Giant Bomb's Game of the Year Thread: Skyrim? Skyrim? Skyrim? Skyrim? Skylanders!

I was exaggerating a bit when I said "copy paste" but it still very extremely same-y and based on the same obvious tilesets. It's more complex than Fallout, but it still feels very much like an upgraded version of that same "oh, now it's a cave/vault/office building/factory/military base area" where areas start to run together even if they lay them out differently or add a unique large room at the end.

There was one quest early on where I actually laughed because the little story that went with it, along with the setting, honestly felt like a cut Fallout 3 vault concept that they find-and-replaced the relevant bits with Elder Scrolls.
 
People not getting Giantbomb and taking things bad-way-serious are crazy. Even if you don't like whatever order or winner they give it doesn't matter. They're absolutely transparent, record every single word, tell you from the start to the end it's just their opinion and it's not the end of the world. Giantbomb was built around not being super serious 'our word is gospel' site and instead is a bunch of friend's running a video game site we can actually relate to. Strong-arming them into being 'more professional' at expense of Giantbomb personality I'd think would be awful for those of us who love them for being that way, faults and all. The winning of the award doesn't change the accolades given to other games in the discussion since you literally hear them saying how fantastic it is. That doesn't become meaningless because it didn't win, and that's the great thing about how these awards are dome.
 
Dungeons in Skyrim are far better than in Oblivion, but not perfect and distinct enough so they still do brake the immersion a little bit.

I do understand why they picked it as their GOTY and it's not because "Brad is stubborn". Come on. SR3 is reaaaally great (about to finish it), but besides the story missions it is a shallow open world game with lot's of repeating stuff which is boring even if the mission types are crazy.

I was disappointed in Vinny giving up Dark Souls, I thought he would fight for it :)
 
Durante said:
Have you actually played Skyrim? Because honestly, I've seen dozens of unique dungeons in the game and never noticed any obvious copy/paste going on. Unlike Oblivion (or DA2 for that matter, which was even worse).
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I haven't seen copy-paste dungeons either, but that doesn't mean the dungeons aren't extremely similar to each other in layout. They're all one straight line from beginning to end. Almost every single time you need something, it's at the bottom of the cave (oh, look, a dragonpriest/draugr deathlord right next to a shout wall). So you can run through them on autopilot. Hell, there's even a 'cleared' flag to tell you that you're done with the dungeon, time to find the shortcut back to the outside.

Oblivion dungeons had some of this too, except on top of having a bunch of identical ruins, most of them you had no reason to explore. In Fallout 3 they did away with identical dungeons, but a bunch of them had no purpose. I kind of prefer it that way, it makes the world seem more 'real' -- like each location might've had a purpose originally that wasn't 'store goodies until player character wanders in to pick them up'.
 
Gestahl said:
Which game are you talking about again
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SR3, because Skyrim doesn't even have good main story missions.


EDIT: I really do despise the sameness of the dungeons. It is what made me quit the game. "Oh boy, I wonder if that more detailed draugar will come to life! Guess I should 1-hit kill it with my bow before it even gets the chance" x 100.
 
I'd say the only thing they really change is the layout. I remember hearing how every dungeon would be interesting and unique. I swear I've gone past the same Draugr graves in the wall and have a Draugr stand up at each corner about 20 times. And that would lead to the main room with caskets along the side and one in the middle with a Draugr that uses shouts inside.
 
Riposte said:
SR3, because Skyrim doesn't even have good main story missions.


EDIT: I really do despise the sameness of the dungeons. It is what made me quit the game. "Oh boy, I wonder if that more detailed draugar come to life! Guess I should 1-hit kill it with my bow before it even gets the chance" x 100.
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Those parts, and the parts at the end where all the caskets suddenly break open, own as an archer with the slow-down because it's essentially a 1-hit kill shooting gallery where every hit counts as a sneak attack.

The I open the chest/walk up the dragon wall, then out the door which leads me back to an earlier part of the dungeon that was a 1-way door.
 
Rabbitwork said:
lmao yeah man, gb content is real dense.
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Does it need to be dense for people not to get it? People don't get comedy all the time and it isn't because it's always deep. If anybody is getting aggravated or unhappy because of the Giantbomb goty deliberation then yeah, they don't get it. You can argue if you want, it really doesn't matter to me.
 
obonicus said:
I haven't seen copy-paste dungeons either, but that doesn't mean the dungeons aren't extremely similar to each other in layout. They're all one straight line from beginning to end.
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Yes, I feel that's a much more valid complaint than "copy-paste". In fact, it's one of my major problems with Skyrim. There are some dungeons which don't follow this pattern, but they are few and far between. It's a very similar situation to FF13 actually when it comes to dungeons, but it's alleviated a lot by the world, towns and buildings.

And of course they use the same textures/tilesets multiple times. What did you expect?
 
EmCeeGramr said:
Those parts, and the parts at the end where all the caskets suddenly break open, own as an archer with the slow-down because it's essentially a 1-hit kill shooting gallery where every hit counts as a sneak attack.
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This is my favorite part of skyrim. Just how broken it can be to use alchemy to fortify enchanting to fortify smithing so you enhance a bow to the point where it can sneak-attack one-shot an ancient dragon (with +dam archery enchants, of course). Or to enhance the crappiest armor in the game so it reaches the armor cap. (My character runs around in forsworn armor, with a forsworn bow, and one-shots everything.)
 
Durante said:
Yes, I feel that's a much more valid complaint than "copy-paste". In fact, it's one of my major problems with Skyrim. There are some dungeons which don't follow this pattern, but they are few and far between. It's a very similar situation to FF13 actually when it comes to dungeons, but it's alleviated a lot by the world, towns and buildings.

And of course they use the same textures/tilesets multiple times. What did you expect?
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For me it was the tilesets combined with the boring linear layouts, with those few interesting dungeons spread out so thin. If they were more open and sprawling I might have cared a lot less. Or, if they had just cut half of the mines, caves, and tombs and made the remaining ones more interesting and unique like those rare ones, I would have been a lot happier.

As it is, I'm getting really bored of the dungeon crawling and kinda just want to get on with the main quest and Thieves Guild quests and finish the game already. I guess I'll do the civil war one, but the characters in it are so dull and unlikable despite the admittedly interesting ambiguity that I don't want to.
 
cr_blah_blah said:
People not getting Giantbomb and taking things bad-way-serious are crazy. Even if you don't like whatever order or winner they give it doesn't matter. They're absolutely transparent, record every single word, tell you from the start to the end it's just their opinion and it's not the end of the world. Giantbomb was built around not being super serious 'our word is gospel' site and instead is a bunch of friend's running a video game site we can actually relate to. Strong-arming them into being 'more professional' at expense of Giantbomb personality I'd think would be awful for those of us who love them for being that way, faults and all. The winning of the award doesn't change the accolades given to other games in the discussion since you literally hear them saying how fantastic it is. That doesn't become meaningless because it didn't win, and that's the great thing about how these awards are dome.
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I don't think there's many fans of GB that don't "get" them, that's not the issue. The issue is wanting to hear a bunch of friends talking honestly about the games they enjoyed and which they want to win. For the most part that's what we get, until one of the staff members literally puts his fingers in his ears and the other one just throws his hands up and says whatever. I don't see why at that point I can't scratch me head and go, uh?

It's not me trying to turn them into super serious professionals and make them lose their charm, but seriously when one of the main editors of the site hasn't even played one of the biggest games of the year, and still votes for it, you can't help but question why they're in a position to do what they do then. I ain't losing sleep over it, but I can voice my opinions on it just like anyone here.
 
obonicus said:
This is my favorite part of skyrim. Just how broken it can be to use alchemy to fortify enchanting to fortify smithing so you enhance a bow to the point where it can sneak-attack one-shot an ancient dragon. Or to enhance the crappiest armor in the game so it reaches the armor cap.
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The best game of the series, Morrowind, is so broken you can beat it in under 15 minutes. Enchanting was absolutely the easiest to manipulate and expose. For all the faults Skyrim has Morrowind was far worse (jank, combat, bugs, exploits) but had an amazing environment. I think people tend to forget how Morrowind was despite it being amazing.
 
EmCeeGramr said:
For me it was that the tilesets matched with the boring linear layouts, with those few interesting dungeons spread out so thing. If they were more open and sprawling I might have cared a lot less. Or, if they had just cut half of the mines, caves, and tombs and made the remaining ones more interesting and unique like those rare ones, I would have been a lot happier.

As it is, I'm getting really bored of the dungeon crawling and kinda just want to get on with the main quest and Thieves Guild quests and finish the game already.
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You should. You will never find anything in a dungeon that's better than what you can craft. Which is sad. It would have been cool if they didn't use bullshit scaling and put some worthwhile unique items in the dungeon to make exploration worth it. For the first 30 hours of the game, I explored every nook and cranny and picked up everything I could carry. Once I got to the point where I realized that I would never find any worthwhile loot, the exploration aspect just died for me, and that's the only part of the game that is really well done.
 
I disagree with Brad. His argument was poor for Skyrim when he was just saying "they got it right" but Saints Row 3 kinda did that too. They pulled it back near the end though. However, Saints Row The Third felt like it could have used an extra 30-40% content in it. What was there was fun but there really wasn't much of it.

Personally, I'd pick Witcher 2, Portal 2 or The Old Republic(but that was too late anyway).
 
cr_blah_blah said:
Does it need to be dense for people not to get it? People don't get comedy all the time and it isn't because it's always deep. If anybody is getting aggravated or unhappy because of the Giantbomb goty deliberation then yeah, they don't get it. You can argue if you want, it really doesn't matter to me.
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yeah man, because if you have an opinion thats different from my cartoon avatar's opinion you don't get it.
 
Darklord said:
I disagree with Brad. His argument was poor for Skyrim when he was just saying "they got it right" but Saints Row 3 kinda did that too. They pulled it back near the end though. However, Saints Row The Third felt like it could have used an extra 30-40% content in it. What was there was fun but there really wasn't much of it.

Personally, I'd pick Witcher 2, Portal 2 or The Old Republic(but that was too late anyway).
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Damn, you lost me at the bolded :(
 
worldrevolution said:
I don't think there's many fans of GB that don't "get" them, that's not the issue. The issue is wanting to hear a bunch of friends talking honestly about the games they enjoyed and which they want to win. For the most part that's what we get, until one of the staff members literally puts his fingers in his ears and the other one just throws his hands up and says whatever. I don't see why at that point I can't scratch me head and go, uh?

It's not me trying to turn them into super serious professionals and make them lose their charm, but seriously when one of the main editors of the site hasn't even played one of the biggest games of the year, and still votes for it, you can't help but question why they're in a position to do what they do then. I ain't losing sleep over it, but I can voice my opinions on it just like anyone here.
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I don't think people can't disagree or voice that, there's no point of this thread if you can't. I'm more directing towards drive-by posters wondering how they can pick X over X.

Also, I don't think picking one over the other nullifies anything. Most GOTY awards go "this wins because it's the best and these were close", and with these we know it's not that cut and dry. For SR3 fans you know who loves it and Skyrim same. The actual award winning just doesn't mean anything to me regardless since we know their actual individual opinions, which is more important. That's just my position as someone who enjoys their opinions and doesn't necessarily care about real awards and the flawed system that's impossible to fix.
 
I think this thread has been, for the most part, very good at commenting and critiquing their deliberations.

Some folks get a bit passionate but most comments I have read have been pretty decent and critical in a fair way. I’ve seen much worse and sillier comments about other stuff they’ve done.

I’d have to imagine that one reason GB pouts out 10 hours of deliberation podcasts is to foster this kind of discussion, so I think it’s fair game when people are gonna go back and forth about it and question some of the decisions. Nothing wrong with that. I’ve enjoyed this thread a good deal.
 
Rabbitwork said:
yeah man, because if you have an opinion thats different from my cartoon avatar's opinion you don't get it.
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Maybe that's the way I came off without meaning so, but I obviously don't think that. Your snark doesn't really change that. I've never said people can't agree or argue but to be upset at a result that's meaningless because you had the actual meat of the conversation just doesn't make sense. It's like people getting mad at game review scores even though they have zero effect on anything. The actual award given out doesn't matter, the conversation in the process does. I'm obviously not broad stroking everyone single person in this thread. Using the term "get it" always insults somebody who it doesn't intend to. My point was directly about anybody that it's obviously directed at.

I was basically trying to say even if you don't agree with a winner the games you root for still get their moment and accolade, even if it's not an award we all know can't be well-rounded and all-encompassing. Just trying to give a different perspective outside of "Why didn't my game win?".
 
Not to defend Skyward Sword's overworld but Patrick's doing it wrong. You gain altitude so that you can dive with your bird and speed up. You don't have to constantly use the boost to get faster as it's more of an "I'm to lazy to do this one more time so I'll just boost rather than dive". It makes travel less annoying.
 
PounchEnvy said:
Not to defend Skyward Sword's overworld but Patrick's doing it wrong. You gain altitude so that you can dive with your bird and speed up. You don't have to constantly use the boost to get faster as it's more of an "I'm to lazy to do this one more time so I'll just boost rather than dive". It makes travel less annoying.
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That's the same exact thing Brad and Jeff missed out on in Batman. Dive and pull up to gain altitude to transverse further ground without grappling. But in Batman it's a pseudo-side quest that can possibly be missed out on?
 
I'm not sure why people expect caves and tombs to all look radically different from one another, there are a huge amount of unique environments in Skyrim already, especially compared to Oblivion.
 
Phonomezer said:
I'm not sure why people expect caves and tombs to all look radically different from one another, there are a huge amount of unique environments in Skyrim already, especially compared to Oblivion.
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The problem is that you're basically doing the same things in all of them, regardless of looks. Occasionally there might be a twist like the Yngol barrow, but by and large once you've experienced one cave/barrow, you've experienced just about all of them, and that's not good from a gameplay perspective.
 
FStop7 said:
It's pretty awesome, it is my personal GOTY.
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Darklord said:
I don't like MMO's or grouping with people(for the most part) and I've sunk 65 hours into it so far. It's really, really fun. Second best Bioware game this gen only beaten by Dragon Age: Origins.
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I'm not going to fault you for having different opinions, but from what I've played of it has been an absolute snore-fest. The main story cutscenes are nice, and you get to enjoy awesome Star Wars sound effects, but that's about it for me. The novelty of the cutscenes for sidequests wore off after the tutorial planet and weren't enough to mask the bullshit tasks. There are way too many massive and empty areas, too, and I think the art style is extremely bland. I've got many more problems with the game, but I'll leave it at that.
 
So Jeff was not allowed to cut L.A. Noire from the list because he hadn't played it, yet Ryan could vote Skyrim over SR3.

Over/under on hours of Skyrim Ryan has played, I'll set it at 3 hours. My bet is under.
 
Yeah, Ryan's motivation for picking Skyrim made no sense to me. He even said he agreed with Jeff on SR3 for GotY at the very beginning of the discussion.
 
Want to listen the the podcast but the spoilers are killing it, I dont understand why the have to talk about endings, these are the GOTY games here, people still want to play a bunch of them.
 
dreamer3kx said:
Want to listen the the podcast but the spoilers are killing it, I dont understand why the have to talk about endings, these are the GOTY games here, people still want to play a bunch of them.
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I feel like in some cases it might've been necessary to fully explain why they liked or disliked a game, but in a couple of areas in certainly wasn't. If I recall correctly when they were talking about Uncharted 3 they had actually agreed to cut it and were about to move on, then they switched back and just talked about the plot of that game for like 10 minutes. It seemed unnecessary, but I mean they give you plenty of warning so I can't blame them, I just took off my headphones until they had moved on.
 
The only game I remember getting harsh spoilers for was Catherine, but who cares about Catherine? I imagine anybody who does has already beaten it.

I feel so betrayed by Ryan that he was so quick to turn on SR3 despite barely playing any Skyrim. I've played Skyrim for around 200+ hours and have S-ranked it on 2 gamertags so I've done everything twice. It's one of my favorite games of all time, but I still don't think it should have beat Saint's Row.
 
i just wish they did video too (like tested podcasts); it'd be nice to watch them argue than just hear them.



also, y'all care way too much. Enjoy videogames. They are fun hobby, not a lifestyle. Anybody that self-identifies as a "gamer" should self-walk into "traffic."
 
Wow. I just got to the part where Brad talks about how the politics in Skyrim are unlike anything he's ever experienced. Just wow.
 
LiQuid! said:
The only game I remember getting harsh spoilers for was Catherine, but who cares about Catherine? I imagine anybody who does has already beaten it.

I feel so betrayed by Ryan that he was so quick to turn on SR3 despite barely playing any Skyrim. I've played Skyrim for around 200+ hours and have S-ranked it on 2 gamertags so I've done everything twice. It's one of my favorite games of all time, but I still don't think it should have beat Saint's Row.
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I care about Catherine because I'm a huge Persona 3/4 fan and I hear good things about the puzzle system. I haven't had time to play it over the past year with so many other games coming out, so I might as well wait for it to hit a lower price.
 
LiQuid! said:
The only game I remember getting harsh spoilers for was Catherine, but who cares about Catherine? I imagine anybody who does has already beaten it.
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It's not out in Europe yet so most of the guys who were upset are in EU. Thankfully, the spoiler Patrick mentioned is the least surprising one.
 
Guy LeDouche said:
i just wish they did video too (like tested podcasts); it'd be nice to watch them argue than just hear them.



also, y'all care way too much. Enjoy videogames. They are fun hobby, not a lifestyle. Anybody that self-identifies as a "gamer" should self-walk into "traffic."
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You really earn your user name.
 
Guy LeDouche said:
i just wish they did video too (like tested podcasts); it'd be nice to watch them argue than just hear them.



also, y'all care way too much. Enjoy videogames. They are fun hobby, not a lifestyle. Anybody that self-identifies as a "gamer" should self-walk into "traffic."
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I wonder why you registered to this forum.
 
Guy LeDouche said:
i just wish they did video too (like tested podcasts); it'd be nice to watch them argue than just hear them.



also, y'all care way too much. Enjoy videogames. They are fun hobby, not a lifestyle. Anybody that self-identifies as a "gamer" should self-walk into "traffic."
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I fucking hate this sentiment.
This is a forum. You're supposed to discuss things here. Not just blindly fawn over shit, cuz hey, its just dem videyogamez. Sunshine and lollipops turn your brain off at the door.
There is nothing wrong with being passionate about your hobby.
 
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