Thank you Joaquim, we don't know a lot about each other but you definitely understand the situation. What you said makes all the sense in the world and I know it will help. You're right, I'm ready to step out on my own path and those around me are hoping to see me do just that. Thank you for the encouragement :)
Lol if I was born just a couple years later I literally would've been able to grow up in the yoshi backpack era. My cousin Kaitlyn is in high school right now and she's like that and I look at her with envy at times lol. She gets to be as eccentric as she wants with colored hair, nerd clothes (there's such an industry now, it's weird), and it's all awesome because the majority of the other kids are the same way and those kids who are simply wearing abercrombie and playing sports are suddenly the minority.
Kidding aside I really appreciate the points you made in your comment, the encouragement, and that guidance J-Bone. It's calming, it helps me see the bigger picture, and it's the kind of thing I need.
Great games, all deserving. I was surprised only a little, I thought Journey was going to take it but it was a nice to see Xenoblade get the nod. The resident lurking jrpg fan will be appeased, maybe. As long as nobody tries to discuss sales, popularity, or anything else about anything. Don't mention Mass Effect or Elder Scrolls either (like ever), and we may just have world peace yet. Those games are made by shell corporations pumping out broken games that aren't fun, all under the mighty umbrella of overlords unknown sucking up the profits.
I'm not saying they're Illuminati. BUT THEY'RE ILLUMINATI!
There's still a chance that Spartan Ops will grow on me. I certainly don't hate it, but if it comes down to a choice I'd have to go with Firefight. Halo 4 is already packed with lots of good content, game modes, etc, so they definitely didn't send out an incomplete package by any stretch. I just really loved Firefight in ODST, and then the version in Reach was the best. I love it because you can play co-op or single player and it's always fun. Plus it's open ended if you want it to be and you can customize the experience, waves, weapons, and every other detail. And it basically gives you all the opportunities to play with the Halo sandbox and all the tools and just have Halo fun outside the campaign and multiplayer. I bet they will end up having it again at some point, maybe Halo 5 will bring it back. I can only hope.
I'm actually glad to hear that Dishonored grabbed you so much and engrossed you so much. The things that most intrigue me about the universe is the whales and the fallen continent of Pandyssia they talk about in the books you find around the game. I think it's cool that whales play such a huge role in the civilizations and that there's some kind of magical edge to them some mystery that I don't grasp or understand yet. I actually just started a second playthrough of the game this week and I came across this book about the Leviathan(s) which are some magical sea beasts maybe. It makes me wonder what's really going on under the oceans in their universe. What are the whales really like, what kind of intelligence do they have, what's the history behind the whales? How did it come to be that the whole civilization depends on their oil and there's so much whaling going on? What does Pandyssia look like, what happened to it? There's some interesting things going on in the Dishonored universe I want to know more about in the sequel.
Since I started the 2nd playthrough I've been having more fun this time around and upgrading the skills I know I love. Some of the story and characters were hit and miss for me, but I'm still in love with the gameplay and there's some mystery and wonder in the universe. I will get very excited for future games.
Good to see Patrick back and healthy. Has Patrick been able to get back into any painting projects lately?
I liked Rob's choice of Johnathan Blow. I don't actually know anything about John so I had no idea he was so cocky or obnoxious, but I love following the progress of The Witness and the project updates he gives on the site. Through the comments sections of his updates and the conversations he has with fans he seemed pretty down to Earth in that context. The Witness look brilliant already, it's going to be fascinating.
I have one question for Julian about this year in gaming. I know Julian says he needs to watch his new game spending this year. With that being the case, is it possible that you will be delving into your backlog quite a bit this year?
Lately the developers that I've been learning the most about and have been inspiring me creatively are Ken Levine, Harvey Smith, and Notch. Notch made one of my favorite games ever in Minecraft and it only came after he turned down a dream job offer at Valve and started his own company. He can make deep games with simple controls and get you addicted while feeling creative and free. I didn't know anything about Harvey Smith until recently when I knew he was a man behind Dishonored and co-owner of Arkane. So I went on Polygon and found this incredible life story of his history in the industry from Wing Commander to Deus Ex to Dishonored and everything in between that he's done and I have a new respect and understanding of him.
Ken Levine was another guy I knew was brilliant and well-known but I never undersood why and I had no idea of his history. Once I learned about his writing/acting origins, how much he wasn't a programmer, designer, painter, etc, and about his unformed, amorphous, sculpting-esque development process, his struggles, and how much the integrity and messages of his games mean to him did I get a grip on why he's great. He's the kind of creative director that isn't easy to work with for a lot of people, and his ideas never sound good to executives, but if you can understand his process and help him make his ideas real they can turn out astoundingly beautiful even if it was a bloodbath getting to that point. I think it would be interesting to have Ken as a boss and to be on the practical design side making his visions real in level design etc.
I've said before about how much I love Molyneux, and I still do, but in the realm of visionaries and people with their imaginations and hearts on the cutting edge of gaming and storytelling I think I'd prefer working close to Levine and learning from him. In a development environment you have to have people with you that are strong where you're weak and can create balance. I'm not a good storyteller so Levine would be an amazing person to learn from. For the past few months I actually wasn't too hot on Bioshock Infinite, but that one article I read about him made the game into my most anticipated of the year. Well that, and also seeing gameplay of Infinite helped.
It's a great game that's really poorly done on PS3, it's incredibly unstable and they haven't fixed it. There's plenty of reason for PS3 owners to be upset and for gamers in general to be upset. Doesn't mean the game isn't excellent though. My point has been about the game and its design and comparing it to previous games. My experience has been great, than there's people with experiences that make them want to break the disc. It's pretty uneven and there's multiple sides of the Skyrim story to tell but for quite a long time since release the only story I've been hearing from people at 1UP is that this is a horrible game and Bethesda should be burned at the stake and people who enjoyed the game aren't real gamers.
Be upset with the game they shipped on PS3 and haven't fixed, that's fine. The PS3 version is crap and they haven't done anything to earn the respect of the people who bought it. Just know that there's a whole other side of the story where people have had an amazing time and aren't angry, and it doesn't end up having anything to do with fanboyism. Hard to imagine isn't it, a scenario where this game is great? I don't have a PS3 and haven't experience any big bugs, so I don't have grounds to tell their story. I can listen to their story though and understand why the game they got is horrible.
@julian You should really gamefly Skyrim one day and give it a weekend or something. It's very different than Oblivion and different than the vocal minority lash out it recieved. People calling it a bad game make me furious. Just because it doesn't work on PS3 doesn't mean it's a bad game. It's multiplatform, this isn't the first time that's happened in multiplatform development. People beat up on Skyrim unfairly and it's mostly people who either have a PS3 or haven't played the game at all and are just guessing. My experience has been nearly flawless and you can't argue with that, this is just the way it's happened. Mike Wall here at the site likewise had a nearly flawless experience so it isn't a fluke.
I've always been a huge Elder Scrolls fan because they are my type of games, but I can fairly say that the combat works now. I've been playing for dozens of hours and I'm halfway to the level cap and my game has been as flawless as an open world game can be. I've only had two small bugs and one of them fixed itself (a bandit was walking around and bouncing on a table randomnly) and the other one was just a single miscellaneous quest that wouldn't make the transition to the completed quest list. That's it, seriously.
Using ranged combat finally works. I've played the whole game as a stealth game (stealth works well too) and I sneak around and attack with the bow for extra damage. The melee combat is much more weighty and paced slower. There's a lot of perks in various skills to choose that make combat more exciting and change the experience quite a bit. Almost every problem I had with Oblivion has been improved or removed outright. No longer do you have to spend an hour making a character and being stuck with the skills you invested in initially. The armor and weapons system is overhauled and you can now craft your own and upgrade it. In Oblivion you could easily come across the best armor in the game within the first 15 hours, glass armor and deadric, and there was nothing left to aspire to. Skyrim is completely different and armor and weapons are finally great.
Randomly encountering dragons is great, the difficulty is intense, combat is brutal, there's more quests and questlines than you can shake a stick at, and it's absolutely gorgeous artwork and world design. The two main stories for once work in an ES game and are better executed than the piece of crap Oblivion's was. The previous games were full of problems but I loved them because you could see where they were going and see the heart behind them. Skyrim is the proof that they've finally started hitting all the notes they want to hit from the quest design to dungeons, artwork, combat, interface, pacing, random events, vingettes, storylines, character building. They love designing this type of experience and they've really done well to learn from the previous games. Skyrim is amazing and it deserves the love it got, that's probably not something you want to hear because these types of games might not be for you no matter how good they are, and I know Jesse wouldn't want to hear that either because I think he plain doesn't like Elder Scrolls at any level, but it's just a great game.
People bitch about games not giving you your monies worth or by FPSs being 8 hours and RPGs being 30 hours, there not being enough creativity and color in games, to much hollywood and not enough heart and love in design. So Elder Scrolls games come along and give you a really expansive world with a ton of systems designed in, hundreds of hours worth of content, improved combat on all fronts, love and care in every nook and cranny, as hardcore as western RPGs get, beautiful landscapes perfect for nature lovers, it's like a nordic mythology lover's paradise, and after all is said and done people still shrug and say it's overrated or stupid. That's crazy.
If it's not your type of game that's perfectly understandble, that's all people need to say, but to throw trash on Bethesda or the whole series makes me furious just like I'm sure people throwing trash on Bioware and Mass Effect 3 would confuse or upset you. Luckily nobody here at the site trashes Skyrim like that, but back at 1UP that's what the majority of my friends do lol and it makes me not want to bring Skryim up at all. Despite how amazing my experience has been, and how this could end up being one of my favorite experiences ever, I still can't talk about it because of all the Elder Scrolls haters out there. It's silly. I have to secretly love an amazing game while everybody else tries to paint it like it's the worst game in the world and all its fans are brainwashed by fanboyism. That's one of the reasons I haven't been writing blogs lately, I'm having a near flawless experience with Skryim and I can't talk about it because there's too many people that want to just scoff at me or tear the game apart.
It was a really good idea to have a distinction between best 2012 game you played and the best gaming experience you had in the year. I wish more people did that, it's so much more satisfying and maybe even cathartic. I've noticed that when people across many sites do GOTY stuff it isn't necessarily a great experience but more or less a ritual. It's more formal, serious, and leads to plenty of confrontation and debate over simple placements on a list or votes for categories. I really enjoyed listening to the Giant Bomb crew debate and come up with an ordered top 10 list in a civilized manner, but I don't think everybody should have to do that. I would rather hear more people discuss the games that were developed in the year, and simply of the ones they experienced which one was their favorite.
Then outside of that in a different conversation, as was present in this episode, I'd love to hear people explain their favorite gaming experience of the year in general no matter what platform, game, or release date of the game involved. Often times I find that the most satisfying and emotional gaming experiences people have during a year don't end up having anything to do with the big AAA and indie games that came out that year. It's often something more personal, an old favorite game they played again, or maybe a game from the backlog that they're playing for the first time. Discussing the big AAA and indie games of the year is a good and necessary thing that enthusiasts all do, but when people just relax and gush about the best gaming experiences and memories we made that year in general it's even better.
This year I mostly played games from 2011 and from the backlog. The early year was dominated by Modern Warfare 3. I enjoyed the campaign, fell in love with Spec Ops Survival, and finally fully understood why this series is actually fun and why they design the levels and mechanics the way they do. Then in the spring I played a ton of Deus Ex Human Revolution and it became one of my 3 favorite stealth games ever. My summer was full of Civilization Revolution, Dark Souls, and Minecraft. Then I went through a long period where I didn't get any new games until the holiday season when I picked up Dishonored and Skyrim. Then the final game I got this year was Halo 4 for Christmas which, despite being my most anticipated game of the year, is the only game I haven't started playing yet because I've been too busy with Skyrim. Go figure, if you told me back in the summer that Halo 4 would come out during the holidays and I'd be too in love with Skyrim to get to it, I would've laughed but it's come true. This wall of text is quite legit already, but I still haven't picked my actual favorite game of 2012 and favorite gaming experience in general.
My favorite game of 2012 goes to Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition. It's perfect, it's made for me. It works great on controller so that I don't have to sit at my computer, the music is amazing, and the systems are all easy to interact with but deceptively deep and difficult to master. Minecraft is the only game I've ever played in my adult life that makes me feel like a kid again, that makes me feel free. Free of all the trends, tropes, and expectations of video games, design, and being an enthusiast. It's the perfect little game I never expected and never asked for but a fucker in Sweden with a beard named Markus designed it anyways and it's brilliant. The game was rough and basic at launch with only Survival mode, but once 4J studios added Creative Mode and tons of materials and features through patches it made the overall package much better.
The best gaming experience I had in 2012 was playing Dark Souls. When I first heard of the game I thought it would be a boring, frustrating, pretentious game that would only waste my time and keep me from playing better games. But once some friends of mine convinced me to buy it and I began playing it and studying it my opinion changed as wildly as it possibly could. Dark Souls is by far the most unique, misrepresented, intriguing, and mechanically fun RPG experience I've ever had. It resonates, there's tons of "moments". It's the type of game that by simply playing it you become part of a community, and the mysteries of the lore and the lack of details of the game's systems makes you want to learn about the game instead of turning it off. The game is simple and designed incredibly well, but it challenges you in ways other games on the market never do. It respects your intelligence and expects you to learn through experimentation, observation, and tenacity. It's much more fair than people give it credit for. I've only ever had two cheap deaths among hundreds. When you die and go back to a bonfire it's always because you let the game do it to you.
Death is a part of the learning process and in Dark Souls dying will make you a better player, it will inform you, and help you overcome the immense boss challenges and dangerous terrain. Every single enemy you come across can be the death of you, but the combat is so fun that frustration never overcame fun-factor. The game has the best third person sword and sorcery realtime combat ever in a game. I've never played another game as satisfying. The combat is intense, weighty, bloody and it's a thinking man's combat system. When you defeat creatures, knights, and bosses you know it was because you were that good. It wasn't because of a lucky dice roll or because you clicked the action button faster. This leads to incredible feelings of accomplishment and triumph that I haven't felt before in any other RPG.
One of the tropes of gaming is that you just slaughter your way through thousands of monsters in every RPG and it never means anything or makes you feel anything. In Dark Souls every monster counts, every room in every building counts, every excursion into uncharted territory is taken with caution, every swing of your sword and raising of your shield matters. As I said, the game is simple. You will rinse and repeat with many enemies, but for the first time ever an RPG has managed to make me care about all those moments, first encounters with new monsters, and all the battles. You can't just go on "auto-pilot" and run through dungeons hacking at the knees of everything in sight waiting to collect loot and occasionally use a health potion when something just happens to take your health down a bit. The combat and feel of everything in Dark Souls is the way I wished Zelda felt, the way I wished other third person games of it's genre felt. The speed of movement, how much armor and equipment choices effect you, how much your stats effect you, the lock on targeting, the use of sword, shield, and bow, the distinct dungeons.
I'm so bummed Patrick isn't feeling well because more than anything I really want to know what he thinks about this since we are both big Zelda fans since childhood, but Dark Souls is my new Zelda. That's heresy for a Hylian like me or Patrick to say but I feel it in my heart. Much as the original Gears of War elevated the feel of 3rd person shooters in its day or Halo elevated the feel and status of 1st person shooters on console, and Mass Effect changed everything for me on the interactive storytelling front, Dark Souls changes everything for me in the realm of 3rd person real time sword and sorcery action. It's the progression and evolution of the Zelda action-rpg I've always been waiting for.
I'm not saying Dark Souls is the greatest RPG ever designed, but I will say that this may be my favorite RPG ever, it made me think about system design very differently, it made me look at difficulty and pacing differently, it made me emotionally and intellectually migrate a lot of my Zelda love over to a newer franchise I had never played before.
Favorite game of 2012 goes to Minecraft Xbox 360 edition and favorite gaming experience of the year belongs to Dark Souls. I couldn't have predicted that in a million years. Early in the year I thought I would be all about Halo 4, Dishonored, and nothing else.
I finished Dishonored last week and overall I was quite happy with it. It was a good game overall, peppered with moments of pure awesome. The mechanics are rock solid, the level design is great, and there's a lot of replayability for me in some of those levels. The game came up short in a few ways though for people who care about narrative. There's some depth and mystery in the universe of Dishonored but I ended up caring very little about any of it, or the characters. All the big powerful men you go after in the missions don't feel important at all in the end. The Empress was kind of interesting, and at times I wanted to protect her as Corvo, but she was still pretty boring and useless in the end. The Outsider was useless and never rose to the level of mystique that the G Man from Half Life 2 got to (which they're obviously trying to emulate). For as much effort as they put into the universe, it all ends up feeling pretty flat and standard. It's very gamey, doesn't transcend any tropes, and it's not very unique or interesting. It's a frankenstein of influence from Bioshock and Half Life 2, but it never gains it's own unique vision. The most interesting thing about the Dishonored universe is the fact they use whale oil for everything, and if that's the most unique thing about the universe, that says a lot.
The things I loved the most about the game were the multiple ways to deal with targets, the multiple pathed level design, and the horror element that the rat swarms and creepers (they're zombies) added to the levels. A lot of the non-lethal solutions to missions turn out to be incredibly dark and twisted, and are arguably less ethical than simply killing them. The one that was the most twisted to me was a mission where you have to decide what to do with a posh noble woman. I decided to let her live, but doing so meant that she would be taken far away and isolated, imprisoned, and controlled by an obsessive and demented man that was "in love" with her. In Dishonored nobody is as good as they seem, everybody betrays somebody, and everybody gets screwed at some point so there's no point to taking it all too seriously. Everything is shady as shit no matter what you do in the game.
The levels were a ton of fun to explore, and you can tell that every little area in the game had a designer in it. Loot, equipment, upgrades, narrative vignettes, and side quests are packed all throughout the various areas of each level. There's no wasted space or forgotten areas in Dishonored levels, everything seems to have attention put into it. The game does so many small functional things well that other games mess up. In Dishonored you can still interact with things while you carry unconscious bodies around. When you load a save the game doesn't start until you press the continue button, which is a simple thing I appreciate control over, and most other games never do that. The game gives you stats on how you did stealthwise, which Splinter Cell gave up a long time ago. Dishonored does a lot of small things well and you don't appreciate those things until you see them done well. I can tell this game was made by people who like stealth games and don't want to suffer with a lot of the old stealth design tropes so they're figuring out ways to make the genre better.
In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed the majority of Dishonored, just not the last 3 levels. Prior to the last 3 levels, a big shift happens in the narrative and you spend the last 3 levels of the game trying to rectify that shift, but I honestly got bored right then, when things were probably supposed to be the most dramatic and climactic. Everything I wanted to do creatively in Dishonored I was able to accomplish earlier in the game, and the whole endgame was just a chore. By the time I got to the final level I just wanted it to be over so I could put a new game in. There's 8 big levels in the game excluding the intro level, and 5 of those levels are really amazing from both a gameplay and visual point of view, but I tuned out the last 3 levels and the end game. I'm happy Dishonored has done well and they have a new franchise on their hands. I'll be excited to see more of these games, they're doing a lot of things right.
As for Dark Souls, I love DS, but I have too much to say about it to start here. For months now I've been doing an entire blog series about my first playthrough of Dark Souls but I'm pretty sure nobody reads it lol. Dark Souls is certainly fun, it's not a badge of honor for me. It's a very well designed game, great execution, and it's very fun. It's my favorite combat ever in a third person sword and sorcery game, and it may just be my favorite RPG ever, but I'll withhold judgement on that until I finish the game. I'm getting close to beating it. Most of the stigma around Dark Souls is just misinformation and assumptions made by those who haven't played it. People think it's a game that isn't fun but pretentious masochists play it to feel better about their hardcoreness. It's not, hate to break it to you, but it's a good game and you should play it. Everybody should give it a shot. That's why I do the Dark Souls Diary to show people what the game is really like and how fun it is.
I was really happy I got it for that price. I've been playing it for several hours now, I'm just a couple missions into the main quest, and several missions into the Companions guild (fighter's guild) and I haven't had any bug problems. When the game first loads there's a 20mb patch lol, so I bet there's a bunch of fixes in all of that. The truth is I won't know what it was like to play the buggy game at launch, just like I won't know what it's like to play Mass Effect 3 without all the DLC and extra ending content. Once I finally play ME3 it will be with the new stuff and I won't have any clue what was launch content and what is new.
I'm really in love with it, so far it's every bit as engrossing as I expect an Elder Scrolls game to be. It's like everything they've been working towards, it seems like the best Elder Scrolls to date with the lessons learned from Morrowind and Oblivion. The thing I love most about Skyrim is all the Morrowind flavor it has in the music and in the naming of things. It's different from Oblivion in a lot of good ways. The world feels more alive and you come across interesting things from time to time that you would never see in Morrowind or Oblivion. Last night I was doing a quest for the Companions and the sky was full of bright Aurora Borealis, it stopped me in my tracks and I had to admire it for a while. Then the next morning I'm wandering around in the arctic tundra listening to the nice orchestral soundtrack in the background, sneaking around and sniping deer with my bow so I could harvest their hides, craft them into leather so I can upgrade my light armor, but then I hear a dragon bellow from miles away. I immediately start scanning the skies and once I see it I start running for some ruins to hide for my life. The dragons sometimes miss you and continue flying around the world doing what they do, and sometimes you're not so lucky.
That dragon unfortunately saw me and swooped down to attack. There were some imperial guards in the little ruins using it as a watchtower. It turned into a crazy, unplanned, cinematic battle. Then an hour later in another quest I descended into a visually distinct valley full of hot springs and geysers, sneaking around avoiding confrontation, and ended up underground interacting with a huge magical tree in a cave. Then I come out from the cave and there's two dragons flying around the land. I avoided them by sneaking through the trees and keeping out of sight. The dragons got into fights with other animals and I got to watch their escapades unfold as I sneaked through the yellowstone park-esk place and escaped the area without getting spotted or murdered by the dragons. It was just cool, other games don't do this stuff. This is why I love Elder Scrolls games. The art design is beautiful, I definitely like Skyrim province's geography and vistas more than Morrowind or Oblivion.
