Board 8 > Games by year, ranked and explained - part II, 2005-2016

(+) Yeah! (+)

I feel like the phenomenon games of 2014 were the Five Nights at Freddy 1 and 2
I don't know how well they sold, but it definitely hit a segment of video game and non-video game culture pretty hard.
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I've never understood those games. is the appeal just youtube shock value? I don't think I've ever seen someone like those games authentically.
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idk man, all i know is that kids were buying toys and stuff of the characters.
The video game made cultural impact in some way.
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yeah no doubt
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2013: Dual Destinies > The Last of Us > Dream Team

2014: ...
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I volunteered at a summer camp in 2015 in a room of 8 year olds and all they ever talked about was Five Nights at Freddy's and Minecraft. I was there every day for a month and every single day there was a conversation about Five Nights at Freddy's. There was even an entire table in the room dedicated to clay figures in which they had accurately made every character from the series out of clay.

I've never seen anything like it before. I never thought I'd feel so out of touch about video games, let alone in my early 20s.
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i hate my new friends for not being into SSB.
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Five Nights at Freddys' success boils down to:

1. At the time, the original game was a very unique and cool idea. A horror game where you can't move at all and failure to keep yourself safe leads to an immediate and jarring jump scare - it's actually a pretty innovative idea (that has since been lost due to 4 sequels in 1-2 years). It was also easily accessible as it emphasized overall situational awareness over precise motor contols/reflexes. This is the reason why it was an initial success.
2. The games built up this weird narrative underneath everything that was also really only possible to understand if you paid attention to bits and pieces of dialogue and read wikis and talked to things with other people. This kind of thing works really well in the internet age. Every game revealed new details of the story to keep people talking. I only read up on all this after the fact but overall it seems like people were really entertainted by the narrative and satisfied with where it ended up.
3. Pretty much every character is ridiculously easy to market and sell as collectible toys and shit. This means a lot when a lot of the audience isn't actually playing the games! Those things sold like crazy.

Youtube is obviously the #1 main reason overall but lots of games get youtube-popular and don't have the weirdly enduring popularity of FNAF so there's definitely other stuff going on there.
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Yeah was gonna say you missed FNAF, you old codger

Also Goat Simulator, another game that hit big among the same audience.

And the GotY WWE SUPERCARD
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the PC got weird
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Conversations with my brother suggest to me that Five Nights At Freddy's made it big because:

1) It's clean survival horror. Kids love this shit and it's more or less okay to introduce them to it.

2) It's resource management. Not a lot of games delve into this niche.
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HaRRicH posted...

2) It's resource management. Not a lot of games delve into this niche.

Yup. This is what I was getting at with the game being about situational awareness much more than reflexes. You have to balance energy between lights & doors while also keeping track of camera feeds and maps while also listening for sounds in the distance. It's the kind of game I would have loved to play before the internet sucked any and all mystique out of it!
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KamikazePotato posted...

Five Nights at Freddys' success boils down to:

1. At the time, the original game was a very unique and cool idea. A horror game where you can't move at all and failure to keep yourself safe leads to an immediate and jarring jump scare - it's actually a pretty innovative idea (that has since been lost due to 4 sequels in 1-2 years). It was also easily accessible as it emphasized overall situational awareness over precise motor contols/reflexes. This is the reason why it was an initial success.
2. The games built up this weird narrative underneath everything that was also really only possible to understand if you paid attention to bits and pieces of dialogue and read wikis and talked to things with other people. This kind of thing works really well in the internet age. Every game revealed new details of the story to keep people talking. I only read up on all this after the fact but overall it seems like people were really entertainted by the narrative and satisfied with where it ended up.
3. Pretty much every character is ridiculously easy to market and sell as collectible toys and shit. This means a lot when a lot of the audience isn't actually playing the games! Those things sold like crazy.

Youtube is obviously the #1 main reason overall but lots of games get youtube-popular and don't have the weirdly enduring popularity of FNAF so there's definitely other stuff going on there.

The story and theories surrounding it are the biggest draw and what keeps it going I think. The creator is an evil asshole genius lol
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I voted 83 today - dat Lode Runner.

second place would be 80 thanks to Zork
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1984 for me. I put so many hours into 1942 & Marble Madness.
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1943 was my jam. Kung Fu is awesome though and I think it's 84 in arcades.
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I loved 2013 with TLOU and BioShock. But yeah, not a lot there otherwise. I just remember playing a lot of older games in 2013 and loving the year overall, but as far as releases go...
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What year was Slender?
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TheRock1525 posted...

What year was Slender?

2012
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This seems topical after some people in this topic have mentioned not 'getting' Minecraft (or some more recent popular games in general) - some dude just recreated Pokemon Red in its entirety, in Minecraft, 100% playable

http://imgur.com/gallery/QEDkx

I've played a good amount of Minecraft and I still can't comprehend this!
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No mention of the Halo MCC and the 2014 Ubisoft games (especially AC:U, and Watch_Dogs.)? They were pretty infamous in 2014 for, in the case of Halo: MCC, and AC:U, being broken messes, and in the case of Watch_Dogs, the released game having a graphics downgrade from the E3 2012 trailer.

Also, Gamergate started in 2014. The Gamergate movement claimed to be about ethics in gaming journalism, yet, upon closer inspection, it was really more of a harassment campaign that targeted female game developers like Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and other women in the video game industry with doxing, threats of rape, and death threats. Needless to say, the industry response was predominantly negative. The ESA, Blizzard, and Sony condemned the harassment of women from Gamergate. Even Nintendo has referred to Gamergate as an "online hate campaign".

KamikazePotato posted...

This seems topical after some people in this topic have mentioned not 'getting' Minecraft (or some more recent popular games in general) - some dude just recreated Pokemon Red in its entirety, in Minecraft, 100% playable

http://imgur.com/gallery/QEDkx

I've played a good amount of Minecraft and I still can't comprehend this!

yeah, see, I just don't get this stuff. I guess it's cool from a distance? the sandbox thing just doesn't appeal to me.

as for the 2014 drama -- to be honest, once you hit about 2011 I really start to lose track of video games. not because I'm not invested in them -- I am -- but they just get so big and spawling that it's impossible to keep tabs on what happened each year. there are so many subcommunities by the time you get into the 2010s. I'm sure there were happenings in WOW, League, Eve, Old Republic, DOTA, Minecraft, DayZ, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Street Fighter, etc each year. feel free to keep mentioning them though. Gamergate is obviously a huge thing that has infected the gaming community but I don't really keep tabs on it at this point.
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League hasn't had any real controversy yet. It's just kind of...there, sitting at the spot of being the most played game in the world (I think?) haven't checked in a while. It's pretty seperate from 'normal' games too so what happens in LoL doesn't influence, say, the next Elder Scrolls game.

The biggest thing LoL has contributed is how rapidly it's grown e-sports as a legitimate thing. EVO will always be the major thing for hardcore gamers but League world tournaments can reach a million viewers and games air on ESPN now. Who knows how long it lasts, but at the moment it's really cool to see. I went to a League final at Madison Square Garden with a group of friends and it was incredibly fun. There's a gigantic community there.
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I'm not even talking about controversy. League is a massive gigantic community that I couldn't tell you the first thing about. I can't speak the MOBA language either. and there are like 200k people who watch those matches each week!

I think League has to influence other games just by sheer force of its size. you can't ignore that. that's just one example, too. like, I'm close with the FGC and know all the players for each game. that stuff influences other games even if the bubble is relatively small. there are dozens of communities like that out there now. the speed running community, the dark souls community, the f2p mmo communities.. there's a ton I don't know about video games right now, whereas I knew a whole lot back when. it's just the nature of how big games have gotten.
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2015


Notable Games:

Axiom Verge
Bloodborne
Broken Age
Crypt Of The Necrodancer
Fallout 4
Hacknet
Her Story
Kerbal Space Program
Life is Strange
Metal Gear Solid 5
N++
Ori And The Blind Forest
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Rock Band 4
Rocket League
Splatoon
Super Mario Maker
The Witcher 3
Trails in the Sky SC
Undertale
Xenoblade Chronicles X

transience's take:

1 - Ori and the Blind Forest
2 - N++
3 - Life is Strange
4 - Xenoblade Chronicles X
5 - Hacknet

Overall: 3rd

Gamerankings:

1 - Undertale
2 - The Witcher 3
3 - Metal Gear Solid 5
4 - Bloodborne
5 - Fallout 4

GOTY Media Picks:

1 - The Witcher 3 (257)
2 - Fallout 4 (58)
3 - Bloodborne (31)
4 - Metal Gear Solid 5 (29)
5 - Life is Strange (12)

GameFAQs:

1 - The Witcher 3
2 - Fallout 4
3 - Bloodborne

2015 was awesome. Most games stopped going cross-gen. Indie games brought it bigtime. Some of the big games slipped up a little but they were rescued by The Witcher 3. Witcher 3 kind of blew everything out of the water. It's one of the biggest GOTY blowouts that we've had since we started tracking that kind of thing. The world was big, the graphics were great and the quests were detailed. It wasn't quantity or quality; it was both. It raised the bar that all huge budget WRPGs would have to match going forward. Fallout 4 came out in 2015 as well and it was liked, but not loved. Witcher 3 was just better. So was Fallout 3 to most eyes. I'm actually surprised that it fared as well as it did in GOTY. It didn't seem like anyone really loved Fallout 4 and it had technical issues galore. Basically, it was a Bethesda game. Maybe expectations shifted from 2008 to 2015.

The big sequel-y release of the year was Metal Gear Solid 5. MGS5 is a weird one. It played great and had all the emergent goofy stuff that people love these days. I've heard it described as the best Far Cry game yet. Casual fans loved it because it actually played well for the first time in the series. You could learn to love MGS1-4 but it wasn't going to nail the feeling of a great third person action game. MGS5 fixed that.

And yet, a lot of people bounced off of it because it eschewed the stuff that made Metal Gear, well, Metal Gear. All the insane story stuff and deep fiction was sacrificed. It felt unfinished. There was also a sense that it was pushed out the door because of all the drama between Kojima and Konami. Big fans kind of crucified this game for its narrative, and GameFAQs, a site that values narrative above all things, didn't even vote it into its top 3 of the year.

Nintendo put out Splatoon and Super Mario Maker. Splatoon was met with skepticism when it was revealed. It looked like a shooter for babies made by someone from Nickelodeon. Turns out it's actually kind of great. The change in mechanics made it feel fresh and the soundtrack is kind of amazing. It fits the feel of that game so well. Splatoon might be the greatest breakout game on the Wii U. As for Super Mario Maker, that game's kind of amazing. The UI is classic Nintendo and Mario's super-familiar 2d level design made it super appealing for anyone to get in and start making levels immediately. Unlike LBP, Mario Maker actually plays well so there isn't any struggle there. You can look at Super Mario Maker as the proof of concept for the Wii U tablet. It might be the only game that makes good on the system's promise, but that's enough!
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Also on the Wii U was Xenoblade Chronicles X. Man, that game is conflicting. Like MGS5, it eschews storytelling in favor of pure exploration. It nails that piece of things even better than the original Xenoblade. I absolutely love the world that they crafted for X. It's a shame that they pushed plot over to the side but I still think this is a great game. The Wii U is probably my console of 2015.

Of course, the real answer for this year and pretty much every year going forward is the PC. The Xbox One got Ori and the Blind Forest and the PS4 got Axiom Verge, but the PC got both. It became this great neutral ground where most games ended up, and usually the best version at that. Ori and the Blind Forest is amazing. It's probably the best metroid-like without the word Metroid in it. It's in my top 10. Ori has all the atmosphere and isolation that you'd want in one of those and it's great to run around and explore. It focuses on exploration over combat. It has a dynamic save system that allows it to be hard in spots without being frustrating. The music is great. I love it. Axiom Verge is decent but a little disappointing - the traversal is underwhelming and you don't get a lot of cool moves, just more guns. The game focuses more on combat than movement. It's good but it's not great.

Life is Strange came out of nowhere and took over 2015. Its narrative was crazy and it had an indie vibe that stuck with me super hard. There was so much theorycrafting around the world of Life is Strange, and while the ending wasn't as satisfying as it could have been, the ride was still great. This game defined 2015 more than any other. If any other game was on that wavelength, it'd be Undertale, the indie turn based rpg that became a bit of a meme game and struck a chord with a lot of people. The tumblr crowd took to this game and it became almost a mascot of an entire breed of people. Both Life is Strange and Undertale took over wide swaths of the internet in 2015.

More great games hit PS4. PS4 had a great year too. Rocket League really took over the PS4 thanks to it being free with PS+. Bloodborne was Dark Souls with guns! People really love that game. The highlight for me is N++ which is a desert island kind of game. There's thousands of levels and it's my favorite pure platformer ever. I've spent hundreds of hours playing N++ and I'm still not done. I can't say enough positive things about it. It just handles so, so well.

Just going to run down some more interesting stuff. Crypt of the Necrodancer takes the roguelite idea and crosses it with a rhythm game. The combination is brilliant and makes each second feel so good when you're on beat and nailing enemy patterns. I suck at Necrodancer but I like to give it an honest try. Sometimes I get a good run going and feel like a rhythm god. Her Story was a fascinating FMV game that's only barely a video game but also has a story that could only be told through an interactive medium. I love the interface and the Windows 3.1 aspect of it. Kerbal Space Program existed for years before 2015, but it was one of the best examples of early access games. That's a game that you have to put in time and effort to get anything out of it, but those who figure it out have a thrilling time with it that can't be matched by your average game. And finally, Hacknet is great. I love command prompts and unix shells and this game gives me that and more. Hacking into evil corporation computers and pacemakers was a great damn time. The DLC came out last week and I need to play that ASAP. Maybe after this list is done.

2015's awesome.
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I started playing Ori last time I was at my parent's house (because they have a Windows computer) but didn't finish because playing on a keyboard is annoying. Hopefully I'll remember to bring a controller next time I go home!
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first year with a literal goose-egg for me, i think! woot
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2015 was awesome
My 3 standout games
Rocket League
Mario Maker
Castle In The Darkness

Rocket League is my game of the year. I've put nearly 600 hours into it. It's the first time that a video game has made you actually feel like you are a player in a field playing an actual sport. It's just amazing. The community is huge and growing and the competitive scene is gaining ground as well. This will be a lasting game and a lasting franchise. IMO the biggest IP for 2015

Mario Maker sucked about 500 hrs of my life within the first 5 months of it's release. Basically the dream game came to fruition. It also taught us that making an actual good traditional level is really hard.

Castle In The Darkness like Blood Dragon, this game was pure unadulterated joy. I had a stupid grin on my face for pretty much every minute of the 25 hours I spent with the game. I died a lot but did not care at all. I even 100% it's achievements, I never do that. I need to go and complete the NG+ as I stopped half way though.

It's funny too, everyone raged about Axium Verge while Casle in the Darkness got like 1/8th the fanfare. While it's a fun game and has some good tunes, it never gripped me. I have about 3 hours of gameplay but it faded away, I should go back and play more of it but I just never had the urge again. I want to like it more then I do, I really do.
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I played Castle in the Darkness for.. let's see. apparently only 39 minutes. I thought it was longer than that! I didn't get too into it as you can see. I forget what exactly stopped me but I think it was just feeling like there wasn't anything that was telling me to keep playing.
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2015: Trails SC > Broken Age > MGSV > Life is Strange
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MGS3 is still one of the greatest games of all-time.

MGSV is fine, but I don't really have a desire to ever play it again now that I've done everything. There's really nothing to bring me back to it.
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Man... 2015 sucked... I think I bought at most 5 games that year? And I only played a couple hours of each except for one. And that is Splatoon. GotY for me no contest whatsoever. I guess all I played all year was Splatoon and LoL with a tiny sprinkle of Mario Maker. It's weird seeing how high everyone else ranks it lol. I just wasn't really into anything else that came out.
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2015 was dope
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I still never understood why Mario Maker never Included the ability to play as Luigi in SMB3, SMW, or NSMB.
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TheRock1525 posted...

I still never understood why Mario Maker never Included the ability to play as Luigi in SMB3, SMW, or NSMB.

Me either. It would have been a really simple thing to have. But also, I feel like they handled that game strangely. It had a lot of potential for continuous updates and new parts to use, and everyone kept thinking they were going to add in the ability to make slanted surfaces and some other basic Mario things that were missing, but it never happened. Then they dropped support. Then a while later they announced the 3DS version and it had nothing new, took out the costumes, and didnt allow created levels to be shared online. Idk, I hope they make a sequel with tons more to use, new game skins like the Mario All Stars updated visuals, multiplayer, and more.
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what does tran's favorites bracket look like based on this list
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ooh let's see

2009 > 1979
1989 > 1983
2006 > 1981
2005 > 1978

1995 > 1986
1987 > 1985
2001 > 2014
2008 > 2009
1997 > 1999 (yuck!)
2012 > 2007
1990 > 2000
1989 > 1996
1991 > 1988
2010 > 2002
1994 > 2004 (augh)
2011 > 2006
1998 > 1993
1992 > 2016
2003 > 2013
2015 > 2005

1995 > 1987
2008 > 2001
2012 > 1997
1990 > 1989
1991 > 2010
1994 > 2011
1998 > 1992
2015 > 2003

2008 > 1995
2012 > 1990
1994 > 1991
2015 > 1998

2012 > 2008
2015 > 1994

2012 > 2015
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Oh cool that's up now

This topic was pretty useful for a quick look at the big releases for each year as I filled out my bracket!
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Also yeah 1994 vs 2004 probably shouldn't be a round 1 match...!
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2016


Notable Games:

Ace Attorney 6
Another Metroid 2 Remake
Civilization 6
Dark Souls 3
Doom
Final Fantasy XV
Firewatch
Hitman
Hyper Light Drifter
Inside
King's Quest
Mighty No. 9
Mirror's Edge: Catalyst
No Man's Sky
Overwatch
Owlboy
Pokemon Go
Pokemon Sun/Moon
Stardew Valley
Street Fighter 5
Super Mario Run
Superhot
The Last Guardian
The Witness
Thumper
Uncharted 4
XCOM 2

transience's take:

1 - Another Metroid 2 Remake
2 - Ace Attorney 6
3 - Inside
4 - King's Quest
5 - Street Fighter V

Overall: 23rd

Gamerankings:

1 - Inside
2 - Uncharted 4
3 - Forza Horizon 3
4 - Overwatch
5 - Owlboy

GOTY Picks:

1 - Uncharted 4 (162)
2 - Overwatch (102)
3 - Doom (29)
4 - Battlefield 1 (16)
5 - Last Guardian (15)

GameFAQs:

1 - Final Fantasy XV
1a - Pokemon Sun/Moon
3 - Uncharted 4

This year gets an incomplete from me. I just didn't play very many games in 2016. The first half of the year was spent replaying the AA series and the second half I wasn't that into video games. Life gets in the way sometimes.

My game of the year is a fan remake of a game boy game. AM2R rekindled my feeling about Metroid. There's nothing like playing a new 2d Metroid and I got that experience again with AM2R. Fantastic remake with some great gameplay additions. Its shortcomings are entirely due to sticking to the Metroid 2 formula a little too tightly, and even those are not that bad.

Ace Attorney came back with a great game. Inside is an amazing art house game, one of the greatest ever made for sure. Its attention to detail and nuance are like that of a movie with lots of symbolism. It's weird to compare it to other video games just because there's an auteur quality to it that you don't normally get. Anyway, this is getting way too pretentious. King's Quest is a great nostalgia pull from me.

Street Fighter V came out to a lot of mockery for its lack of content and broken release. Those complaints don't hit me in the slightest. I'm not here to worry about story mode or fight money. SF5 is good - but it struggles in the metagame in the way that SF4 didn't. It's just not as fun and I get easily flustered with it. I like SF5, just not nearly as much as 4.

Anyway, those are my main games for the year. The world swooned over Overwatch. Overwatch didn't win GOTY honors this year which is surprising because it's all anyone really talked about in 2016. Its characters had tons of personality and the game was really accessible on lots of different levels. Shock and awe, Blizzard knows how to tune a multiplayer game. This game will be huge for a few more years. It's nice to see a new multiplayer FPS show up and beat everyone down. There are options in that space now that weren't there a few years ago when everything was Call of Duty or Halo.

But what about a single player FPS? Doom might have been the biggest revelation of 2016. It took all the strengths of Doom, went all in on them and made an amazing campaign. It was decidedly oldschool and fast. Its combat was satisfying and, I guess the word is 'visceral' but screw that word when describing video games. Doom killed it in 2016. I'll be curious to see if the FPS campaign scene will step up their game. 2016 was actually a great year for that - Titanfall brought a good campaign too.
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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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2016: Final Fantasy XV > Uncharted 4 > Spirit of Justice > Zero Time Dilemma > Steins;Gate 0 > Street Fighter V

Best year of gaming in a while for me

2017 seems to be following it up quite nicely, too.
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Oculus and Vive both released commercially in 2016, actually.

Gear VR was the only real "VR platform" before the year started and even it only hit on Holiday 2015
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did it? I knew it was close. those platforms came out with a whimper anyway due to supply constraints and, well, no actual launch software that anyone would rave about. I'm not even sure what the best 2016 VR game would be. you probably have to limit it to 'experience' and look to free things like rec room.
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The Lab was a fantastic tech demo from Valve

But there's not more than a couple hours there.
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transience posted...

Overwatch didn't win GOTY honors this year which is surprising because it's all anyone really talked about in 2016.

This bit is interesting to me. GameSpot gave Overwatch their GotY award and the like/dislike ratio for that youtube video is amazing. There's lots of complaining about giving the award to a game without a single-player campaign or a story. I dismissed it until a guy I know in real life told me he saw the award and disagreed with GameSpot giving it to Overwatch for the same reason. This dude has played Overwatch nearly every day since it came out, so clearly there's some weird underlying element to all this.

Let's look at the top GotY picks for the last decade or so:

2006 - Oblivion
2007 - Bioshock
2008 - Fallout 3
2009 - Uncharted 2
2010 - Red Dead Redemption
2011 - Skyrim
2012 - The Walking Dead
2013 - The Last of Us
2014 - Dragon Age: Inquisition
2015 - The Witcher 3
2016 - Uncharted 4

Every one of those is a game known 95% for its cinematic experience (hello Naughty Dog), or is an open-world game that gives you a ton of player freedom (and still has a strong story element). It makes sense to me - being able to appreciate a good story and/or getting to explore and do whatever you want are things that pretty much everyone can enjoy. Overwatch doesn't fit into that narrative. It's a competitive online-only FPS with a joke of a story. At least Call of Duty gives you some token cutscenes about the US military being super awesome! To people who don't care about those kinds of games it's probably very jarring. I think we subsconsciously treat game awards like movie awards in a lot of ways so it's not surprising that games without easily-digestible experiences rarely make the top of the list.

Additionally, I think a game like Overwatch is hard to quantify in terms of enjoyment, which makes giving it an award a tad weird. Naughty Dog games are designed to give the closest experience to as many people as possible. Telltale games are designed to give the closest experience to as many people as possible (while lying to them about how important their choices are). Open-world games are designed so that, even when letting the player go anywhere and do almost anything they want, they'll still have a fun experience that is similar to what the rest of the game has to offer. With Overwatch, you can go into a match and get your ass kicked and it won't be fun at all. You aren't an invincible Dragonborn. There's no reloads if you lose. You can try for an extremely long time to get better but you'll never be the best, and even if you somehow are, your team has a good chance at sucking anyway! It's a constantly changing and evolving experience, and one that isn't nearly as friendly as the other games listed above, which hand you your experience on a silver platter. People's opinions of Overwatch vary wildly depending on how well their last match went.

Plus - Uncharted 4 is going to be Uncharted 4 in five years time. Overwatch in five years will be an entirely different game thanks to patches. What if Overwatch in 2020 isn't nearly as fun? Do we change the award to "Overwatch in 2016 before Patch #X.X hit"? It's weird. Awards are meant to crystallize a piece of art in a moment in time and put it on display for years to come. They aren't equipped to handle games that can be patched.
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Not that interested in VR at the moment.

I actually played a lot of video games in 2016! Of course, like 200+ hours of that was DQ VII...
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