Morning Friends! Surprising to no one I played an excessive amount of Valheim over the weekend. We talked a bit about it on the podcast but I am quickly realizing that for me it is just a different sort of gaming experience. Like when I have played Minecraft in the past, the adventure is fine… but at the end of the day it always ends up being about the building. So since I am slowly moving on past my first foothold in the shared server environment, I thought I would at least talk about it a bit this morning. While my foothold has evolved into something that everyone just generally refers to as “Fort Bel” the truth is it started out as me trying to stay out of everyone else’s hair since I was further progressed.
I posted a walkthrough video of Shade’s Folly aka my starter place on the island. The goal was to run down the coast and sorta do my own thing while everyone else caught up, and as a result I never really assisted much in the building of what became the main town hub for our island. What was originally the building shown on the lefthand side of the screen, I eventually added the second building… and then proceeded the erect a giant stone wall around the entire compound and build further structures directly connected to that wall. This also caused me to create a more shared crafting area and open up my storage reserves to pretty much everyone on the server.
The longer I have been here however the more stale it has gotten. There isn’t that much more I can do with my current location because I risk taking up more space and encroaching upon the territory of those who built around me. Additionally I am on the border of the nearest entrance to the Black Forest and I don’t want to “unwild” that region any more than it already is. As a result I have gone out onto the ocean in search of new areas and at some point I will probably do other walkthrough videos talking about each of them. The biggest of these is Dawn’s Rest or what folks are just mostly universally referring to as “Castle Bel”.
I also played quite a bit of the Outriders demo this weekend, and hit the level cap. I could in theory do like the YouTube community has been doing and grind their faces off against a tiny amount of content trying to farm things… or I could just stop playing. I am likely going to more or less stop playing. I’ve spent a tiny bit of time trying out the other classes but I am pretty certain that Devastator is the class for me. So far my second favorite is Trickster… but they both sorta do the same thing where they are up close and personal with targets which seems to fit my enjoyment pattern with aggressive gameplay and bad decision. Really looking forward to the launch of this game at the end of the month.
The thing that I was NOT expecting this weekend is that I ended up firing up Destiny 2 and playing some of it last night. It is amazing how much more enjoyment I get out of the game now that I know that the weapons I am earning won’t be irrelevant now that the gear Sunset has officially been called off. Unfortunately one of my favorite Auto Rifles is in the sunset, so I will be trying to find a new favorite Kinetic Auto since Steelfeather Repeater is already sunset. Anything that is not currently sunset should be fair game however, so I am hoping to get a few Shadow Price variants to see if I like that weapon. I vaguely remember it from Destiny 1, but not extremely well.
Like every weekend it went entirely too fast. Time moves extremely strangely in the time of the self imposed lockdown. What did you get up to this weekend? Did you check out Outriders? What were your thoughts.
Yesterday the floodgates opened on a new game vying for our attention in the emerging Looter Shooter genre. This morning I am going to talk about my impressions of the almost four hours I ended up playing last night. This will be in no way an adequate representation of the game because I just haven’t spent enough time with it to be certain about how anything works yet. Since this demo is freely available to pretty much everyone at this point… I highly suggest you just skip this post and go make your own impressions. So as such I will lead off with download links so you can do just that. There will be spoilers for the story ahead, or at least some broad summarizations of plot points. Be warned.
I am going to be honest one of the biggest challenges with Outriders is that it is going to need to carve its own identity because out of the gate it feels like a remix of a bunch of concepts we have already seen before in various forms. I was jokingly referring to it as Gears of Destiny yesterday because it feels HEAVILY inspired by the Gears of War franchise. On top of that there is a heavy mix of Guerilla Faction, Defiance, Rage, Killzone and the Mass Effect multiplayer engine. Ultimately the question is does this blend work? Yeah I think it mostly does and the gameplay feels extremely fluid and enjoyable, enough that I went ahead and purchased the game after experiencing the demo.
Why did I go ahead and plunk my money down for this ride? The truth is that the game is telling me a story that is cohesive and understandable. I love the incomprehensible nonsense that is Destiny that has forced me to dig hard to get the little information that I have, but in a new franchise that I am not already sold on and that also seems like an assemblage of parts that I have seen before… they need to hook me on a narrative. So far it seems like legitimately this is a game you can play entirely for the single player story and it will be an enjoyable ride. The thumbnail for the story is that at some point in the future we have destroyed the Planet Earth. The story doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about this but I figure it will probably be something teased out over time.
In order to survive there are two colony ships loaded full of folks and sent towards what appears to be an inhabitable planet. While in transit something happens to one of the ships and it explodes leaving you as one of the last remaining members of what appears to be a law enforcement/expeditionary force type group called the Outriders. This seems significant but we aren’t given a lot of detail about what it means. You are part of the first group to make landfall and at first things seem to be just as idyllic as the postcards made it out to be. However the longer you are planet side the more things go south because apparently the planet is effected by giant storms of some sort of energy that straight up disintegrates some things that it touches… others it leaves changed but it will be awhile before the game elaborates on that fact.
Some events transpire that end up with you being stuck back in a Cryopod… and shocking to no one you wake up much later than originally intended. During the almost forty years that pass things have gone from bad to worse as the planet is essentially divided into two groups: The original expeditionary force that is dwindling in numbers and a group of separatists that appear to have gone full on Fallout raider and I strongly suspect are cannibals by what could only be described as “meat cages”. You wake up on the wrong side of the lines and in your attempt to escape you realize that you have become “altered” and with that comes special powers.
Queue the class selection screen. It was around this point that I alt tabbed out to YouTube and watched a few videos summarizing the classes. More specifically I watched the video that Ginger Prime put out some time back. Based on my limited understanding of the classes the break down goes a little something like this.
Technomancer – Ice based Long ranged support/gadgets lone wolf that almost has a pet class rhythm to it because I believe it can eventually drop turrets. Heals based on long ranged encounters.
Pyromancer – Fire based medium range engagements and lots of elemental damage synergy and crowd control abilities. Heals based on kills of things with its elemental debuffs on it.
Trickster – Time ability based short range assassin type character that gets in does a lot of damage and gets back out. Gets healed and shielded when killing something at close range.
Devastator – Earth based tanky short to medium range engagements that heals based on killing encounters that are in short range.
After looking at the various options I ended up going Devastator since I like being Tanky, but I also like a run and gun up close and personal style. I spent most of the night running around with an Assault Rifle and a Shotgun and shifting in and out of close and medium range using the abilities of the class that I will get into shortly.
Each class has a talent tree system that allows for further customization. From what I understand regardless of the class there is a tree that is a bit more tanky, so that everyone can tank in a pinch. The trees that are open to me with Devastator are Vanquisher, Warden and Seismic Shifter. From what I understand Warden is my very tanky, very focused on having more health and taking less damage tree. Vanquisher seems to be focused on piercing armor and interrupts so might be more team/support focused pending you are not taking the role as tank. Seismic Shifter appears to be about doing big AOE earthquake damage and taking out lots of stuff at the same time. Being who I am… I am probably going mostly down the Warden path.
In addition to talents that give more passive tweaks to your other abilities, there are some active class skills that unlock as you go through the game. You can have three of these equipped at one time and can mix and match them as you go. Right now I have unlocked exactly three, the first being Earthquake which sends out a field of rock in front of me and any mob that it touches causes spikes to shoot up from the ground dealing significant damage. The next is Golem which gives me a rock based overshield causing me to take 65% reduced damage for 8 seconds. Gravity leap is really interesting in that it causes me to jump up into the air… turn into floating rocks and then go slamming down on whatever I target with the left mouse button dealing a large amount of AOE damage when I come slamming down. I use that one a lot as a gap closer on whatever mob is giving me the most grief.
What I am finding most interesting about my class is that in reality… I am not a boss tank. Like bosses are the one thing that I seem to struggle with the most because most bosses punish you severely for close range encounters. What I want to do instead is draw the hate of all of the little guys because each time I kill one of those I heal myself back up significantly allowing me to sustain that action pretty much indefinitely being a roaming bullet sponge. I am hoping to get some time to test this theory over the weekend with some group play, but I am thinking that really is going to be the synergy. You have your dps focus on burning the boss from cover and your tank causes mayhem running around like mad picking up the ire of little packs that I then smash to pieces for health and profit.
Based one what I am seeing gear wise, it seems that when you pick up something blue or better you start getting ability modifiers. This leads me to believe that the end game of Outriders is going to involve some Diablo 3 style builds that abuse specific attributes on your gear to buff abilities and make them significantly more powerful. If I had to guess probably when you get purple gear they are going to start giving you more than one modifier at a time. What I don’t know however is if these modifiers are completely random or if it is fixed like Diablo so you can seek out specific items to fill specific slots. I am honestly hoping it is the later because fully randomized gear may present the same problem that Anthem did of giving you a bunch of items that are potentially useless.
So I have talked about a lot of positives, so we are going to throw out a negative. Sometimes character creation systems end up being unintentionally racist. I feel awkward saying this given that my skin tone can only accurately be represented by the pink crayon in the Crayola box… but like representation is really important in video games. While creating my character I noticed that the skin tone offerings were entirely dependent upon the face that you chose. This morning I pulled together an example of this where I selected the darkest available tone with every single face and then edited them all together. There is exactly one face type that is allowed to be dark brown, with a second being allowed to be more medium… and then everyone else looks like they have just been using bronzer. The folks at People Can Fly can do better and I hope they do as the game goes on. Thankfully it appears that cosmetic changes are free so if they do add in more options folks can re-customize.
Like I said above I enjoyed the game enough to go ahead and purchase it. I only did this because I wanted the cool skin for my vehicle, which I assume gets unlocked for usage later in the game. I think it is going to be enjoyable to at least play through the story and solo around a bit. I am hoping it will be enjoyable for group play because what I have seen so far makes me think that there is going to be a lot of party synergy going on. I hope to get some time in this weekend trying something group based, but it also appears that you can pretty much complete all of the game in co-op mode for those who are inclined to do so. So since this is an impression piece… other than the melanin slider woes… my impressions of the game is pretty solid.
So yesterday was a bit of a busy one for me. I ended up only working half a day as my wife and I got our first round of Covid-19 vaccinations yesterday. I am shocked and amazed that we have at least one round down after hearing all of the horror stories about family members trying to get theirs. It required a bit of a drive however and my phone battery was a little low so I mostly stayed off social media. When I get back home eventually and log into twitter I see a reply from a friend of mine stating that I sounded prophetic about Anthem Next yesterday morning. Of course this lead me to start googling and apparently there was an official announcement about the future of the revamp in BioWare Blog form. The most relevant bits are as follows:
In the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT). We will, however, continue to keep the Anthem live service running as it exists today.
Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog
So I guess that is it and now the grieving can finally begin. So yesterday when I said I didn’t think it was actually going to happen, there was a part of me still holding out hope to be proven wrong. I liked the mess that was Anthem quite a bit, but ultimately reached a point where it didn’t feel like my time invested in the game was worth it. Even then if you go look at my Origin profile, I logged 214 hours of gameplay before I ultimately gave up on it. I was pretty damned invested in this game and I wanted it to succeed, but I think we all sorta saw the writing on the wall. Much like the other gut punch of the week, the closing of Fry’s Electronics… it wasn’t a surprise but it still really hurts to see it happen.
What Was Wrong?
So each player is going to ultimately have their own hit list for what went wrong with Anthem, but for me personally it boils down to two points. The first is that the game just needed more content simple as that. The story that you play through in the campaign felt like the opening chapter of a much larger tale. I believe that the intent was to do seasonal content drops that moved the story along and because they had to spend so much time triaging launch issues, this original plan was completely scrapped. The problem with this however is the base version of Anthem almost feels like a Demo for what the final product should have been.
Not only was it missing Story Content but it was missing activities for the players to participate. The game needed easily two to three times as many Strongholds as were available so that you could string together a good play list without it feeling like you were always getting the one you liked or the one you didn’t like. Ultimately the game in its current state has four multiplayer activities that matter:
Tyrant Mine – The Bug Hunt One
The Temple of Scar – The Protect the thing from the Scar One
Heart of Rage – Doesn’t Open Up Until You Beat Game
The Sunken Cell – Patched in Post Launch
There simply just needed to be more of these. If you had eight of them instead of four then I think that probably would have felt like a reasonable play list. Destiny for example has 15 Strikes in their current playlist and there were an additional 7 Strikes available prior to Beyond Light. At the launch of Destiny 2 they had 6 Strikes which seemed a bit tight but they rapidly patched in additional strikes with the first two content drops, which landed as planned without interruptions. Basically Anthem just needed more across the board of content to do at all levels because it very quickly became repetitive.
Misunderstanding Their Loot Model
The other major problem that Anthem had was that I do not think at a fundamental level they understood their own loot model. As an avid Diablo 3 player… I fully understood the type of loot that I was receiving. In D3 the loot is plentiful because it feels good to get shiny things, but any given item you get is usually deeply flawed in some way. D3 gives you ways of fixing this but makes it extremely expensive, so the alternative is to just keep doing content until a better version drops. The challenge there however is that in order for this flawed but plentiful loot model to work… the loot needs to flow like water. You need to be deluged with reasonable gear candidates so that from the dross you can piece together a few gems to make a reasonable gear set.
In Anthem there was a massive difference in functionality between a good item and a bad item and this felt awful especially considering how rare it was to get a Legendary item to drop. When that Legendary was something that you either didn’t need or couldn’t use it was extremely demoralizing. I think this was improved a little bit with the Cataclysm they introduced and the ability to target specific gear slots, but at that point the player base as a whole was largely gone. I attempted to play the Cataclysm several times but was never able to matchmake a full team and usually speaking it was just me and another player trying to make it work.
A Last Hurrah
So of those two problems… they cannot fix the first one because the team is being pulled off the project. There will be no more content trickling into the game and that sucks. However since loot setting should just be some server variables if they did things correctly… they could maybe tweak the generosity a bit. Were I BioWare, I would crank up the loot and let those who want to play the game at least do so in a method that fits the gear model that they ended up with. Let the magical 8 sided dice that aren’t called Engrams reign down from above and cover us in sub part loot options for the slim hope that maybe just maybe one of them will be useful! For me personally that would have gone a long ways towards keeping me engaged.
I enjoyed the core gameplay loop but I ended up in a place where it felt like I just could not move upwards because I wasn’t getting the gear needed to keep moving upwards. I was fine grinding the Hive Tyrant over and over and over again so long as there was a loot payout but when I could run for four hours and see a single hint of lime green… it seemed like my time was better spent doing literally anything else. Cranking up the drops would help to salve the community a bit, if there even is a community anymore. The few times they screwed up and accidentally turned the loot up to eleven were some of the most enjoyable periods in the game for me. I happened to catch a few of these lucky streaks and it felt AMAZING.
Damaged Faith
Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Christian Dailey – BioWare Blog
There is one more relevant quote from the BioWare blog that I want to talk about this morning. The theory is that they are abandoning Anthem to double their efforts on Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects, which is perfectly fine and probably the most reasonable option. That said I have no faith that BioWare in its current state is going to do anything to support those games either. This is the second big BioWare title in a row that they have abandoned support for prematurely. I was a huge fan of Mass Effect Andromeda and I am still pissed that we will never get any DLC content for that game or likely have much in the way of denouement for the loose ends that the game left. Once again it was a game that told a partial story because you could see them leaving the door open for follow up content that never actually came.
Sure this could be a bad streak for a good studio, or it could just be that the BioWare that we knew and loved is no more and whatever is left is no longer capable of the long-term stewardship of our hopes and dreams. Star Wars the Old Republic is mentioned but that game has more or less been in an extended maintenance mode since the wrap up of the Knights of the Eternal Throne storyline far as I am aware. As gamers we have this bad habit of latching onto a studio and viewing them as something different than the assemblage of the people that were in it. BioWare has been bleeding staff for years and thanks to the Dev Whisperer we have seen the pretty sorry state of their internal affairs. I am not sure at what point they stop being capable of supporting the franchise that we have loved for so long.
Grieving is Hard
Anthem was a wound that had never fully healed but I had managed to scab over a bit and put it out of my mind. Yesterdays news however ripped that scab off and I am once again bleeding a bit. So as such I am a bit touchy about it this morning, and with it comes a certain over dramatic melancholy with my writing. Now I am trying to decide if I want to reinstall the game and give it one last shot on the way out the door or just put the entire thing to bed as a failed experiment. Anthem was a good game and I enjoyed it greatly for as much as we actually got of it. I just wanted more or what was working and more generosity. Folks will claim that they have learned their lessons from Diablo 3, but those same folks seem to not actually understand why that game works. As a player that returns like clockwork every time a new Diablo 3 season opens… I can guarantee that Anthem did not learn that lesson.
This post is a bit disjointed but I also feel like I needed to get it out of my system. My blog often times is therapy for me and when I have written something I can finally start to put it out of my mind. I think this might be the case for Anthem. That said I will probably still be in mourning for a bit.
Good Morning Friends! Seeing as this is the first non-aggrochat-syndication post of 2021 for this blog, I though it was a good time to look back on the previous year of gaming. More specifically MY previous year of gaming and talk about some of my favorite experiences. This isn’t a strict top X list, but the order is more or less sorted in a good to phenomenal manner. Lets get started!
The Touryst
This is a curious little game that originally released on the Nintendo Switch, which is sort of a puzzle platformer for lack of a better category. You are a tourist and you have come to visit this island get away, but it turns out there are mysteries to be solved along the way. You end up travelling across multiple islands and unlocking the secret of the temple contained on each. There really isn’t true combat in the game, apart from occasionally hopping on the top of things to stun them. Extremely charming game and also a really interesting technology supporting it. The load times and rendering prowess is a good show piece for the Switch.
Atom RPG
This game plays like you remember the original Fallout playing. Like going back and playing those first two Fallout games is a bit of a challenge at this point, because they end up feeling more than a little kludgy. Atom RPG is Fallout… but if you had set the game in post-apocalyptic Soviet era Russia. There are so many things interesting about this game, namely it gives you a window into the world that was the USSR before the break up and the alternate reality of what might have happened in the event of nuclear war. There is a sequel out that I have yet to play, but eventually I am sure I will.
Streets of Rage 4
I’ve always been a big fan of beat-em-ups and while I was originally super partial to Final Fight, the Sega competitor Streets of Rage left it in the dust with the release of the second outing in that series. Streets of Rage 4 is a project that lovingly recreates the feel of playing a 90s era fighting game, but with modern era graphical design. The artwork is gorgeous, but if you so choose you can downgrade everything into a pixel based equivalent of the original art style. Exceptionally good game, and also plays extremely well on the Nintendo Switch.
Animal Crossing: New Horizon
I had never really played an Animal Crossing game prior to the release of New Horizon, and this game dominated my headspace in a time when I was desperately needing some pleasant escape. This landed right as the pandemic was ramping up, and I even named my island Pandemia because it was my plan to get through the worst of it. Sadly at that point we had no clue how “worst” things were going to get, and as a result I eventually stopped playing the game and have not returned when it reached a point of being a little too “daily quest” for my tastes. I greatly appreciate it filling a role that I desperately needed at a specific time.
Phantasy Star Online 2
While I had gone through some complete nonsense that allowed me to create a Japanese account, I never really spent a lot of time playing it. So when PSO2 released in earnest for North America this year, I grabbed hold with both hands and enjoyed the hell out of it for about a month. I have no clue why exactly I faded away from the game, but I hope to return at some point because it is a fun mix of mindless shooting and loot collection. Additionally it has one of the best gacha systems out there which releases cosmetics at a pretty regular cadence, all of which are also capable of being resold by players. RoboBel probably misses me.
Horizon Zero Dawn
I love Horizon Zero Dawn. It was my game of the year in 2017 when it was originally released, however this year we finally got the PC port and it was so enjoyable for me to revisit this game. Playing HZD with a Mouse and Keyboard is so much better than playing with a clunky old controller. The game finally can be played in the way I hoped it would someday, and it looked amazing with glorious PC 4k graphics. I have written so much over the years about this title and all of those words still stand. One of the best gaming experiences I have ever had and the added precision of the mouse just makes everything better.
Jedi Fallen Order
I realize I just talked quite a bit about this game last week, so probably not much new to say. I played this originally when it first released at the tail end of 2019, but bounced pretty hard when I realized a point where I was uncertain what the game was asking of them. Throughout the entirety of 2020 I had it in the back of my head that I wanted to restart this game and play it instead with a mouse and keyboard. That finally happened over the Christmas break and I sailed through the experience smoothly and this is probably the finest Star Wars game out there. I mean I would even put it up there with KOTOR in the amount that I enjoyed the world building contained within. Very different type of game mind you, but still extremely enjoyable.
Hades
I am not certain that Supergiant can create a bad game. Like… they created a sportsball game and managed to even make me interested enough to play it and enjoy if nothing else the story. Hades is Supergiant taking on the Rogue-Lite genre and crushing it. Not only does the game feel fluid and responsive but it weaves an interesting tale being told a tiny bit at a time as you repeatedly die and start all over again in your attempt to escape the underworld. The interactions you have with the cast of characters aligned to help you in your journey is what makes the entire experience so enjoyable. You don’t mind the deaths because you know it is likely going to unlock at least one interesting tidbit of story along the way.
Death Stranding
If Animal Crossing was the game I thought would get me through the pandemic… Death Stranding was the game that actually helped me come to terms with it. First off you have to understand this is the first Kojima game I have ever played, so I was not quite certain what to expect going into it. I had tried playing Metal Gear games, but my hatred of Stealth Mechanics ended up causing me to bounce almost instantly from them. Death Stranding is set in a world where the eponymous event made it extremely dangerous to live around other human beings. As a result the society is fractured and your mission is to travel across the entirety of the United States (or a very condensed version of it) and link up these disparate islands of humanity so that they can all communicate freely again. It hit home the way we are all isolated in our own homes and leaning super hard on the internet and technologies like Zoom to stay connected in this time when it is similarly dangerous to be around other human beings. The emotional conclusions of the game hit me in the gut like a sledgehammer and I still feel the impact of it today.
Genshin Impact
Every so often a game comes along that transcends the normal gaming experiences and almost becomes a phenomena over night. This happened with Pokemon Go, and to a slightly lesser extent it happened with Genshin Impact. For awhile this game was the thing that everyone was playing and talking about and it all happened for good reason. Genshin has some of the best action roleplaying gameplay out there, but it also comes with a lot of negatives given that this is firmly a Gacha game. You hit some pretty hard walls that can only be solved by time or money spent. While the game gives you serious opportunity to win free character pulls… it also has lead some folks to spend literal tens of thousands of dollars on this game chasing specific characters. If you find yourself susceptible to gambling mechanics… maybe check out Immortals Fenyx Rising instead because it ends up being a very similar experience.
Ghost of Tsushima
While I am seemingly nowhere near beating this game, it has been something I have chewed on for the better part of this year. If I were to create a simple description of this game it would be “exquisitely crafted”. This is a game that lives up to the highest forms of development and everything is polished to a mirror shine. The interactions with combat and the world both feel fluid and interesting, and the story that is being told ducks in and out of the main story and side quests effortlessly adding up to one of the more interesting open world designs I have experienced. My favorite thing about the game is the stand off system, allowing me to stroll into an enemy camp and challenge them to send out their strongest to fight me in a duel. What I like the least are the few missions that force you to play the game from a stealth perspective, which are thankfully only really associated with a single NPC. Now that I have my PS5 I have been back playing the game in earnest and loving every moment of it.
Cyberpunk 2077
If I were going to pick a game of the year for this blog, it would ultimately be Cyberpunk 2077. I realize that this is a deeply controversial game for so many different reasons, but it was also the most fun I have had playing a game all year long. The level of intricacy in world building and storytelling… is unfortunately matched at times by things simply being unfinished. This game likely needed another year to cook before release in order to finish out the systems that were very obviously only stubbed in in order to make the every shifting release window. I’m technically on my second play through now as I am approaching the game from a different origin and already seeing quite a few changes. I hope they keep releasing updates to where this game can at some point be the absolute masterpiece that is The Witcher 3. There is just so much going on here that I worry will be missed for all of the major issues the game has going on. This is a game deserving of your time… if you can play it on a platform where it runs well like the PC. Until that is true for all platforms… maybe give it a pass and pick it up once the discounts start happening.
Games I Missed
I know there are a bunch of games that I for whatever reason never got around to playing. Spiderman and Miles Morales for example… did not play yet but hope to in 2021. You might notice that Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft is missing from the list, and while I enjoyed my initial play through I don’t like it enough to hold it up there as one of the best experiences of the year. There are other games that I wanted to talk about like New World, but have not been officially released so it seemed weird putting an Alpha on the list.
What were some of your games of the year? Drop me a line below or of course feel free to contest my opinions.
