Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo and Thalen
It is that time again, time for another games of the year show. As is usually the case we fire up a google form and have each member of the AggroChat cast pick their top 5 picks for the year. This then gets collated into the final list that we talked about during the show. This time around we had thirteen different titles to talk about, with the highest voted title getting 5 different votes from staff members. Since we have talked at length about most of these games, the resulting discussion ends up being more a trip down memory lane than a deep dive.
Today is the last day of my holiday break, and it is around this point that I realize I did nothing but play games, or in this case one specific game. I am not sure if I care that this was the case since I spent most of the break fighting some sort of bronchitis nonsense. Holiday break has been one of those times when I dive into particular long games. During one such break I replayed all of Mass Effect starting from the first game carrying the save forward to the third game. This time around after having watched and loved the Netflix series, I dove headlong into playing The Witcher 3. I realize I probably should have started with the second game, but I also don’t think I would have stuck with it had I done so.
Witcher 3 is a weird game that seems to give no care what soever for you being confused about the setting. It is a game that more or less expects you to have either played the first two games or have read some of the novels. This makes it deeply enjoyable for those who have, but also extremely obtuse for someone who has not. I remember the first time I played the game some years back I bounced pretty heavily because it felt like I had no investment in the setting and was immediately being told that I love this woman enough to try and jump through a bunch of hoops to go find her, The Netflix series however gave me enough of a grounding in the setting to be able to start to care about how intricately crafted this world is.
To date I have spent 77 hours wandering the backwoods of the northern kingdoms, and I am completely hooked on the world. The Witcher 3 is among the most interesting and intricately crafted roleplaying game experiences I have ever participated in. I even tried my best to go back and get a foothold into the original Witcher game, but again didn’t make it super far thanks to the awful interface. I do however think I will be able to play the second game now, since I remember my key problem with it has been it did not like alt tabbing and I have other solutions to work around that. I’m even contemplating starting on the novels because I want to know more about this rich setting and the characters within it.
I don’t want to go into anything even vaguely close to spoiler territory because this is a game that I feel everyone should experience for themselves. I will say however that for a game that released in 2015, the game still looks phenomenal. Like I am not sure if I have another game that looks anywhere near as good as this one does in 4k. All of this gives me extreme hope for what Cyperpunk might end up being like to play, but really… I just want CD Project Red to get that game finished so they can create another epic set in the Witcher universe.
Over the last few days I have been using a thing and I thought I would sit down and talk about it this morning. I’ve known about Good Ole Games or GOG as they refer to themselves these days for years. They were a handy shop for buying old games that came with dosbox pre-configured to launch without horrible side effects. At some point they launched the Galaxy Client an it was “fine”. It did the job and presented any games I happened to own on that platform in a pleasant manner. The only game I really owned through GoG was Witcher 3, and only then because a download code came with a video card I had purchased. Since GoG is now owned by CD Project Red it makes sense that they would be handing out OEM codes through their official storefront. To be truthful I had the client installed but I never spent much time with it… that is until I was made aware of some significant changes.
Once upon a time there was a thing called Raptr and I loved the way it kept track of my games played. In part a bit of the reason why I started manually tracking games played in each month was because I was no longer using Raptr. The client reached a point where they integrated way too much stuff into it and it seemed to be a bit of a drag on my system. Over the last several days I have seen a bunch of these cross-platform gaming stats showing up on social media, but I think the first one I remember seeing was my friend Maeka. This lead me down a path of trying to see what had changed with GoG and being pleasantly surprised. The challenge with the client is the fact that I am already heavily bough into the Steam store and the inertia tying me there is strong and mostly keeps me from ever wanting to buy a game elsewhere as steam has served as a single launchpad for all of my games.
Seeing this as a problem, it appears that GoG has worked hard on trying to come up with the answer. Instead of creating yet another walled garden of exclusive content, they went the opposite direction and have created a client that seemingly integrates with everything else. Now I have this single pleasant interface that delivers up all of the content that exists regardless of the store front. This is the point where you are just about to tell me “but Bel, Nvidia Experience already does this and offers graphical configuration options”, and that is absolutely true. However what GoG does is give me back some of that Raptr functionality of tracking the time played and achievements earned from every single game on the list and allowing me to see what my friends are also playing.
The activity feed has been real awkward over the last several days as folks on-board their way into the platform and it catalogs the past decade worth of gaming. However past that initial set up phase as people find out about GoG Galaxy 2.0, it then becomes a valuable way of seeing what my friends happen to be doing. I would love to see them integrate with something like Player.me or maybe just outright buy them to add some of the missing social features. Like when a friend earns a hard achievement I would love to be able to do something simple like give them a thumbs up. That said what is there has switched me to pretty much keeping it up and running at all times, and has greatly increased my willingness to venture off of Steam and purchase games from another platform.
This all works because they did something somewhat brilliant. Instead of negotiating deals with all of these publishers, they went down the road of allowing for community supported Python integrations to be snapped into the client. Many of these integrations are currently being maintained by GoG, but are being treated as open source projects allowing anyone to look at what the code is doing and figure out how to adapt this to other platforms. As it stands right now these are the following integrations I have found, and you can get to them by typing in the GitHub Search Box in the settings>integrations interface.
Battle.net
Bethesda.net
Epic Games Store
GOG.com
Guild Wars 2
Humble Bundle
Minecraft
Origin
Paradox Plaza
Path of Exile
PlayStation Network
Rockstar
Steam
Uplay
Wargaming.net
Xbox Live
As you will notice there are still several that are missing, and the integrations all support different functionalities. The biggest thing that I see missing from various store fronts is the ability to synchronize the friend list. The killer feature for me is being able to integrate and list out everything that I happen to have available through Humble Bundle, since more than once I have re-bought a game that I already had access to through another platform. Humble Bundle is also artificially inflating the numbers since a lot of those games I have already redeemed to Steam and are still showing up in their “non-drm” version available as a zip file download.
I realize that Scopique was joking, but I occasionally do feel like I need to throw this out there. My blog is not sponsored by anyone. Every so often I will latch onto a product like GoG Galaxy 2.0 Client like I am talking about today or my many posts about Parsec streaming client and evangelize about them. This is not because I am getting some kickback from the company, but instead because they are products that I really do find indispensable and want to share them with my friends. I live in this weird space where I consider my readers and the folks I interact with on social media to be friends, and that we are all in this together as some bizarre collaborative experiment. At this point I have turned down what would probably have been thousands of dollars worth of payola that I get offers of through the email accounts associated with this site and my podcast. My opinion is firmly not for sale, but having said that… seriously check out Galaxy 2.0 because I personally find it super cool.
For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know I have a yearly tradition of doing a rundown of the games that I played during the year and comparing them to the same periods over previous years. I have this weird habit of keeping track of what I am playing in a given month and tracking this in spreadsheet form. I started doing this in 2013 and thanks to my other habit of keeping track of spreadsheets I have gone back as far as 2012 with some level of accuracy. I could likely go back further… but that is a job for another time. Essentially based on screenshots, what I am blogging about and what I am talking about on the podcast I can create a fairly accurate record of the games played during a given year. For those who are prepared to descend into madness you can view the entire spreadsheet here.
The Top 10 of 2019
The rules are simple… if I played a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me how many months in a given year I played a game. This is not nearly as granular as I would have liked, but trying to keep a journal of every game I played on a specific day truly would be madness. From this we can see some trends about my tastes during a given year and how these have changed over time. The games I played over the most months are as follows.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played All 12 Months
Dragalia Lost – Android – Played All 12 Months
MTG Arena – PC – Played All 12 Months
Destiny 2 – 10 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 9 Total Months
World of Warcraft Classic – 7 Total Months (counting beta time)
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 6 Total Months (counting beta time)
Elder Scrolls Online – 6 Total Months
Anthem – 5 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 5 Total Months
Now lets take a look to see how this compares to last year, as there are several changes that are worth talking about.
First off there are some significant games that are completely missing from the list. World of Warcraft for example which still reigns as the game I have played for the most months total is completely missing from the top ten. Additionally Monster Hunter World which came on with a vengeance last year is also missing from the list because I more or less have been waiting for the PC release of Iceborne given that I have little to no interest in playing on the console release. I took a break in Destiny 2 for a few months and because of fun seasonal events and the switch release I have played Diablo 3 significantly more often this year. The release of an excellent expansion in the form of Shadowbringers also leapfrogged Final Fantasy XIV several positions. Dragalia Lost had not quite launched early enough to make the list for last year but was a nearly daily fixture in my life in this past year. Both Elder Scrolls Online and Pokemon Go have been on the decline in my free time, so both dropped significantly in the numbers.
The Top 15 of All Time
Now we are getting into the territory of the images being impossible to read, but the above sheet snippet shows the top 15 games of all time. However for sake of sanity I am going to bullet point the list so you can see it more clearly.
World of Warcraft – 60 Months
Destiny / Destiny 2 – 55 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 55 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 44 Months
Diablo 3 – 41 Months
Rift – 39 Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Months
MTG Arena – 21 Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 14 Months
Minecraft – 14 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Months
Wildstar – 13 Months
World of Warcraft continues to reign at the top of the list, but its lead on the other options is shrinking because I am continuing to play that game less. Destiny and FFXIV are now tied for second place, and I fully expect that the Destiny Franchise will have potentially knocked Warcraft out of that top spot. Elder Scrolls knocked Rift out of the previous 4th place but didn’t gain as much ground this year as I didn’t play it nearly as often. Diablo 3 has risen up to claim the 5th spot and gained significant ground considering there was a big gap before between 5 and 6. Rift continues to descend the list because I am not actively playing it and also did not spend much time playing it last year either. What I find most interesting is the last three on the list because if you had asked me to guess as to what this list would like like ArcheAge, Fallout 4 and Wildstar would not have been still hanging on after all of this time. For reference you can check out last years post where I am pulling the comparisons from.
Other Interesting Data
Some other interesting data worth noting. In 2018 I played 70 unique games and this year I played considerably fewer, only racking up 48 games. That is still a lot of games but I felt like for a large chunk of the year I had a pretty stable list of titles that I kept bouncing back and forth between. The weirdest thing is… that if you look where I spent a lot of my time they are not on the same titles that I listed in my top games of 2019 post. I am a sucker for “comfort gaming” and there are a lot of times I keep playing games that present familiar patterns. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my vacation playing The Witcher 3 and I have loved it, and I guess my hope for this new year is to spend more time playing single player games since my multiplayer communities have been waning.
In 2018 I played 33 games that I would describe as a “Singleton” or a game that I only poked my head into for a single month. In 2019 that only represented 19 total games and it feels like that is really where the difference between the years comes into play. I was seemingly more adventurous in 2018 than I was in 2019 and I hope I can capture that spirit for 2020 and get out of my comfort zone a bit more often. For those interested in more trending information along this topic you can see a number of my posts since starting this tradition.
