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

Someone has to make an image for the "Bethesda Loop" where game journalists gush over the new Bethesda game and say "they finally got it right!" and then when the next one comes out they say the last ones were bad games. Every time one of their games comes out it becomes a new "pillar of gaming" and then quickly just becomes another Bethesda game. When Brad straight up said that their previous games were "bad games", I laughed. How short sighted can you be? Bethesda has just been iterating on essentially the same game for their entire existence (and there is nothing wrong with that). To say that it is the second coming or something seems ridiculous to me.

Great site but these year end deliberations are kind of pointless when everyone has not played mostly the same games (which is impossible). People arguing for or against games they have barely (or have not) played is silly.
 
Finished. I enjoyed it although not as much as previous years. The final arguments between the two last games were ok, but not great.

Ryan's whole deal was just odd. Having lavished SR3 the guy chose a game he hadn't really touched. His reasons were kinda bare and the vote felt a bit fake.

Ah, anyways I thank Ryan, Patrick, Jeff, Brad, and Vinny (and Drew, Dave,etc!) for producing some great content this year in both video and audio form. My favorite VG website hub thingy out there. Here's to a another great year from Giantbomb!
 
Officerrob said:
Just how 'longer' should not be reiterated as 'better'. A game can be super long and still be repetitive and uninteresting. Length is not an indication of quality
Click to expand...

I really don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You know I'm not Ryan right? I don't even think Skyrim is better than SR3, and if I did, the length of it's content wouldn't be the deciding factor, the quality would.
 
StuBurns said:
Wackiness is not a synonym for fun.
Click to expand...

I dunno...riding around in a souped-up purple smart car and assassinating people with a land-shark while a ninja rides shotgun is pretty fun.

irwH62Bi8nLA6.jpg
 
The best Bethesda game wasn't even made by Bethesda.

New Vegas had far more interesting stories to tell than I saw from Skyrim.

And the gunplay was actually passable for me, as opposed to the horrible melee combat in Skyrim.
 
StuBurns said:
The boat that is the intro movie? You quit before you actually played the game?
Click to expand...
I'm just looking at my achievements. I know I remember a car crashing into someone's (the cousin?) garage, but I quit due to the way the car and character handled.

As for 'wackiness isn't a synonym for fun' well, I think you should read the rest of my post for an explanation as to why I think it's fun. The wackiness is an excuse for offering novel new ways of fooling around.
 
Zabka said:
I dunno...riding around in a souped-up purple smart car and assassinating people with a land-shark while a ninja rides shotgun is pretty fun.

http://i.minus.com/irwH62Bi8nLA6.jpg[IMG][/QUOTE]
I didn't say Saints Row wasn't fun. I said wacky doesn't mean the same thing as fun, that's it.
Click to expand...
 
RivalCore said:
Ryan (and Patrick) mentioned that facial animation in LA Noire couldn't be used for other games, what did they mean by that?
Click to expand...

I think they were referring back to something they said in the best graphics discussion that the technique they came up with for LA Noire wasn't something that would ever really proliferate into the industry because (in their opinion) it's time consuming and therefore expensive. Not sure how correct they are about that.
 
They got one thing wrong in their final discussion. They said SR3 never makes you play any other side stuff more than once. That's really not true. I've done multiple missions of guarding a driver, and that shitty guardian angel thing just in the story missions.

Skyrim has plenty of shit content too, but it's good content taken all together is enough to make at least three Saints Row 3s, while SR3 is pretty damn repetitive outside of the show stopper missions, which are mostly at the beginning and end of the game.
 
I didn't expect Dark Souls to make the list but was hoping that Vinny would fight for it harder (especially when both Patrick and Brad said they would back him up a little) and also would have liked Jeff to maybe bring up some stronger arguments against it, instead of just talking about a description mistake for one of the starting gifts.
 
Don said:
I didn't expect Dark Souls to make the list but was hoping that Vinny would fight for it harder (especially when both Patrick and Brad said they would back him up a little) and also would have liked Jeff to maybe bring up some stronger arguments against it, instead of just talking about a description mistake for one of the starting gifts.
Click to expand...


I think he liked The Witcher more than Dark Souls.
 
Aaron said:
They got one thing wrong in their final discussion. They said SR3 never makes you play any other side stuff more than once. That's really not true. I've done multiple missions of guarding a driver, and that shitty guardian angel thing just in the story missions.
Click to expand...

You don't have to do an instance of an activity more than once. But if a different character gives you the same activity, it counts as different. So guardian angel for pierce and kinzie are slightly different (different helicopter you pilot) while trafficking I guess they just had recorded lines for Zimos and Pierce.

Skyrim has plenty of shit content too, but it's good content taken all together is enough to make at least three Saints Row 3s, while SR3 is pretty damn repetitive outside of the show stopper missions, which are mostly at the beginning and end of the game.
Click to expand...

That's not how it works. You're talking as if there's math involved. Which isn't to mention that if you bury the good stuff deep in the chaff, some people will think there's only chaff. Not that I think Skyrim is all chaff. I like the game, I think. I liked Oblivion and F3 too, though. It's an incremental improvement, as others have said (and definitely much improved over Oblivion -- if they had a most improved sequel this year I think Skyrim would be a shoo-in).
 
obonicus said:
You don't have to do an instance of an activity more than once. But if a different character gives you the same activity, it counts as different. So guardian angel for pierce and kinzie are slightly different (different helicopter you pilot) while trafficking I guess they just had recorded lines for Zimos and Pierce.
Click to expand...

Counts as different to who? If you're in a helicopter sniping people pulling up in cars for a couple of minutes, then use a rocket launcher to take out cars for a couple of minutes after that, it's the same mission.

So far that is the only thing that'd felt cut and pasted, but it is there.
 
Officerrob said:
Packing a game full of 100 hours of mostly boring quests and bad combat doesn't make it more compelling either. The fact that Ryan's argument against SR3 was that he "only" got 30 hours out of it while Skyrim is just so much longer (even though he might have only played a few hours of it) is just stupid.
Click to expand...

I completely agree that the argument is stupid. It is like saying any soap opera is better than The Wire because it has at least 10 times the amount episodes.
 
Dany M said:
I think he liked The Witcher more than Dark Souls.
Click to expand...

When he sacrifices Dark Souls to be cut he actually says he'd personally put Dark Souls above any game on that list, which included the Witcher at the time. Pretty surprising but..then again, Vinny is a very smart man.
 
KorrZ said:
When he sacrifices Dark Souls to be cut he actually says he'd personally put Dark Souls above any game on that list, which included the Witcher at the time. Pretty surprising but..then again, Vinny is a very smart man.
Click to expand...
If only vinny had a top 10 list of his own we could know, damnit.
 
EmCeeGramr said:
What? No it doesn't. You don't go into 20 different Area 51s or Castle Clintons or Liberty Islands with rearranged layouts.

They're also completely different styles of RPGs with incredibly different scope and goals. DX isn't an open-world game, it's a mostly linear story based experience where they let you run around in one sandbox filled with sidequests with a defined character before dropping you into the next one. Skyrim is a classic Bethesda game, where you have a blank slate of a character who wanders around a giant open world exploring in the classic RPG mold.


But sure, comparing a notoriously buggy on-release game from the year 2000 with a great but non-open world to a AAA release in 2011 that proclaimed itself to have ultimate freedom and unscripted quests sure does make Skyrim look really good in comparison. Next up: we defend Saints Row jank by pointing out that the old Driver games were janky too!!!!
Click to expand...
What does "AAA release" mean and why is that significant? Just the budget? The bigger and more open the game is, the more need is there to re-use some assets/geometry, so again the question is why highlighting that aspect is meaningful. Shouldn't games be more buggy in 2011 than in 2000 given that they are more complex? The only argument of yours that makes sense is that the game does not live up to pre-release marketing hype, which is of course correct, but once again quite irrelevant, unless the point you want to make is that bethesda marketing oversells their game.
 
the giantbomb GOTY deliberations are my GOTY awards of the year.

Not because I have listened to them but because they are REALLY long.


Also the dictionary is the best book of all time because it has a lot of words in it.
 
cuevas said:
If only vinny had a top 10 list of his own we could know, damnit.
Click to expand...

I'm just going off of what he said on the Day 5 Podcast. Those are recorded after the top 10 lists are already done, maybe he came around and realized where his heart truly belonged; with Dark Souls.
 
syllogism said:
What does "AAA release" mean and why is that significant? Just the budget? The bigger and more open the game is, the more need is there to re-use some assets/geometry, so again the question is why highlighting that aspect is meaningful. Shouldn't games be more buggy in 2011 than in 2000 given that they are more complex? The only argument of yours that makes sense is that the game does not live up to pre-release marketing hype, which is of course correct, but once again quite irrelevant, unless the point you want to make is that bethesda marketing oversells their game.
Click to expand...

My point is that comparing two games doing two very different things, with different expectations attached to them, that are over a decade apart is so mindblowingly irrational that I can't even fathom how it's relevant at all. Pointing out "Well you can't complain about this game being busted in some areas if a well-liked game from a decade ago had some bugs," is about as relevant an argument as, "You don't like parts of Skyrim? Well PURPLE MONKEY DISHWASHER."

Also "shouldn't games be more buggy in 2011 than in 2000 given that they are more complex" is probably the worst thing I'll read in 2012!
 
EmCeeGramr said:
My point is that comparing two games doing two very different things, with different expectations attached to them, that are over a decade apart is so mindblowingly irrational that I can't even fathom how it's relevant at all. Pointing out "Well you can't complain about this game being busted in some areas if a well-liked game from a decade ago had some bugs," is about as relevant an argument as, "You don't like parts of Skyrim? Well PURPLE MONKEY DISHWASHER."
Click to expand...
No see, I'm just highlighting arbitrary application of "standards". Skyrim is in many ways broken and bethesda can only surpass the few other similar games in scope, in many ways Risen does the whole open world rpg thing better. Also I'm kind of curious where the expectations come from given the fact Bethesda's only competition comes from Risen/Gothic and gothic 3 aside they are smaller in scope. All games of this genre have certainly always been very buggy.

EmCeeGramr said:
Also "shouldn't games be more buggy in 2011 than in 2000 given that they are more complex" is probably the worst thing I'll read in 2012!
Click to expand...
No, it's a perfectly reasonable assumption, at least compared to yours, but of course does not take into account budget/team sizes. You are the one who brought up the fact that it's from 2000, indicating that the age had some sort of relevance to the topic at hand.

Anyway, the point isn't to pretend the glaring flaws aren't there, but rather that some of them are to a degree a necessity given budget/time constraints. If you sacrifice some of the openness and size, you can craft a more unique world (Gothic) and I would like to Bethesda to go somewhat into that direction.
 
Still can't figure out how LA Noir made it onto their top 10. It's like they tabled it and when they came back to it, it was locked in. Even Ryan said they could cut it.
 
Aaron said:
They got one thing wrong in their final discussion. They said SR3 never makes you play any other side stuff more than once. That's really not true. I've done multiple missions of guarding a driver, and that shitty guardian angel thing just in the story missions.

Skyrim has plenty of shit content too, but it's good content taken all together is enough to make at least three Saints Row 3s, while SR3 is pretty damn repetitive outside of the show stopper missions, which are mostly at the beginning and end of the game.
Click to expand...

Absolutely, it's nice to see other people saying this now. This has been my argument all along - SR3 has some pretty damn highs, but for the most part it's a mediocre open world game that pads itself with filler.

Protecting hoes, escorting cars from helicopters, shooting your way through buildings with no real pay-off, etc etc is what dominates a good two thirds of the game.
 
syllogism said:
No, it's a perfectly reasonable assumption, at least compared to yours, but of course does not take into account budget/team sizes. You are the one who brought up the fact that it's from 2000, indicating that the age had some sort of relevance to the topic at hand.
Click to expand...

It certainly does. If I brought up the fact that a modern game has archaic attributes that are unbearable in 2011 (and my main problems with Skyrim are quest design, dungeon designs, and many of its role-playing options, as I've pointed out many times, bugs being a far secondary concern that you've latched onto for some inexplicable reason), pointing out that a beloved game from the Nintendo 64 era had those attributes wouldn't make me a hypocrite.

I pointed out that Skyrim's quest and dungeon design are annoying and wearisome to me and the much-touted "radiant quest" system is a mix of randomly generated "go into this linear cave or tomb with a chest and a mean draugr at the end" quests and not-so-randomly generated "this otherwise unimportant NPC is immortal because we don't want you to even come close to failing a side quest chain." Nothing about "Deus Ex was a buggy game at release" rebuts that.
 
EmCeeGramr said:
It certainly does. If I brought up the fact that a modern game has archaic attributes that are unbearable in 2011 (and my main problems with Skyrim are quest design, dungeon designs, and many of its role-playing options, as I've pointed out many times, bugs being a far secondary concern that you've latched onto for some inexplicable reason), pointing out that a beloved game from the Nintendo 64 era had those attributes wouldn't make me a hypocrite.
Click to expand...
See my edited post. Also the reuse of assets/geometry aren't "archaic attributes" but often necessity depending on many factors.
 
Has anyone mentioned that Jeff was completely wrong about Skyrim's dungeon bosses being customized against you? It's crazy how vehemently he defended this theory and used it as a flaw.
 
syllogism said:
See my edited post. Also once again reuse of assets/geometry aren't "archaic attributes" but a necessity depending on many factors.
Click to expand...

I was using 'archaic attributes' as a corollary to my N64 game example (I had something about bad/nonexistent camera control or awkward text boxes in modern Nintendo games compared to the N64 classics, and how counting those against the new while still revering the old is not necessarily hypocrisy, but I cut it out due to it getting rambling).

I understand the reuse of assets and geometry, the problem is the very similar linear layouts exacerbate the problem. That, and I was responding to the idea that Skyrim is supposed to be the one that "does it right" when this kind of thing is very similar in the genre and Skyrim just has a slightly more polished and focus-tested version of it, not some kind of RPG revelation.
 
Xanathus said:
Has anyone mentioned that Jeff was completely wrong about Skyrim's dungeon bosses being customized against you? It's crazy how vehemently he defended this theory and used it as a flaw.
Click to expand...

It doesn't really matter if/why they are using ice magic, most of the dungeons do have the same enemies and bosses. All those draugr crypts blur together at some point.
 
EmCeeGramr said:
I was using 'archaic attributes' as a corollary to my N64 game example (I had something about bad/nonexistent camera control or awkward text boxes in modern Nintendo games compared to the N64 classics, but I cut it out due to it getting rambling).
Click to expand...
Well I don't really have a problem with your criticism as it's quite accurate and reasonable except in the sense that the expectations for quest/dungeon design for a game of this size shouldn't be the same as for a different type of RPG.
 
syllogism said:
Well I don't really have a problem with your criticism as it's quite accurate and reasonable except in the sense that the expectations for quest/dungeon design for a game of this size shouldn't be the same as for a different type of RPG.
Click to expand...

Exactly! It's a problem with the genre in general that I've always disliked, and Skyrim really does little to help it with its dungeon layouts, with a few standout (and extremely commendable) exceptions. That was my whole point. Skyrim is not the Second Coming, the new Revelation of Gygax that redefines Bethesda RPGs. It does some very good things, but it also does some pretty janky things that have always been a problem with the genre, problems that some commentators are acting like have been abolished with Skyrim. It also does some weird offputting things that previous Bethesda games didn't do!
 
Foliorum Viridum said:
Absolutely, it's nice to see other people saying this now. This has been my argument all along - SR3 has some pretty damn highs, but for the most part it's a mediocre open world game that pads itself with filler.
Click to expand...

It's not really something people started saying now. The poster you're replying to didn't like the game very much, and has said so in other GB threads. Most of the SR3 criticism comes from people who loved SR2 and felt the game removed some of the stuff they loved. The people who didn't like the game just haven't showed up in the OT much.

As to mediocre, that's a different strokes sort of thing. Keep in mind that a lot of the stuff you call mediocre is what the people who loved SR2 enjoyed the most.
 
What's the new stuff you found weird MC? For the most part almost all of my problems were related to problems I've found inherent in Gamebryo games.
 
still Listening to day 5 (helped that I had to drive some today, so I listened to the first big chunk, Still have an hour and a half left).

First off I love that they didn't cut when they had to reset the wi-fi, was nice to hear it just go without Ryan cutting out the lull.


I honestly though Brad and Patrick were gonna start throwing punches over Rayman, Like it got really heated over that game.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Skyrim Grandma is retiring at 90 years old
Social 
48
230
salva replied
Skyrim : Gen Alpha Edition
17
1K
Pejo replied
Avowed: Less Diet Skyrim and more Skyrim Zero
2 3 4
174
11K
Wimbledon replied
Skyrim SE vs Anniversary edition for PS5?
18
5K
Panajev2001a replied
'Loading Screens in Bethesda games are necessary' says former SKyrim Lead
News  2 3
126
3K
Three replied
Top Bottom