LogFAQs > #877216053

The other revelation was Hitman. It went episodic to great success and pretty much took over 2016. Hitman works best as a game where you can focus on a single map for an extended period of time instead of blasting through the game like it's a single campaign. There was so much fun to be found in the corners of Hitman and its structure let it all draw out. Hitman has always been pretty fascinating but it never hit big until this game.

I haven't talked about the GOTY and that's because there kind of isn't much to actually say. Uncharted 4 is probably the best Uncharted game. It has a great story and plays as well as those games can play. I just don't think it's especially exciting anymore. It wins a lot of people over for its setpieces and graphics and etc and that stuff really is great - but for me, I get tired of it. Uncharted was probably the best game on a technical level and it could really wow a player who had their first Uncharted experience in 2016, but I don't think it really captured the hearts and minds of people like it did in 2009. Better game, worse experience, if that makes sense.

I would talk in depth about FFXV but I haven't played it. The biggest news is that it and The Last Guardian existed, released and were actually pretty good. FFXV didn't blow players away but it was an enjoyable game with some heart. Last Guardian frustrated players just like all team ICO games do but it also had tons of heart. I still need to play both of these. Maybe I will when they actually finish FFXV sometime in 2017, hopefully.

Those were the good games of 2016. The biggest controversy was probably No Man's Sky, a game that got some really wild hype about its do-everything-go-anywhere premise, coming out and being generally lackluster. The devs went dark for months. No Man's Sky's controversy is mostly around expectations - some promises were broken but really the problem was that it just wasn't all that good. As it turns out, millions of players don't actually want procedural generation for everything! It felt a lot like Spore 2.0.

If there was one trend I'd point to from 2016, it'd be VR. VR has existed for a few years at this point but I feel like 2016 is the first year that it tried to make good. PS VR came out. I think Oculus and HTC Vive hit in 2015 but I'm not sure and can't be bothered to look it up. VR at this point is legit but limited by budgets and scope. You aren't making a high budget VR game because it would just cost too much for what the install base is right now. Proper VR costs about $1500 to get in the game from scratch and PSVR + PS4 is ~$800 for a low-end experience that isn't all that great. There's promise there, tech demos and hints of what's to come, but by this point there wasn't a game that made you want it. If you want VR, you want it for the tech and not for the games. Someday.

2016 isn't bad. I haven't mentioned what is probably the biggest game of the year - Pokemon Go, a geolocation game mixed it with Pokemon that blew up as big as any video game has since maybe Pokemon Red/Blue. For a few weeks it was insane. I brought my kids to a kid's museum one weekend and there was a Pokemon Go event there. We had to park a mile away and take a bus there. Pokemon Go was wild. Anyway, 2016 - a year of good stuff that I just didn't get that into due to general apathy. I'm getting old!
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xyzzy