LogFAQs > #940671025

Semi-Finals Day 40
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 55.20%
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 44.80%

Prediction Percentage 21.57%

The very hot upset pick which looked to be the favorite since the first round and grew basically every round since then finally happened. As it looked like, The Witcher 3 would have little trouble beating Skyrim to secure its spot in the final match of the contest, a feature it by all means deserved to achieve.

The match was never truly in doubt, but both games today had had significantly bad board votes up until this point for whatever reason. On top of the fight for the spot in the finals, theyd also fight for who had the worse board vote. It turned out Witcher 3 won both of those. Skyrim lead for a very short moment, but Witcher 3 couldnt close the match at first. It was only 15 votes ahead at the freeze and Skyrim managed to cut that down to 6 at the next update. Witcher 3 pulled that up to 13 again and then basically doubled its lead for a couple of updates as it rose to the easy victory we all thought it would have.

It surprises me that Witcher 3 has such an awful board vote that it could do to Skyrim what Skyrim had done so far. Its pretty clear to me that the board has a lot more respect for Witcher 3 than for Skyrim and while most of us favored Skyrim before the contest, Im sure everyone had Witcher 3 in their second chance bracket, which would be the one alive at this point. A lot of us went perfect there. I suppose Witcher 3 does best in Europe, but even so, this seems weird to me.

Theres a possibility that Witcher 3 SFFd Skyrim a bit here. Theyre both from the same genre and played by the same people where Witcher 3 is viewed as having evolved on a lot of things Skyrim did. Skyrim is already third in the x-stats before that SFF so it certainly ended up looking better than it seemed at first. Ultimate and Super Mario Odyssey were SFFd to a point where we cant tell how theyd do against Skyrim, but we thought that before the contest too. In the end, Skyrim managed to look basically as good as most of us thought, its just that Witcher 3 boosted from a variety of different things. The Bethesda anti-voting exists, but it seems minimal enough, I suppose it doesnt hurt Skyirm a lot. It wasnt an issue then.

Its no coincidence that the Game of the 2010s came down to these two open-world games facing another open-world game. Breath of the Wild, Witcher 3 and Skyrim are the pinnacle of a genre that has largely dominated this decade. Not only has the most popular games been huge overworld games you can spend hundreds of hours in, games have been criticized for being linear more than ever before.

Skyrim deserves a lot of that praise. Maybe it isnt the best of the genre at the end of the decade, but it sure influenced it the most. Open world games would not have been as big today if Skyrim hadnt existed, thats for sure. It could only underperform relative to expectations this contest, but perhaps next contest it will be an underdog instead and can surprise us. Its impossible to tell if well know more of the next Elder Scrolls game then, but well certainly see Skyrim again.

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Guinness Book of World Records is the name of the diary that belongs to azuarc, the winner of the Game of the Decade II guru contest.