shadowhand (still a great core solitaire mechanic, and well conceived RPG wrapper)
• Shadow Tactics (never thought Desperados would get a reboot)
• Lanota (I think this came out in 2016, but it’s a brilliant iOS rhythm game I assume no one has played and I love it).

[arrendek]

@Ex-SWoo - could you bold your game titles, please? (Thanks!)
@Chappers - could you un-bold your numbers and let Discourse do the “special” number formatting, please? (Thanks!)

[tylertoo]

1. Through the Ages Mobile port of the boardgame. Great UI, great tutorial, great AI on top of a great game.
2. Race for the Galaxy What @Nightgaunt said, except I play against easy AI.
3. Dominions 5 Slightly better UI, slightly better graphics, simultaneous combat, and lots more stuff. I learned this game by playing Dom4. Now, I need to really learn this game.
4. Star Fleet Armada: Rogue Adventures Part Star Control 2, part FTL, grand space strategy infused with simple arcadey mini-games that somehow never get boring. (Also has the official @BrianRubin Space Game Junkie seal of approval).
5. Antihero This turn-based Victorian digital board game deserves more love.

Edit for an honorable mention: Missile Cards. Fun, fast, addictive take on the old Atari Missile Command. I play it incessantly on my phone, but it is also on Steam.

[tgb123]

2017 was nothing if not the Year of the Boardgame. Every game on my list is either an original digital board/card game, an adaptation, or a boardgame in spirit if not by design.

1. Afghanistan '11
2. Antihero
3. Age of Rivals
4. Through the Ages
5. Race for the Galaxy

[note] I have no idea how to get Discourse to do the numbering, but if someone can tell me I’ll adjust my post.

[fixed]

[arrendek]

You just need to consistently number with “1.”, “2.”, etc before each game title on separate lines. Thanks for asking.

[stusser]

1. Divinity: Original Sin 2
2. Prey
3. Torment: Tides of Numenera
4. Divinity: Original Sin 2
5. Divinity: Original Sin 2

If I can’t vote for Div2 more than once, discard the last 2 votes, I haven’t played anything else that belongs on the list.

[lordkosc]

1. Antihero , this digital boardgame has its hooks into me big time. Over 200 hours played this year. Qt3 needs to do the right thing and make sure everyone buys a copy.
2. Hollow Knight , amazing setting and lore. Also the music is out of this world.
3. Assassins Creed: Origins , what a fantastic recreation of Egypt , the story and combat are just alright, the setting and world are the main selling points. If anything I want exploration mode asap.
4. Cat Quest , I never though this cute arpg would get its claws into me, it did.
5. Prey , Since we had extra time to vote, I had time to play this! And its amazing, exactly the kind of world I love to explore and as always top tier Arkane Studios presentation.

---------********----------*******--------
EDITED 1/12/18 @ 9:40pm

Removed from Top 5, but still great games:
Aven Colony , Great casual colony builder, really scratches that itch to balance everything and make it still look good. ;)
CAYNE, a free isometric horror game, its short and the level art/design is amazing. Its a prequel to STASIS.

“Late To The Party” Award: Assassins Creed Syndicate , amazing world / level design, good story, two fantastic characters, a train! Overall it nailed the AC formula for me, and the final boss was not total trash for once. Best Assassins Creed game I played this year.

“Game Tom Loved that I did not Love Award:” Agents of Mayhem , I finished the main story and uninstalled, the world was bland and everything was so focused on grinding to level up the characters that I feel the game as a whole lost some of its uniqueness that their previous Saints games had.

I am shocked at how few 2017 games I played and actually liked this year, indie games dominate most of my list. These might have been top 5 votes if I’d of found time to play them (I own but haven’t touched Wolf 2 TNC, Sniper Elite 4, Death of The Outsider, DOS:2 , Tourment T of N, The Sexy Brutale). I buy too many games…

[arrendek]

Trust stusser to come up with a class of problems that I did not foresee in my tallying script.

[Miguk]

1. Age of Rivals - I don’t even regret spending 58 hours on this.
2. Afghanistan '11
3. Solar Settlers

I’ll save my vote for RimWorld until next year. I haven’t played Starfleet Armada enough yet to be sure I like it.