Quarterlies 2017! The Qt3 forum readers’ choice for the best game of 2017 is …

Games
1

HORIZON ZERO DAWN!!!

  1. Horizon Zero Dawn (Sony Entertainment Interactive) – 10 first-place votes, 81 points overall

Horizon_Zero_Dawn
Horizon_Zero_Dawn1920×1080 358 KB

Of the ten people who voted this one first, seven included comments.

So, to recap:

  1. World building
  2. Robot dinosaurs

Interestingly, the runner-up, Prey, did not garner the second-most first place votes. That honor went to the third-place game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which got only one fewer first-place vote than the overall winner. But Prey got more overall votes (18 to 16) and due to the scoring system, the proliferation of seconds and thirds was enough for Prey to win by a point (64 to 63). In fact, Prey didn’t even get as many first-place votes as the tied-for-fifth-place finisher, Mass Effect: Andromeda. But apparently, you either loved Mass Effect: Andromeda, or it didn’t even make your top five. The point difference between Prey and Mass Effect: Andromeda wasn’t close (64 to 47). The fourth-place finisher, XCOM2: War of the Chosen, got the same number of first-place votes (5) as two games that didn’t even make the top five: NieR: Automata and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus which came in ninth and tenth, respectively. The other game that tied for fifth was Divinity: Original Sin 2. Can you have a second Original Sin? This didn’t bother four people who voted it first. It ended up with 47 points, which tied it with Mass Effect: Andromeda.
So, our top five (er, six?) is:

  1. HORIZON ZERO DAWN
  2. Prey
  3. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  4. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
  5. Divinity: Original Sin 2
    Mass Effect: Andromeda

Two shooty/action RPGs, a straight-up RPG, an action-adventure, an FPS, and a turn-based tactical strategy game. Once again, no flight sims or wargames make the top five. Or the top ten, actually. Here is the rest of the list.

 7.  Super Mario Odyssey
 8.  Total War: Warhammer 2
 9.  NieR: Automata
 10. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Thanks to everyone who voted. A special thank you, papal indulgence, and prayer for rain goes to @arrendek who wrote a script that basically just generated the cue cards for me to read from, kind of like the things Billy Crystal gets to help him every year.

We had 92 voters this year. Last year (according to the spreadsheet) there were 84. The year before that, there were 94. So it seems like there is a pretty stable voting public, although the individual voters change from year to year. Or do they? You can see for yourself by going to our Super Google Spreadsheet (courtesy of @arrendek)

Since this is the first year in which we have had real-time vote counting, I was actually wondering if anyone would change his or her vote at the last second to alter the outcome, which could easily have happened this year with Prey only beating Zelda: Breath of the Wild by a point for second, and Divinity: original Sin 2 and Mass Effect: Andromeda tying for fifth. But I guess anyone who was that invested in Nintendo results already had Zelda first.

2

Nice. I can live with these results.

3

A bold experiment that I didn’t think through before enabling, and only thought about it after it was too late to pull back. Next year I’m totally open to locking down the results, except maybe the individual votes tab so people can verify their votes.

Thanks for everything, @Brooski, and everyone.

Also, I really feel like we should do some kind of comprehensive poll down the line to answer questions people have. I noticed most of the top games are really popular, were on consoles, etc, so I personally wonder how much of this is just popularity contest vs. best game ever. Maybe we can drill down and get to it. With questions such as “which of the top 20 games have you played?” and stuff like that.

But I’m crazy about stats. Just ignore me.

4

It makes me very happy that Mass Effect Andromeda made it. Thanks to the organisers!

5

Antihero and Cat Quest were robbed! ;)

Good top 10… Seems I really need to get a PS4 this year.

@tomchick , as you can see , Agents of Mayhem got 1 point. You really like a game that the forum feels differently about. :)

6

I guess we already went into this a little bit when Dave was doing his pre-emptive “Zelda was robbed” routine in the voting thread.

It’s clearly not a platform popularity contest. The top 6 has a PS4 exclusive, a Switch/WiiU exclusive, a PC exclusive, and three multiplaform titles. (And there aren’t really any Xbox exclusives to speak of, these days). A lot of people here have access to so many gaming platforms that they can play pretty much anything that gets released.

It also isn’t anything like a sales number popularity contest. Otherwise Zelda would have easily beaten Prey; or PUBG with 28 million copies sold would be an easy first, not behind Wolfenstein II with <2M copies. Quickly eyeballing through the list, I’d guess Age of Rivals at position 18 is the biggest outlier. That game has ~10k sales across all platforms; this forum is probably a noticeable portion of the active user base.

On the other hand, it’s obviously a forum popularity contest, as it should be :) Nobody’s going to vote on a game they didn’t play. And I’d assume very few people voted on games that they didn’t actually like, just because they perceived them as somehow being “objectively good”.

I find it hard to believe you’d get a good enough coverage with a separate poll.

I would have guessed in advance the forum post counts for each game to be the best predictor. Here’s the counts (from dedicated threads) for the top 30:

I guess there’s some correlation there, but a ton of outliers too. Now, some of those outliers might have been predictable in advance. It’s not like there’s that much to say about Mario Odyssey. Or in the other direction, I recall ME: Andromeda having a pretty contentious thread as people came in to just to participate in the trainwreck.

But e.g. Destiny 2’s fall from grace is pretty amazing and obvious from that table. People were so enthusiastic about that game for about a month. I would have expected it to at least be in the top 20 just based on that. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is another odd one. (Edit: I just didn’t spot the thread where most of that discussion is, until it got bumped just now).

7

I don’t know how realistic this is, but this is the kind of thing I want to know to contextualise peoples picks. I tried to do this for my picks by giving some of the games I’d not played.

8

There are a lot of games I have not played but have watched as my kids played, should that count? Some games are fine watching because of the story and my kids consoles skills are 500% better than mine (so I actually get to see more of the game quicker than if I was playing)

9

Interesting… Seems a little surprising to have a platform exclusive win. If HZD were the only good game on PS4 all the PS4 owners would vote for it while the platforms with a breadth of offerings would see divided votes. Do these results imply something like:

Best PS4: HZD
Best Nintendo: Zelda
Best PC: Divinity
Best cross platform: Prey/XCom/Andromeda

Not that it matters, but interesting. Thanks for arranging this Brooski & Arrendek.

10

I absolutely think that you can watch someone play games and get basically as much out of it as you wood playing it. I played Oxenfree and watched A Night in the Woods, and am now firmly of the opinion that, for me, those games are better watched than played.

But when you talk about games where someone’s console skills are better than you, that sounds like your talking about a game where a significant amount of the experience is mechanical gameplay interaction. And for those games I think watching them is not enough, I have to feel the thing in my own hands.

11

Thanks @Brooski and @arrendek for your work on the Quarterlies. I love these forum GOTY events.

I’ve either played and liked or want to play 9 out of the top 10 games.

For numbers 11-20, this is true for 6 of them.

12

Theoretically, but doesn’t really apply this year. PS4 had a great year, as did the Switch and PC. Only console lacking on the games front was Xbox IMO. But just looking at PS4 I’d say these were all good to great games released on it in 2017 on PS4 loosely ordered in level of exclusivity. Horizon, Yakuza 0, Lost Legacy, Persona 5, Gravity Rush 2, Grand Tourismo Sport, Nioh, Nier, Hellblade, Nex Machina, What Remains of Edith Finch, Pyre, Resident Evil 7, Wolfenstein, Prey, Night in the Woods, etc.

13

Well, my top-ranked game came in in the top 20 (barely), so that’s how in tune I am with the zeitgeist. And a game I helped make came in 33rd, so thanks, @Enidigm, @divedivedive, and @Vesper!

Thanks, @Brooski and @arrendek, for the mad administration!

14

Fist bump other Race for #1 fan!

Granted, as I said, it was first by default for me. Being literally the only 2017 release I played.

Of course were there no impediment I would only add 5 more top 20 into my ‘want to play’ list.

Zelda
Mario
Xcom
Total Warhammer
Through the Ages

This should surprise literally no one who knows my tastes.

15

Proof that QT3 is the classiest place on the internet.

16

I won three games in a row on Hard this morning! I’m the king of the world!

17

This was as interesting as ever so thanks @Brooski for boldly taking the helm and @arrendek for your awesome automation!

18

Is this the first time a console exclusive took first place? In the past, it felt like voting for a console-only game was like throwing my vote away.

19

Huh. I think it might be, actually. Great observation.

20

Thanks for stepping up to run it this year guys (you’ve surely got enough notifications by now, yeah)! Glad the voters came to a reasonable decision ;)

My hot take observation: There were so many good games released in 2017 that you could randomly pick anything from our top 50 without going wrong. QT3 has always had some divergent tastes from the mainstream but I wonder if some of the surprising results were due to vote dilution – 155 games were nominated this year vs 114 games last year.