ResetEra Games of the Year Awards 2023
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In terms of roster size, absolutely. But Smash Ultimate is lacking in other aspects that hold me back from calling it a complete package. The online is abysmal, the single-player offerings are relatively lacking compared to past Smash games, & the training mode is laughable.
On the flip side, SF6 has room for improvement on accessibility options, World Tour's writing isn't anything to write home about, & the roster is pretty damn small (albeit for somewhat-understandable reasons).
Just wanted to chime in to say I've really enjoyed your analysis over the years, and it usually provides a more accurate/enduring ranking of the games involved. Looking back at 2019 for example, I remember seeing both Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds rank higher. I hadn't played either game at the time, but that stuck with me. Having played both now, they're undeniably top 5 games in 2019, and perhaps the top 2.
Sorry to nitpick a specific statement, but I'd reword that "past Smash game", singular, where that game is Brawl. Ultimate has a lot more single-player content* than 64, Melee, and Smash 4.
*Most of it being, admittedly, variations on Event Match. Classic Mode has reworked as a series of Event Matches per-character, Spirits are Event Matches except that you can choose your fighter, etc.
People other than me disliked BG3? Wow.
One of the absolute best games of last year, love it. A fitting swansong for Mimimi Games, though it still hurts that they shut down just after releasing this classic.
I hear you all, but Shadow Gambit.
It'll change your life.
One of the absolute best games of last year, love it. A fitting swansong for Mimimi Games, though it still hurts that they shut down just after releasing this classic.
"Relatively" sort of offsets any literal one ups man ship over 64 and Melee. Especially going from64 to Melee where ALL of it was new.
Bah I forgot to vote. Was always going to be an uphill battle for Alan Wake 2 in a year as good as '23 but top 3 is impressive. Fully deserved.
100%. Smash Ultimate has an excellent amount of quality single player content. It not having Brawl's Subspace Emissary or Melee's target practice doesn't change that point. Spirit Board and World of Light were/are great modes to play solo, not to mention training up your Amiibo fighter was a cool new aspect to the series for solo players.
I agree with what you said about SF6's World Tour and the game's roster size. I was pretty let down by World Tour in particular.
As for Smash Ultimate…
Yes, roster size. Also, quantity of stages and music, as well as a wide variety of ways to customize matches to your liking. No other Smash, let alone any other AAA fighting game, comes close really. Shoot, there's even a pretty good custom stage builder, making the amount of stages near-endless.
Online play in Smash Ultimate that's more than 1v1 is pretty bad, I agree. I rarely had issues playing 1v1 online against other players, however. Still, is it rollback netcode quality? Of course not. But it's totally serviceable for 1v1 matches, in my opinion. The vast majority of people aren't serious competitive players and don't care if there's a small bit of lag here and there in 1v1. Which, by the way, 1v1 is all that is offered in most other fighters (like SF6) anyway. And online play isn't an option whatsoever in Smash games pre-Smash 4, if I'm not mistaken.
I simply don't agree that single player modes are lacking compared to other Smash games.
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BG3 and TotK were my #1 and #2 votes. I think that at their cores, TotK is a better game, but it let open world sprawl dilute the experience. BG3 has one off battles with imps, spiders, and harpies, using enemies that AFAIK aren't used a second time, while TotK has to copy/paste everything, even boss fights, to fill in the map.
I agree. The only games i think that could beat Ultimate in terms of single player goodness is Brawl and maaaaybe Smash 3ds if you really love smash run
Smash 64's is the basic classic mode and nothing else
Smash melee's adventure mode is neat ar first but short and very repetitive
Smash 4 wii u's is just a sad sad joke of a singleplayer mode lol
Brawl's single player is messy but it is ambitious and fun for alot of its runtime even if i feel it drags way too much towards the end with the great maze
And Smash run from smash 4 3ds is addicting like crack
I know some people like break the target but...eh i never cared about that mode so for me its not a big bearing on my enjoyment
And in terms of event modes the games are basically equal with Ultimate having a whole lot of event mode it due to how its campiagn works
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Tears of the Kingdom would not work without it's open world. And comparing the work needed to create a CRPG mob to one found in Zelda is not really fair, the latter has to work on a whole other level.
Fair enough even if it was almost at the same time as the media create users were jumping ship as well. It left a big gap tbh imo. But you're on point on everything else.
I never vote in these and then I'm bummed by the results >.> Need to change that lol.
EDIT: Not really sure why there's a conversation about the singleplayer content of Smash going on, but I just want to pipe in and say it's weak AF. Smash and Mario Kart are both colossal but super crappy in that area.
World of Light is a lot of fights but the context is nonexistent so it turns into a pile of mush. Compare it to Libra of Souls in SCVI which is largely the same thing in terms of fights, but so much more engaging because it's dressed up on a fraction of the budget (Ultimate is almost definitely the most expensive game in the genre, going off the ludicrous amount of credited (and uncredited) devs).
EDIT: Not really sure why there's a conversation about the singleplayer content of Smash going on, but I just want to pipe in and say it's weak AF. Smash and Mario Kart are both colossal but super crappy in that area.
World of Light is a lot of fights but the context is nonexistent so it turns into a pile of mush. Compare it to Libra of Souls in SCVI which is largely the same thing in terms of fights, but so much more engaging because it's dressed up on a fraction of the budget (Ultimate is almost definitely the most expensive game in the genre, going off the ludicrous amount of credited (and uncredited) devs).
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This is such a great outcome! Thank you to everyone who put it together. I'm personally very happy that Zelda won, but every game up there was deserving.
Also, my blurb is in there for Prime Remastered, typo and all! That's awesome! Glad to see that and to see that the best game (in my personal opinion) won!
Also, my blurb is in there for Prime Remastered, typo and all! That's awesome! Glad to see that and to see that the best game (in my personal opinion) won!
A lot of big names winning (and pleasantly surprised to see Hi-Fi Rush in the top 10!)
Was hoping to see some hidden gems but the vote was pretty lopsided, lol. Also quite sad my best affinity mate seemingly closed their account :(
Was hoping to see some hidden gems but the vote was pretty lopsided, lol. Also quite sad my best affinity mate seemingly closed their account :(
Don't see anything wrong about this statement. TOTK is one of the most polished games ever released considering the scale.
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I mean ... as good as BG3 is - and I really love it! - they literally had to fix several thousand bugs and still aren't done patching.
I was one of those several people. I think it's a great game, and I still need to finish it, but its systems, while impressive, were not implemented in a way that felt intuitive or super fun to me.
Great work all involved! It's cool to see an Armored Core game in the top 10 year list.
Hoping the latest Zelda game receives some performance/graphics boosts on Switch 2 as I have on purpose been holding out.
More of you need to play Amnesia: The Bunker !
Hoping the latest Zelda game receives some performance/graphics boosts on Switch 2 as I have on purpose been holding out.
More of you need to play Amnesia: The Bunker !
I stand by that. I played both for ~100 hours.
In BG3 I hit bugs every hour of my playthrough, some of them really annoying, either breaking quests or requiring reloading saves.
in TotK, one time Link briefly got stuck in the floor, but I managed to wriggle him out of it. That's the only one I can remember. Given the amount of physics shit the game is doing it's amazingly bug free.
BG3 is still an amazing game obviously.
I'll be that curmudgeon and say it needed to not be turn-based. I dislike turn-based in any game that's not a strategy game, because there at least it's the main thing you grapple with. In the case of BG3 especially, because it also tries to be a couch coop multiplayer game, and the one thing that's more tedious than having to wait two minutes for all the enemy characters to make their moves while you cannot do anything, is having to wait until your partner is done with their moves on top of that. I wanted to play this game through with my wife, but she bounced hard after just the third battle. The game plays better if you just play by yourself (which to me is a pretty big indictment for role-playing games that want to emulate D&D), but I still find it mostly tedious.
That said, it was my number 6 game or so, so I still recognize the quality outside of the gameplay.
Again, great thread and work! Some feedback: Maybe it has been discussed but I would love to see a VR/AR category as well to see how those games ranked.
I don't get what the alternative to turn based would be for a game like this. I tried BG2 and I was completely utterly lost, too much happening at once, I could control what was happening. I had to pause a ton, which is basically turning it into turn based. I played older BioWare games like KOTOR and even DA was real time but even those there was a sort of taking of turns, and I would pause a lot. That's the nature of these games. Then you have the MMO style which is like waiting around for cooldowns, I don't care for that either.
The only game I have found to do real time action great but keep some of the turn base strategy is FF7 remake. Either go full action or do turn based, I normally don't care for some in between.
Hey look! Spider-man 2 won PS5's best game... maybe the PLAYSTATION BLOG wasn't rigged after all. [shakes head in the general direction of those who deserve this shaking of the head]
I wanted to say the exact same things. These two games were the best for me this year, so I'm glad to see them get some love.
BG3 is known for being buggy in its last 3rd while TOTK is known for not having much bugs at launch. I dont think saying Totk is more polished is an unfair statement
was there some controversy there? Sm2 scored higher and has far more widespread appeal than say FFXVI So it's not shocking, It winning best music over FFXVi was the only ridiculous thing.
TotK literally had an entire year of nothing but polishing, so I don't see how that's an outlandish statement.
Yes. I don't know how much was here, but on social media there were many calls that the results were rigged. And people claiming Sony really wanted to promote Spider-man as GotY, so they needed at least one win, so of course they fudged the results and not, you know, PlayStation fans going to a PlayStation website and voting on PlayStation games.
OP
OP
I've thought about it, but it's a really small list every year with relatively few votes. Maybe if it picks up steam
BG1 and BG2's real-time with pause combat is exactly what they could've done. It's a perfectly viable and fun alternative to turn-based, and many CRPGs use it. Just a matter of preference.
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Great to see Zelda win as it was my personal GOTY... but I did expect BG3 to win as it seems like a fantastic game (Not my style of game but can still appreciate games on their merits).
2023 was a great year!!
2023 was a great year!!
Yeah, I definitely prefer real-time with pause in these games.
BG3 combat is great, but something like Pillars of Eternity combat is the winner for me.
Not quite. The actions happen simulatenously and not sequentially even if you pause a lot.
In real time, you can pause the game to change your decision and react to something the ennemy is doing, whether it's moving, flinging the right spell, switching targets for fighters, etc.
In turn-based, you can't, you just have to wait your turn. And even that barely works for some actions (like retreating).
My time with BG3 has been 80% couch co-op with my wife, and I can't imagine that either working or being any fun at all if it was the crazy clusterfuck of "real time with pause" that BG1 was.
Isn't BG3 supposed to be a DnD simulator? We take turns in our DnD sessions, maybe we're doing it wrong lol
Isn't BG3 supposed to be a DnD simulator? We take turns in our DnD sessions, maybe we're doing it wrong lol
TotK is easily one of the most polished games I've ever played across Switch, PS5 and PC.
Runs smoothly and bug-free while looking beautiful across 250+ hours of playtime, in a game world far larger than most games, and definitely more complex. You're able to climb / destroy / combine nearly everything without limits, and everything is reactive with physics and chemistry and materials logic (even air flow and temperature), and the game is always recording the movement of everything so that you can rewind objects on an individual basis, all at the tap of a button. Not to mention how the Ascend ability would straight up break most games, with its ability to pass through ceilings.
There's a reason so many engineers and programmers from across the industry have praised TotK as a technological miracle, not only by Switch standards but relative to any system. It pulls off an enormous amount of complex and interweaving systems without breaking a sweat.
Runs smoothly and bug-free while looking beautiful across 250+ hours of playtime, in a game world far larger than most games, and definitely more complex. You're able to climb / destroy / combine nearly everything without limits, and everything is reactive with physics and chemistry and materials logic (even air flow and temperature), and the game is always recording the movement of everything so that you can rewind objects on an individual basis, all at the tap of a button. Not to mention how the Ascend ability would straight up break most games, with its ability to pass through ceilings.
There's a reason so many engineers and programmers from across the industry have praised TotK as a technological miracle, not only by Switch standards but relative to any system. It pulls off an enormous amount of complex and interweaving systems without breaking a sweat.
Ascend always seems to get neglected in these discussions compared to Ultrahand and Recall. Ascend is absurd. I have no idea how they managed to turn "noclipping through arbitrary level geometry in a giant open world game" into a bug-free feature.
🤣 God BG1 combat was terrible. I had no idea what I was doing in that game, my brain is not wired for RTwP.
RTwP makes games unplayable for me, so I'm beyond glad they went with true turn-based combat.
100%.
Pillars of Eternity was pretty great, in no small part thanks to the RTwP combat. Baldur's Gate II is the GOAT CRPG, and it also uses RTwP.
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