Game of the Decade

[Mister Jack]

It's 2020! I know we have a Game of the Year thread for 2019, but this is a little different. This is about picking any game between 2010 and 2020 that you feel defines the whole generation for you. If some time traveler asked you to look back at one game from the last ten years and point to it as being the most influential, the most memorable, the most popular, or even just better than every other game, what would it be? I know what my pick would be.

 

 

To this day I still maintain that Witcher 3 is the best open-world game ever made. Yes, better than Grand Theft Auto. Yes, better than Red Dead Redemption 2. Yes, especially better than Breath of the Wild. It's just amazing what they put together here. A story I actually care about? Check. Side quests and missions that are actually interesting? Check again. Combat that can be challenging but not too frustrating? Check. Choices that actually matter? Check check check. On top of that, Geralt is probably the best open-world protagonist I've ever played. In almost every other open-world game the main character, especially a custom one, gets so much shit dumped on him or her by every other character and all they can really do is sit there and take it. There are so many times when I wish I could just push a button and tell them exactly why what they just said is fucking stupid. Witcher 3 actually heard my wish because Geralt is a master of snark and an absolute riot, but despite this you can still take him seriously as a character and care about his journey. If there's anything that pushes this game over into GOTD territory, though, it's the open world. It's wonderfully designed, full of color and interesting things to see and people to meet. A pet peeve I have with many open world games, and this does apply to Rockstar, is that sometimes it feels like it's just big for the sake of being big. There are long stretches of nothing that are supposed to impress me but just make me feel very aware that I am playing a video game right now and I become impatient to get to the next objective. Witcher 3's world is big without feeling too big.  There are a generous amount of fast travel points so you don't have to waste too much time riding aimlessly unless that's your thing. Most importantly, the world is littered with a bunch of really cool stuff to see and do. Thanks to the bizarre human characters and diverse monster population you can never really be sure what the game will throw at you next. And all of that isn't even getting into the fantastic expansions that I still remember fondly even today. I imagine most people have played this by now, but if you never got around to it because you feel like you have to play the first two games before you do (which is why it took me so long) then put that feeling aside and just do it. Skip the first game. Your choices in it literally do not matter and it's barely referenced at all aside from some old acquaintances of Geralt's. Watch a Let's Play or something of the second game. Witcher 2 is good and your choices in it do matter, but if you don't have time to put it on your backlog then just do what you gotta do to let yourself play Witcher 3 because it is the game of the decade.

 

Edited January 1, 2020 by Mister Jack

[TCP]

My picks:

1. Breath of the Wild
2. Red Dead Redemption 2
3. The Witcher 3

[TheMightyEthan]

Yes, but why?

[TheMightyEthan]

 

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

 

BotW was obviously a great game, but even beyond that, it really encapsulated a lot of the changes gaming went through this decade, and it managed to do it without losing the magic of the series (*cough*Assassin's Creed*cough*). It took a series that had been largely the same formula since Ocarina of Time*, smashed it to bits, and rebuilt it from the ground up, while still feeling like a continuation of what came before. Where previous Zeldas were divided into the overworld and dungeons, with progress gated by specific items, and puzzles that cannot be completed without them, BotW goes full open-world, with system-driven gameplay. I don't know of anything more 2010's than open-world, system-driven. You get every ability/item within the first couple hours of the game, and if you want you can completely ignore everything and run straight to the final boss (not that it's easy, but it's possible). On the flip-side of that, the game is very good at sign-posting where to go next, without railroading you into it. My problem with lots of open-world games is that they're too open, they feel too aimless, and I lose interest without a clear mid-term goal. BotW always has that mid-term goal, which allows you to screw around to your heart's content, but then as soon as you get tired of it and want to progress the narrative it's fairly clear where to go next. And it accomplishes this without cluttering the map with icons. The only icons on your map are the one quest marker (which you can determine which quest is tracked, or turn off completely) and ones you place there yourself. This means you don't just play the minimap, you actually look at the world and figure things out from there, which sounds like it could get frustrating, but the world is so well designed that you rarely lose your direction if you want to find it.

 

The Hyrule of BotW feels huge, and open, and empty, without being desolate. It's post-apocalyptic, but it's a green post-apocalypse. There are a just few small settlements, that truly feel like remnants of a collapsed civilization, clinging to life in the wilderness. The emptiness makes it the most real-seeming "wasteland" I've yet played in. It's not Rapture, where the lore says there's a semi-functioning society still, but the world looks completely destroyed with only crazed psychopaths in sight. Nor is it the densely-populated wasteland of Fallout, which has too much civilization for how disorganized the lore says it is, but simultaneously too many hordes of bandits and monsters right next to the settlements. Each village in BotW feels isolated from the rest, but also like it could be reasonably self-sufficient, and the monster camps are close enough to be threatening without being so close as to make you wonder how the town is still around at all. And on a more minor note, the towns feel like actual towns, unlike the "towns" in Fallout that consist of two houses and five people, with one quarter-acre farm.

 

In short, Breath of the Wild exemplifies the trends of the decade, while also doing them better than any other game I've played.

 

Honorable Mention:

 

Prey, for similar reasons to Zelda. Talos has all the charm of Rapture, without the ludo-narrative dissonance of there supposedly being a functioning society still around somewhere, and the systems-based approach to problem solving is a joy.

[MetalCaveman]

 

Looking at my save games I have well over 1000 hours in this game. Got the Platinum, and I pretty much know every secret area, boss, cheese, etc.  

 

There were plenty of games I enjoyed, but when looking back at the decade, the one that defined it for me is, without a doubt, Dark Souls. \m/ \m/

 

Everything about it was awesome, the soundtrack, the atmosphere, enemy design, yes, Bligthttown was a nightmare, that's undeniable, but it doesn't bring down the rest of the game IMO. 

 

[danielpholt]

I actually wrote a pretty sizable list of all the games from the 2010's that I really enjoyed, however no ones interested in a long list of good, they want a shortlist of GREAT! And so here we are.

 

Here's my 'shortlist' My top five if you will. The more observant among you will have noticed that there is in fact seven games; I couldn't decide between Superhot, Cuphead and Destiny so I ended up including them all, because choices are hard and I'm not man enough to make one okay?

• Destiny
• Superhot
• Cuphead
• Super Mario Maker 2
• Rocket League
• PUBG
• Overwatch

Anyway onto my favourite-bestest-super raddest-game of the decade? And the winner is??

 

Spoiler

Rocket League

 

This was a fight between PUBG and Rocket League. Ultimately Rocket League is on Switch, and I've continued to go back to it. PUBG whilst arguably holding my favourite gaming moments of the decade, just can't compete in the post 'I've had a baby and sometimes I just wanna kick back and enjoy a nice calm, not remotely horrifying video game' world that I now live in.

 

Rocket League is without a doubt, one of my favourite games of all time. And I'm bad at it, but that okay because as good as the great players are, being entirely average still allows you to have an absolute shed load of fun. I've easily spent over 600 hours of real-life time playing this game across PS4 and Switch, and when every other game that takes my life hostage (PUBG, Apex, Mario Maker and Overwatch) eventually lets me go, Rocket League is the thing I go back to.

 

Not bad for a game I got for the price of a months worth of PS+.

 

Edited January 21, 2020 by danielpholt
Idiocy

[toxicitizen]

Dark Souls is the no-brainer answer for me because it's one of the very few games I've actually felt like replaying multiple times this decade, more than any other and I'm not even done with it because I still have to play the remaster. It also cemented FROM's spot as one of my favorite game studios ever and anything they make has my interest going forward. It came out in 2011, at the very start of the decade, and I'm still struggling to find another game that even comes close for me.

 

That being said, it's hard to argue against Witcher 3. I seriously missed the boat on this one and somehow managed to not play it until the decade was over but I can't not acknowledge it because holy fuck, it has been consuming my entire existence for the past two weeks. For years now I've thought that there was something about RPGs that just didn't click with me enough to bother with the excessively long ones. At some point I inevitably lose interest and stop playing them. I had to take a 6+ months break in the middle of Dragon Age: Origins years ago and I've had Divinity: Original Sin sitting in my library unfinished since October. Even Trails, which I think might actually be my favorite video game series at this point, can sometimes kinda drag and feel like a chore when you're just trying to get to the next good story beat.

 

But here's Witcher 3 with its absolute metric fuckton of content. I'm just about to cross the 100 hours mark and I'm not even done with the main quest, I still have a bunch of witcher contracts and side-quests in my journal AND there's the two expansions after that. With any other game, I would be overwhelmed and exhausted by the sheer amount of shit I still need to get through. But this fucking game has me sitting here thinking "Is... is this enough content? Is this enough Witchering?", which is a fucking ridiculous question. Hell, it even got me to finally start reading the Witcher books!

 

So yeah, my game of the decade is Dark Souls but also Witcher 3.

[TheMightyEthan]

Eurogamer just put up a Games of the Generation article, which is a good read. Not quite the same thing as Game of the Decade, but close (I know my answer would be the same, and for the same reasons).

 

I'm not going to spoil the list, but I will say I was surprised by all but maybe 3 or 4 of the entries.

[Thursday Next]

Would have to be a game I got a platinum in since I have to really love it to go to that level. In which case... Horizon, GoW, Jedi Fallen Order, Sekiro, Control, or Tsushima (excluding niche titles)... can't think of any others.

 

Of which I would say Horizon since it was the one that surprised me most. Sekiro is a close second. It's rare that a game "clicks" for me like Sekiro did, but I ate it up!

[MetalCaveman]

2 hours ago, TheMightyEthan said:

Eurogamer just put up a Games of the Generation article, which is a good read. Not quite the same thing as Game of the Decade, but close (I know my answer would be the same, and for the same reasons).

 

I'm not going to spoil the list, but I will say I was surprised by all but maybe 3 or 4 of the entries.

 

 

#2 Hell yeah! \m/ \m/