Games of the Year 2020

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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.

AggroChat #328 – That Killer App

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start the show with discussion about Mechwarrior 5 and the multiplayer sessions that have been happening among AggroChat folks.  We also talk a bit about the extremely confusing world of intellectual property when it comes to this game.  From there we revisit the topic of why forcing a stealth mission is a bad idea when you are not expecting it.  Grace talks about a short game she discovered called Space Court where you preside over a Court in Space.  Tam talks about getting the Valve Index and finally maybe finding the killer app in the form of Half-Life Alyx.  From there we dive into a discussion about the games that we have missed during 2020 and didn’t have time to play, which segues into a discussion about Bel giving Dragon Age Inquisition another shot and how maybe Kodra would like the games that are not the first one.

Topics Discussed:

  • Mechwarrior 5: Multiplayer
  • Why Forced Stealth Missions are Bad
    • Revisiting the Topic
  • Space Court
  • VR and the Valve Index
  • Half-Life: Alyx
  • Games we Missed Playing this Year
  • Trying Dragon Age Inquisition Again

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Games Played 2020 Edition

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This was one hell of a weird year, I think for pretty much everyone involved. Traditionally on the last day of the year (or as close as I can actually manage to it) I have had this tradition since 2015 of attempting to talk about the games that I played during the last year. I am not entirely certain why I started doing this thing, but if you have been around for awhile you will recognize this sort of post. I do this thing where I keep track of what games I played during what months of the year. I think in part this has been my way of keeping track of when exactly I played something now that tools that I used to use such as Raptr no longer really exist, or at least I am not really using them.

The challenge as well is that so many games are spread out across so many different platforms. I consume content from Steam, GOG, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Nintendo Online or Xbox Game Pass. So instead of relying on a single source of information… I started keeping track of things in spreadsheet form and then collecting what games I actually touched during a given month based on what I had been talking about on my blog and what games I was taking screenshots of from my massive archive of past screenshots. The end is a compiled list of games that I chart in spreadsheet form… which is by no means as complete as tracking hours (which would be impossible) but does give me an idea of what my year looked like.

The Top 10 of 2020

Top 10 Most Played Games of 2020

The rules of this experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me the number of months in a given year I actually played a specific game. There are always going to be a number of “Forever Games” that eat up a lot of my time, but throughout the year I ended up spending at least some time in seventy different games. Here is the list of games that I played the most months during the year of 2020.

  • Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played all 12 Months
  • Destiny 2 – PC – Played 10 Months
  • World of Warcraft – PC – Played 9 Months
  • Ghost of Tsushima – PS4/PS5 – Played 6 Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – PC – Played 5 Months
  • Phantasy Star Online – PC/Xbox One – Played 5 Months
  • Genshin Impact – PC/Android – Played 4 Months
  • Hades – PC/Switch – Played 4 Months
  • New World – PC – Played 3 Months
  • The Division 2 – PC – Played 3 Months
Comparing Top 10 from 2019 to 2020

Another thing that I find interesting is comparing my top ten list from the previous year. First up it is zero shock that I am still playing a lot of Diablo 3. This game is comfort food for me and especially with the option of playing it on the Switch I spend a lot of time just tinkering around in it between seasons. My ultimate wish is still that I can just play my PC characters on the switch. Completely gone is Dragalia Lost and honestly… I have yet to replace it with a Mobile Phone game. Also gone is MTG Arena which I weirdly just sort of stopped playing out of the blue. Destiny 2 I probably played less, but I poked at it pretty often and World of Warcraft came back with the pandemic and my need to play something that I could ultimately shut my mind off while playing.

I played significantly less Final Fantasy XIV and for whatever reason I am finding it harder and harder to attach to that game. WoW Classic, Bloodstained, ESO, Anthem and Pokemon Go all ranked high in 2019 but are all completely absent. Replacing them would be Genshin Impact and PSO2 which I spent quite a bit of dedicated time playing… but have sort of petered out in both cases. Hades is another bedtime gaming experience that I continue to poke at… and while I spent a lot of months playing Ghost of Tsushima I never really was able to play for a very long time due to my lack of stamina when playing with a controller. Division 2 and New World both surprised me because I did not realize I had played for as many months as I ultimately did.

The Top 15 Of All Time

Top Games by Month Since Beginning Tracking

Another thing that I like doing is keeping track of the total number of months I have spent playing a game since starting this. I have data reaching back to 2012 and that gives me an eight year view of my gaming habits and trends. Since that image above is way too small to reasonably read, going to once again break it out into a text list.

  • World of Warcraft – 69 Total Months
  • Destiny / Destiny 2 – 65 Total Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 60 Total Months
  • Diablo 3 – 53 Total Months
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 45 Total Months
  • Rift – 39 Total Months
  • Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
  • MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
  • Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
  • Monster Hunter World – 16 Total Months
  • Guild Wars 2 – 15 Total Months
  • Division 1 and 2 – 15 Total Months
  • Minecraft – 14 Total Months
  • ArcheAge – 13 Total Months
  • Fallout 4 – 13 Total Months
  • Wildstar – 13 Total Months

As you can see from the list… this is mostly consumed by what I earlier referred to as “Forever Games” There are a good number of MMORPG/Live Service as well as some evergreen games like Fallout 4 and Minecraft. Diablo 3 and Elder Scrolls Online swapped spots in the list, which makes sense because I did not really spend much time in ESO this past year. Given my continued disinterest in FFXIV, Diablo may be able to lap that game by this time next year. Rift continues to hold solid even though I am not playing it because that 39 month seems like a hard plateau to cross with new games. Weirdly from that point down all of the games remained the same… because they are not games I was actively playing nor has anything else had the staying power to really compete with them.

Longest Streaks

While working on this post, I had a random conversation with my friend Tam about this process and that I was going through pulling together this post. To this he posed the interesting question of which game has the longest streak of unbroken months. I didn’t have an answer to this at all, which lead me to quickly compile a list of the longest streak for all of the games on the above list. It was around this time that I realized that if I did a longest streaks list… I would end up with a completely different top 15. Several of those games are played in short bursts over a large period of time which add up to a big number in the end. The end result is a bit surprising.

  • Destiny – 33 Months in a Row
  • Diablo 3 – 28 Months in a Row
  • MTG Arena – 23 Months in a Row
  • Pokemon Go – 23 Months in a Row
  • Rift – 22 Months in a Row
  • World of Warcraft – 21 Months in a Row
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 20 Months in a Row
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 20 Months in a Row
  • Dragalia Lost – 16 Months in a Row
  • Monster Hunter World – 15 Months in a Row
  • World of Warcraft: Classic – 7 Months in a Row
  • Anthem – 6 Months in a Row
  • ArcheAge – 6 Months in a Row
  • Bloodstained Ritual of the Night – 6 Months in a Row
  • Ghost of Tsushima – 6 Months in a Row

Other Interesting Data

In 2018 I played 70 unique games, which fell to only 48 in 2019. However with 2020 I returned to 70 games which means I seemed to be extremely restless as it comes to gaming. In 2019 I played 19 games that I considered to be “singletons”, or games that I only played for a single month and then walked away from usually meaning I bounced. During 2020 I played 44 of these Singletons so I wound up bouncing around quite a bit. I would like to play more single player narrative adventures, because I seem to really enjoy them when I allow myself to play them. However I still find myself being drawn back into the usual titles that I find familiar and comforting, which was something that I needed quite a bit during this year of Pandemic.

If you are curious about past gaming trends since starting this experiment, you can find my posts going back to 2015.

If you are terribly curious, you can even check out my raw list of data that I share freely. I am not exactly sure why I started this tradition, but I do find it interesting to reflect back each year on the past years games and the trends that occurred.

Jedi Fallen Order Final Thoughts

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Jedi Fallen Order was technically a game that I talked a bit about when it came out last year at roughly this same time. Prior to the Mandalorian, this game represented the single best piece of fiction set in the Star Wars universe that did not directly involve the main canon of characters. What it represents is a spreading out of the universe and the telling of other tales that just happened to be tangential to the main story through line of the Star Wars setting. I had a lot of fun playing this game in November of 2019, but I wound out stalling out very hard and never quite returning to it to finish things up. At that point I was playing with a controller, which is not my instrument of choice. For the last year I had wanted to restart this experience so that I could get a fresh start and also adapt to my more favored Keyboard and Mouse controls.

That happened over the break and even though this game came out last year… it is probably also going to go on my games of 2020 list because experiencing it with different controls made the experience so much better for me personally. I think pretty much all of my original points hold that this is a Dark Souls inspired game that doesn’t feel like Dark Souls thanks to the variable difficulty slider. I was mostly here for the story and the escapism of feeling like a Jedi, so I played on a lower difficulty setting. If you feel like you want to punish yourself, then you can absolutely crank the slider up to the maximum and start with Dathomir as your first planet and the game will allow you to bash your face against that wall for as long as you care to.

That is one of the major challenges that I have with Jedi Fallen Order is that it isn’t exactly great a messaging what you as the player should be doing. For example as mentioned above you are given a choice of a starting planet of either Zeffo, the correct choice or Dathomir, the masochistic choice. There is a SIGNIFICANT difference in the starting difficulty of both planets, and I personally chose Dathomir this go around because I had some knowledge of the game under my belt and it would allow me to unlock the Dual Saber faster. The thing is… even in doing this… you can only progress so far on Dathomir before you have to switch right back to Bogano because you lack the metroidvanian tools required to progress further at that point.

While playing the game it tells the story of you as Cal Kestis a Jedi Padawan who somehow escaped Order 66, but the emotional and mental toll of doing so damaged your connection to the force. Through interacting with the world you end up remembering bits and pieces of your training allowing you to access the classic Jedi powers like Force Push, Force Pull, and Double Jump as well as encountering a number of equipment upgrades like Rebreathers and Climbing Claws that assist in your traversal of the levels. These abilities are then used to solve puzzles in the same manner that you would have in a game like Zelda as you complete similar “Temples” to unlock the knowledge that you are seeking to fulfill the main quest of the game.

You are also aided by BD-1, a little robot friend that you find on the first planet of the game Bogano. BD-1 is the best companion character that I have seen in a game like this, and as you traverse the world you also improve its abilities to aid you in your challenges. An example is early on BD-1 will help you slide down zip lines, but eventually you find a tractor system for it which allows you to ascend those same lines opening new ways to traverse existing areas. In Star Wars the Robot companions are always the heart of the story, and BD-1 is essentially the “goodest” dog you could have ever encountered. I just sorta wish you could pet it, because it totally deserves head pats.

Another strong point of this game is the extremely solid cast of supporting characters. These characters are patterned after the appearance of the human actors which presents an interesting thought. Now that we are in this era of Disney Plus spinning off so many new shows set in the Star Wars Universe… Jedi Fallen Order could be adapted perfectly to the small screen. Cal Kestis is played by Cameron Monaghan of Shameless and Gotham, and Cere Junda is played by Debra Wilson who if you are old like me you will mostly know from Mad TV. In both cases the digital character is basically just them, and it would be super easy to translate those roles over to physical forms. It would be super interesting to have a oneshot series that takes place between Jedi Fallen Order and whatever the next game is that they are working on.

Maybe even more important than how well acted the main cast of Cal, Cere and Greez are… this game also has a phenomenal cast of antagonists. The best of these include the Second Sister, who is an Inquisitor that is constantly on the hunt for Cal Kestis and crew. Another stand out is the Night Sister that you encounter on Dathomir who is trying to keep you from progressing further on that planet. Both are exceptionally three dimensional characters that manage to be more than just an imposing person with a red lightsaber. Not going to go into much detail because spoilers, but suffice to say that the story takes some interesting turns and earns the adoration I am heaping upon it.

I said earlier that the game is bad at messaging what the player is supposed to do, and I feel like I need to dive into this further for a moment. When I started playing this game last year I hit a wall and that wall was me not understanding that the game was trying to tell me to leave the planet that I was currently on. During the quest you venture to Kashyyyk and help a band of freedom fighters to liberate the Wookies being enslaved there. Immediately following this repatriation you are given a subtle tip that maybe something interesting has happened on another planet… but the game doesn’t come out and tell you to freaking leave. Instead it explains how you would get to the next area of the planet… and I spent hours wandering around trying to figure out how to go down that path. You can’t get there yet and you really do need to leave the planet and go do something else for awhile before that path opens up.

In other ways the game does a really good job of telling you what you can and cannot do. Each Jedi Ability opens up new areas of the game much like a traditional Metroidvania, and these are generally messaged with terrain looking a specific way. This is called out when you first pick up the ability… for example in order to Wall Run, you need a specifically textured section of wall and once you notice this your mind starts to calculate what you should be doing in which sections. Eventually you learn that you can chain together a number of traversal elements which only serves to make you feel more like the Jedi Knight that you are becoming. It is only really when the Story wants you to go somewhere else that maybe it does a poor job of explaining itself.

The entire package however is extremely fun and while the game itself isn’t the longest I have played… it rides this line between being too short and overstaying its welcome. Nothing in the game feels like filler being used to pad the content or force you to jump through a series of hoops to slow down your progress. All of the content you experience is there for a story driven reason and as a result it feels like an extremely solid narrative experience. It doesn’t hurt that all of the set pieces are these epic views from the Star Wars universe as you roam around giant crashed hulks and ancient force user temples.

I went into this game expecting a fun romp that allowed me to pretend I was a Jedi. What I did not expect however was the sheer emotional prowess that the story wields in allowing you to feel like what it must have been to be a Padawan that barely escaped the purge. In fact there are moments within the game that allow you to relive the experience of barely escaping while Order 66 is being carried out. The game actually shows you several different sides of this same event that we are now familiar with thanks to the prequels. In all cases there is a sheer gravity of the action that sticks with you and I have to admit… the game extracted more than one tear from me as I lived through its tale.

Now that we are a year out from its release, you can pretty much pick the game up for around $20 on your platform of choice. If you have ever loved Star Wars at any point in your life… this is money well spent. I can only hope that we see a lot more of this cast of characters, because the game sets a few things up that it never quite delivers on, making me think we have many more adventures in our future. I want more games with the mechanical and emotional gravitas that this game provides.