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

Games
165
  1. Horizon Zero Dawn - One of the few games I got the platinum trophy. I was making good progress through new game+ on ultra hard. I still need to go through the DLC. I just loved the rich story, world building, writing, characters you care about, and amazing soundtrack.
  2. Destiny 2 - I’m one of the few people who like the more streamlined systems who can’t devote their lives to min/max this game. I’ve bought 4 copies (3 on pc and 1 on xbox) so I can play with my kids on the pc which looks just amazing. Still some of the best shooting around and the raids are just pure quality. Another amazing soundtrack too.
  3. Assassin’s Creed Origins - I’ve only ever finished 1 and 2 and about 6 hrs of 4 so I haven’t really been keeping up with the series. After the long break from this series it has been great getting back in. It’s incredible looking on an xbox one x (probably the best water I’ve seen yet). I wish there was a bit more depth to the combat and as usual there is the standard ubicrap open world crafting stuff which is fine but a bit familiar at this point. But the stabby stabby and first person arrows are still fun after the 51 hrs I’ve sunk into it so far.
  4. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
  5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I have several of the games mentioned by others that I still need to get to at some point but currently Destiny 2 and origins is taking up all my time. So some of these might have made my list if I actually had time to boot them.

  • Hollow Knight - my son is really into it right now.
  • Prey
  • Mass Effect Andromeda
  • Neir Automata
  • Nioh
  • Shadow of War
166
  1. Total War: Warhammer 2
  2. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
  3. Age of Rivals
  4. Secret World Legends
  5. No Man’s Sky
167

  1. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle
    I’m not a huge fan of Mario, the Rabbids or Firaxis’ XCOM so imagine my surprise when Ubisoft took all these things and mashed them together into something that unexpectedly and consistently excited me. The Rabbids and XCOM are the best things to come to the Mushroom Kingdom since go-karts, and I never thought I’d say that. The rhythm of exploring, puzzling, battling, unlocking and discovering new stuff was hypnotic to me, and the sense of humour throughout irresistible, infectious and refreshingly un-Nintendo and off-kilter. Mario + Rabbids’ spin on XCOM’s turn-based combat is what really sets it apart though. It’s to XCOM what Doom is to your modern first-person shooter; it’s about movement and not taking pot shots from behind cover. Dashing across the map, team jumping, bouncing off enemies, rolling through pipes and chaining attacks together, often with multiple heroes – but sometimes with one – was glorious. I don’t get excited about DLC much, but I can’t wait for more.

  2. Antihero
    Slight but oh so very sly. Antihero is a carefully crafted and crafty digital boardgame that’s best played against friends. Most of my 200+ hours with it have been spent playing the async multiplayer once or twice a day in 10-20 minute bite-sized chunks so… that’s a lot of chunks! They’re crunchy though and dense with tough decisions to chew on so it’s been a constant source of thoughtful turn-taking and friendly competition with fellow forum folk. Now it’s on iOS and Android, my girlfriend calls it Antisocial.

  3. Cryptark
    Decide on a derelict, plan your heist and gear up. Execute your plan, or improvise trying. Profit? Cryptark is a thinker’s shoot 'em up about tight margins and that (gun)heady space between playing it safe and risking it all.

  4. Nier: Automata
    Nier: Automata spectacularly explodes in so many directions creatively it’s hard not to be impressed. If anything, it’s too much to process at times, but I hungered for more answers and explanations, and they were there amidst the rubble and wreckage once the dust had settled. Above all though, Nier: Automata kept surprising me from the beginning right up until the very [E]nd, through its structure, mechanics and forth-walling breaking shenanigans to its presentation and dynamic soundtrack.

  5. Gorogoa
    Frameception: we must Gorogoa deeper. I’m still not entirely sure what this is about but it’s beautiful, unique and dizzyingly well designed.

Honourable mentions:

Splatoon 2
Splatoon was probably my favourite online shooter alongside Titanfall 2, but Splatoon 2 just builds upon the strengths of the original in almost every way. Salmon Run alone is worth the price of re-admission but coupled with all the other new content and quality of life improvements it’s a no-brainer.

Mario Odyssey
I’ve not finished this yet but what I’ve played has been great, even if the structure of the game is getting a little too familiar now. I agree with Tom that it’s aesthetically incoherent (at its worst: hello New Donk!), but at its best its bold and still beautiful. The moons themselves aren’t the rewards, it’s how you find them that often is. The motion controls can go fuck themselves though, and Jaxi beats Nier: Automata’s boars for best desert mount.

Cosmic Express
Easy to pick up but, crucially, easy to come back to if you put it on the backburner. Some puzzlers I really struggle to return to if I stop playing for too long (see Induction) but Cosmic Express always welcomed me back to its simple, elegant but nevertheless fiendishly difficult and clever little puzzles.

Battlerite
If I’d played this more, with more friends, I think this could have reached my top 5. I’ve had some amazing moments playing Battlerite with my brother though. I hope there’s plenty more to come.

Invisigun Heroes
One of the best local multiplayer games I’ve played all year, but unfortunately one of the least played due to lack of friends visiting. Booo!

Sumer (still in Early Access)
Probably the best local multiplayer game I’ve played all year. It’s a MULE-like worker placement game where each player competes for the goddess Inanna’s favour to rule Sumer. Again, lack of local friends has made playing this difficult but I can’t wait to play more. The solo AI however, is surprisingly adept at panning me.

SnipperClips
I love this game but I really need to sit down and play it more with my girlfriend. It’s such a charming and clever game that’s unlike pretty much anything else I’ve played. Splatoon 2 and Mario + Rabbids distracted me from it.

Cuphead
My girlfriend and I got all the way to world 3 a couple of months ago but haven’t been back to it since. It’s an exceptionally tough game but it rewards experimenting with the lesser used and seemingly worthless weapons and abilities. It also rewards pigheadedness. Porkrind would be proud.

168

I haven’t a clue what it’s about.

169
  1. Persona 5
    Grabbed me and didn’t let go. A step up in playability from its predecessors. Amazing music and extremely stylish. Great story and characters. Holy crap ending. A little bit longer than it strictly needed and one or two, thankfully short, terrible representation of gay characters.
    I almost put this number two, but then I listened to the soundtrack again and couldn’t do it.
  2. Hand of Fate 2
    Like its predecessor this is sort of a palate cleanser in between games for me. I’ll drop in, play a route or two, and drop out. Something about the combat makes me uninterested in playing for prolonged bursts I think. Everything else is amazing; they’ve taken a solid framework and made everything more varied and better at the same time, which is not easy. I love the mini-stories that come up during gameplay, I love the varied goals of each stage, I love that weapons and followers each have their own unlockables.
    I think I’ll play a round or two tonight.
  3. Xenoblade Chronicles 2
    I had a really stressful year, especially the last few months, and this was a soothing balm I could relax into. Combat required thought but not too much (once I read enough forum posts to figure it out). I could relatively mindlessly go down a checklist of quests, feeling like I had accomplished things. The world was gorgeous and exploring it led to rewards in the form of treasure or beautiful vistas. The characters and story were extremely anime and nothing great but nothing bad. The only downgrade is some of the terrible outfits for some of the women characters; unfortunately one of the worst is a main character who I couldn’t escape.
  4. Rayman:Legends Definitive edition for Switch
    I played this with my daughter and the coop was extremely well done and we had super fun with it. It is telling that she is willing to play this again but not Super Mario; of course we also didn’t finish this because it gets way too hard for us about halfway through. What we did play was fantastic.
  5. Super Mario Odyssey
    A great time in coop with my daughter. We played through the whole story, and then she watched me play to get the next amount of moons. She checked out of that about halfway through.
  6. Golf Story
    Clever, funny, great dialogue. I loved this little gem.
  7. One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows
    A lovely little strategy dicefest roguelike dungeoncrawler that plays, setup to teardown, in an hour. Ticks a lot of my buttons in a compact and very well designed game.
  8. Hearthstone: Dungeon Run
    Little bit of recency bias here, but still. I liked this better when it was called Dream Quest but this version is awesome as well.
  9. Mass Effect: Andromeda
    A flawed but fun game, not unlike ME:1 in that regard. Lots of plot hooks that will now never be resolved. What happened to the rogue AI! That was the coolest part!
  10. Pandemic Legacy Season 2
    This is kinda cheating because my group has played all of one month. But I can already tell it’s going to be awesome.
170

  1. Horizon Zero Dawn. I equally loved hunting down mechanical horrors and excavating three levels of setting – the present, the near past, and the distant past. The main character was a great companion on the trip. Aloy was a barbarian Anne of Green Gables: bright if naive, chaste, indefatigable. Just as her fiery locks only let her blend into certain clumps of plants, she was never quite able to blend into society. (Perhaps this led to the one problem I had with the game. She would walk around these beautiful settlements and towns but never be able to interact with them on more than a surface level.) The landscapes were a love letter to the U.S.
    National Park System.     After beating the game, I finally was able to connect to its open-world cousin The Witcher 3. (I had bounced off it on two previous tries.) I now appreciate that earlier game’s characters and sidequests, but as impressive some of the enemies in that game are, they still lack the scale and the fear that a fight brings against a Truckasaurus.

  2. Torment: Tides of Numenera. Numinia? Namnimneya? Anyway, I loved traipsing through the this vision of the far weird future. It wasn’t quite as well written as the descriptions in a Jack Vance Dying Earth novel, but it came close, and the plot was better than his usual efforts, too. The pages and pages of text I read was well worth reading. I think the adventuring party I gathered to my enigmatic PC were the most interesting of the available options – an empathic blob, a helpless little girl, and a woman who walked around wearing a harness of imprisoned Hers from other timelines – but I imagine I’ll try another playthrough sometime with different characters and a different playstyle. Almost every aspect of the game was a twisted reflection of the already twisted design choices made in Planescape: Torment. The protagonist isn’t just an amnesiac with an unusual connection to the antagonist, but that is its starting point. The rules aren’t as arcane as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition, but they are harder to initially grasp. The jaunts to other points of interest and even other planes of existence are even stranger and more unexpected, often echoing through the rest of the game. Even P:T’s central question, “what can change the nature of a man?” is assumed to be answered; the next question is “yeah, but whaddya gonna do about it?” Elements of a great story, a fantastic setting, engaging characters, and a diverting set of game mechanics are shuffled together and dealt out in a generally appealing configuration.

  3. Spirit Island Take that, you lousy symptoms of colonialism.

Other games I enjoyed the hell out of, but they didn’t come out this year: D&D 5th edition, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Elite: Dangerous (and I only got that in the most recent Steam sale), FTL, and of course the Dune Wars and Fall From Heaven 2 mods for Civ 4.

171

With two days left, Horizon: Zero Dawn is leading this voting. snicker

172

Yay, someone is actually using the tally sheet! :P

Edit: Not to say that Brooski isn’t, I’m sure he is! :)

173

It won in a landslide over at BF.

174

It’s a good game. I’d argue it’s also likely that more people played it than did a lot of other games on the list because it was perfectly timed as a release and it’s on the most popular console platform AND it was Sony’s biggest game of 2017.

I think Prey is at number two for similar reasons but that benefits from cross platform sales.

…that’s not to knock the quality of any game on the list. I just think that weighted lists like this often favor the most popular platforms. 2017 was a super year for gamers.

175

I only played one game that was released in 2017, and technically it was simply an iOS port of an older board game!

  1. Race for the Galaxy - played a ton of matches online. An old standby of playee many dozens or hundreds of times face to face. A worthy inclusion for me.
176

I am voting @arrendek the MVP of this year’s Quarterlies.

@tomchick that is a sports reference, it means Maximum Voting Power.

177

Wow. Just… Wow.

Oh, and apropos of nothing, Zelda almost certainly sold 3x as many copies as Prey. Zelda and Horizon also sold in roughly comparable numbers (though that’s a bit hard to reason about). It’s a good thing that nobody tried to imply that we should be normalizing the votes by sales numbers.

Oh, no. Of course not. It was a very respectful snicker.

178

Can’t agree here, the game did not sell well. It certainly sold less than most other things getting voted on. I mean I think it’s great and it’s in my top 5, but you can’t argue that game is making it from exposure.

179

The snicker is directed more at the guy who runs this site and his take on Horizon and yet it’s leading the voting.

180

Fair enough :)

181

I think it had more exposure than people think. Big publisher. On sale seemingly weekly throughout the year. Perfect fit for the Qt3 audience. Available on all platforms save Switch.

The thing that sticks in my mind though is release timing. It hit at a good time, just like Horizon. I was just looking at the 2018 schedule and it looks like Shadow of the Colossus is Sony’s “Horizon” for this year. I don’t know how much people are hyped for that though? Release slate for 2018 is weak so far.

Also, @jsnell I really liked Horizon. It’s my #6 game on the top ten at ResetEra.

182

To be fair to Dave, he’s always had this perspective on the “QT3 audience” every year, so it’s nothing personal about a particular game. :)

183

It’s in the data! Look at more mainstream boards and the differences are obvious. You even have two Qt3-like data points to go by with BF too.

184

Someday, the truth will strike some that we are individuals!