2012 Game of the Year Nominations Thread

Better to allow for an arbitrary length list then.

I'll consider that and thanks for the idea.

1. Borderlands 2, because 125 hours of playtime (and counting) can't be wrong.
2. Spec Ops: The Line, because it's an important game, even if it's not always a great game.
3. Crusader Kings II, because it is (finally) the perfect expression of the Paradox game they've been striving for for over a decade.

Runners up: XCOM, Guild Wars 2, Mass Effect 3 (which might have been my number 1 without such a disappointing ending.) And Far Cry 3 might be a potential late entry.

Oh and personally I consider Dark Souls ineligible, otherwise it'd be on here.

I am conflicted. I can't really agree with the rules allowing Dark Souls on the list, but there is no game I played more this year and there is nothing I can suggest in its place. So it goes.

1. Dark Souls - Well, it is the best game I played this year putting over 200 hours into it (so far). Superbly balanced and so much care and attention was put into its design that you have to marvel at it.
2. Fez - Wasn't expecting much but I tried the demo, thought it was great and bought it. I don't like platformers but this game put a spin on that genre and made it worth playing for me. Delightful art style and music.
3. Dishonored - Open gameplay (if not world) in a steampunk DX-ish type game. Not perfect, but I want more of this please. Also the only game to take time away from Dark Souls when the PTD edition was released.

Now I list other 2012 games that I played this year that were in the pool for me to choose from.

• Diablo 3 - Terrible narrative and average gameplay. I got a character to 60 but I expected more.
• Journey - It's on my backlog. Didn't play it.
• Mass Effect 3 - Got it on Amazon sale and tried to get into it but couldn't. Stalled.
• FTL - Yet another backlog game. Blame Dark Souls.
• Torchlight 2 - I stalled in this one in Act 2. I intend to get back to it and finish it. Ultimately it was a victim of the Dark Souls PC release.
• Need For Speed: Most Wanted - Just got this so it's incomplete. My initial impression is that it's too much Most Wanted for this Burnout fan, and that the Burnout parts will be too much for the Most Wanted fans. Made me more frustrated in 45 minutes than Dark Souls ever did.
• Sleeping Dogs - Just got this, too, for $13 on a GMG sale. I'll play it on my new PC. In theory it can possibly replace one of the above.

This is why I keep a gaming log.

I find the lack of Walking Dead saddening.

1. The Walking Dead
2. Mark of the Ninja
3. Frog Fractions

Dark Souls was released on the PC on August 24, 2012 and October 4, 2011 on the XBox.

IDK, so I'll ask all of you - should a game be ineligible because it was released one year on one platform and another year on another platform? There are plenty of games that happens on - what should we judge as the release date? Or, to put it another way, here's a quote from last year's GOTY thread:

Should it not be eligible even though a large portion of the player-base here couldn't play it until this year? My current thought is that since it wasn't released to a substantial portion of the player base this year, it probably should be eligible. The same would go for a game released in Japan one year and the USA the next.

As far as add-ons go, I think someone could nominate one, but it wouldn't get very far anyway. But I can see a case for making those ineligible. In the same respect, would a MMO expansion be ineligible? BC and WotLK made many GOTY lists...

Simple DLC...that's out.

It seems to me that by that logic, Dark Souls, for example, would be eligible to win GOTY in two different years, which seems off. The obvious (to me) solution is to have a PC category, in which Dark Souls would be eligible, and a console category, in which it would not. It would also separate the adult wheat (PC) from the juvenile chaff (heh).

Or, it's just a silly poll on a silly web forum, so what's the big deal? All in!

I think if it won in Year 1, I'd automatically make it ineligible for Year 2. It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing. If we ran two different forums - one for consoles and one for PC games - I'd probably do two different polls. But not with this group, I think. Unless someone posts a really good reason otherwise, I think this is generally a PC-centric forum and as such I'm inclined to include it on that basis.

1)XCOM-Has flaws, but it's a worth successor to the original.
2)Dragon's Dogma-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0CxIJBHBVQ still stuck in my head, I felt the pacing and difficulty could have been better, but still enjoyed the play through. I'm still interested in playing it again versus Mass Effect 3, so it gets the nod.
3)Dark Souls:Prepare to Die Edition-I can't believe I'm getting stuck on the same things I did before (anor londo archery range run), and still playing through. It's also my first time playing a sorcery build, and magic is easy mode.

1. The Walking Dead.

I played The Walking Dead last week for the first time and I think it has to do with visibility. I don't even remember what changed my mind, but up until two weeks ago I saw the Walking Dead as a mediocre Telltale adventure game in a universe I have little interest in. Every time I heard or read about it I immediately lost all interest.
Every time someone talked about it it should have begun with "This game is different. It's a decision based story with adventure elements. It has very little in common with the other Telltale games."

1. Dark Souls
2. Journey
3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown

You run into all kinds of problems going down this rabbit whole. A lot of people don't have this or that system, a lot of people don't really buy full-price games or can't afford to, a lot of people didn't have a PC that could run this or that game last year but now they do because the parts have gotten cheaper, and a lot of people might have been busy playing all the games that came out last fall and didn't get to some of them until January or February of this year. So should those games be excluded? It hardly seems fair, and if those are the games that people here are playing then that should be reflected in the polling.

Honestly, I wouldn't have a problem with letting people nominate whatever their favorite gaming experiences from this year were, regardless of when the games themselves came out. Dark Souls is an edge case if you're looking at release dates, but if you look at what the game has meant to this community this year (which is what I should think this kind of poll is intended to measure), it isn't an edge case at all--there's a well over 100 page thread about it, we did a podcast about it, and there are multiple people (I would guess somewhere between six and twelve when all is said and done) willing to call it the game of the year 2012 hands down. A game of the year poll that didn't even have Dark Souls represented would be ludicrously unrepresentative of the forum's gaming year even if the PC version had never come out, and letting people nominate things they played this year regardless of when they were actually released would sort out this kind of thing very handily.

On the flip side, it would allow all kinds of off-the-wall nominations, but I don't see that as a problem necessarily. If the best gaming experience someone had this year was playing Contra for the first time, sure, why not let them express that? It's not like we're accidentally going to declare a twenty-five-year-old game the GOTY because that person would be the only one voting for it anyway.

I don't know. It gets at what the point of this exercise is in the first place, I guess. If the point is to issue an aggregate ranking of games released this year that argues for one methodology, but if the point is to take a snapshot of the gaming the community has done this year that argues for another. Maybe two separate contests are in order, even?

Wow. I am grossly undergamed this year so I'm only voting for one.

1. Tribes: Ascend

Eligibility should be the same as for Oscars: the game must be released in the previous calendar year, from midnight at the start of January 1 to midnight at the end of December 31, in Los Angeles County, California, to qualify. Anything else is madness.


1. Mass Effect 3
2. X-COM
3. Diablo 3

DARK SOULS DOESN'T COUNT.

Crusader Kings II
Guild Wars 2
XCOM

1. Guild Wars 2
2. Diablo III
3. Borderlands 2

1. Assassin's Creed 3 (after both patches) because in spite of all the issues it really is a beautiful game and I really enjoyed the new things they put in: tree-running, new combat tools (rope dart = awesome), naval missions, and the greatest story twist in a video game I can recall in many years.
2. Saints Row the Third came out right at the end of 2011 so I'm including it. Just another great expansion on a solid game series, though it went by rather quickly if you didn't get into the DLC packs they put out.

I want to like that game so, so badly. Tribes 2 is still my favorite multiplayer shooter, ever, and Ascend does a bunch of stuff I like. But the F2P unlock crap is just so hideously overpriced I can't bring myself to get into it, and I don't love the map design.

I haven't played enough new games this year to nominate a best 3 but looking over the nominations so far I'm surprised by Diablo 3's poor showing. I haven't played it but with all the buzz around its release I thought it was going to be a shoo in contender for GOTY. Was it a bit of a dud or is it just up against some unusually stiff competition?

Oh, for sure. But it isn't just not as good as Tribes 2, the problems with it make me not like the game. So for me it's less viable as a GOTY pick than lots of other games.

A lot of us hated it, including me.

You hate a lot of things.

Yes, I do. Lots of people hated this one though.

1. Walking Dead
2. Dishonored
3. Borderlands 2

1. XenoBlade Chronicles
2. Mark of the Ninja
3. X-Com: Enemy Unknown

Regarding Diablo 3, I would consider it on my top ten games of 2012, but I had too many issues with how the game progressed to put it higher on my list. Chances are though that I'm going to be changing my #3 game constantly until the deadline is up.

Hate having to do this so early, as there are still so many games I've yet to get to or finish, and my list will most certainly be rearranged a couple years down the line when I finally finish what I'd consider to be the key players.

My list, for the moment, without consideration of Far Cry 3 and Yakuza: Dead Souls and several others, would probably be:

1. Dishonored
2. Dragon's Dogma
3. Spec Ops: The Line

Despite Spec Ops: The Line gameplay being a pretty basic cover shooter, which I hate, it is at least fluid enough to be not un-fun. The reason I'd put it in a top three consideration would be its story and tone. It's both the Apocalypse Now: the Game, which I've always wanted, and it basically shits all over the gung-ho nationalistic blowjob-fests of modern war shooters.

Subject to change, but my initial reaction:

1) Dishonored
2) XCom
3) Walking Dead

1) Dishonored
2) FTL
3) Crusader Kings 2

My list would be Dark Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls, but I played it in 2011.

1) Crusader Kings II
2) The Walking Dead
3) Mass Effect 3 (all for Mordin!)

Runners Up!

FTL: Tremendous fun, if only it had a little more. I'm expecting some wonderful mods in the future and dream of a Star Trek: Enterprise S3 conversion.

Legend of Grimrock: I was too young to play any of the old school dungeon crawlers like Ultima: Underworld so this was an entirely new experience for me. Never finished it but it was great fun.

Hotline Miami: Rewards for split-second timing, wonderful soundtrack, terrible bosses. Excellent game.

Forza Horizon: What a great open world racer hampered by the lack of any appreciable money sink and no long term play besides the standard fastest time against friends gimmick.

Max Payne 3: Not enough games have used Brazil as a setting. I fell in love with this game while ascending a favela. Popping out of cover to take pot shots at gang members and corrupt police officers. It reminded me of a light-gun arcade machine and entered my heart.

XCOM: This could have been the overall winner if only it had some more variety in maps, terrain, or voice effects. The initial offering of DLC was also a disappointment.

Dragon's Dogma: Talk about a beautiful game. I didn't come close to understanding everything about this game, nor did I get all that far into it. That said walking out of town to be assaulted by a gigantic griffon or to descend into the abyss of a dungeon only to confront a colossal troll made it an experience.

Mark of the Ninja: Wonderful graphics combined with excellent gameplay mechanics make what might be the best ninja game ever made. Everything is so fluid and well designed.

What do the Oscars do when a movie comes out on pc one year and on Xbox the next?

Give it to Clint Eastwood, same as always.

I've really not played enough of the top ranked games that came out this year (I blame miniatures and catching up on the backlog) but lack of information never stopped anyone from voting before.

What I've definitely played the most of this year, of the eligible games, is Diablo 3. Its an awkward nomination for game of the year because what came out at release was a bit of a mess design wise and it has taken them the best part of the last six months to fix that. Since the release there have been several large patches that have radically rebalanced things like item design (legendaries went from utterly terrible and boring items at release to reasonably exciting today, two handed weapons became viable), drop rates (there is now actually a reasonably good chance of seeing a legendary drop each time you play and you'll get bundles of rares) and multiplayer (the game no longer punishes players for playing a group as it did at release with exponentially tougher monsters and less efficient loot drops). They even added in a new high level quest of sorts with new bosses to kill.

What's very stupid is that they ended up losing most of the playerbase and goodwill they might have retained among former Diablo 2 players by taking a game that was poorly balanced in terms of effort/reward at release and then spending the first few patches fighting gold farmers by making the game even worse in that calculus for the average player. One of the most stupid decisions they made was making the first or second patch completely nerf one of their positive innovations; the mini dungeon reward chest and treasure goblins. So instead of players being excited to open these big glowing golden chests they just stopped going into the mini dungeons all together. When your game is already being hammered for rewarding players poorly its not a good idea to make it worse you chumps.

Anyway, most of that is now fixed and the game is a decent, high production value, loot piniata loop, except for the execrable crafting which is still worthless.

I guess the other 'big' release I played this year and enjoyed was the new X-Com and while I liked it well enough it didn't manage to completely take over my mind somehow so its sitting there with a squad of psychic champions ready to roll but still not quite completed. I guess it was slick and smooth but it didn't manage to surprise me or require so little mental effort that I can use it to relax (hello Diablo).

Third place probably goes to Guild Wars 2 by default, it was pretty cool for about two weeks mostly because of exploring the great world design but somehow it got it's hooks into me even less than X-Com long term, I guess Diablo just filled this niche in my schedule a little better.

I'm still looking forward to picking up Walking Dead, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 3, the newest Ass Creed and Far Cry 3 in the post X-mas period or in a sale at some point so if I play one of those enough before the deadline this is subject to much revision. Anyway:

1. Diablo 3
2. X-Com: Whatever the subtitle is.
3. DARK SOULS

1) XCom - they actually updated a classic
2) Tribes:Ascend - an FPS where the classes are actually different
3) Dear Esther - not much of a game, but the experience has stayed with me

Hopeful for FC3 as well.

I put a lot of time into Dark Souls PC, but the fact that it needed a third-party hack to make it work means that From don't deserve a GOTY

1: Dishonored
2: The Walking Dead
3: Mass Effect 3*

* This may change after playing Far Cry 3

1. Crusader Kings 2 Got so many fantastic stories out of this one.
2. Diablo 3 I'm a total sucker for loot pinata gameplay together with a skill system that allows lots of experimentation/optimization. And as an economist the development of the ingame economy side was very interesting for me to watch. Plus the experience of essentially getting paid to play is a new one for me.
3. XCOM so far, but may change to Dishonored, which I just started.

1. Dark Souls
2. FTL
3. X-COM

I prefer the PC version of DS for everything but the ability to do coop with my wife that only the xbox offers. But in every other way it's the definitive version of the game for me.
FTL is a wonderful game, and while the same length and boss-capping that limited replayability for me lowers it slightly I understand why the limitations are there. Within its ambitions versus my probably unreasonable expectations, it's pretty great.
X-COM is strange because even though I have a love-hate relationship with it, I really enjoyed thinking about it outside of actually playing it, and though it's beyond my tolerance for being crushed by a game I've probably enjoyed beaglerush's impossible ironman playthroughs more than most tv shows I've watched this year. As with Dark Souls, it's the experience beyond the game that really makes it memorable.

I'm a bit surprised that Torchlight 2 makes no splash at all so far, but I guess that reflects the way I feel about it. I wanted to like it more than I actually did. I may upgrade Mark of the Ninja if I ever get around to finishing it. I got a lot out of ME3 in both single and multiplayer, but ultimately the experience was really soured by the failure to live up to its predecessor's promises in terms of narrative choice. The ending wasn't the dealbreaker for me as it was for many others, as the problem was there from the start when it became clear that the big tensions of ME2's finale were going to be completely ignored in favor of a plain vanilla sense of allegiances and possibility. Loved the multiplayer even if it was silly.