RPGWatch - Game of the Year Awards 2019

No reason to wonder. I definelty did not. What semantics?
I don't remember there was a top game without any followup DLC in that year (can't find the thread to check), of course I went with TW3 as #1, but IIRC my other votes went to FO4 and Eternity.

Choices&consequences… I didn't have a choice back then. Today I did.

EDIT:
About wallet vote. Forgot to add. I did eventually buy TW3 season pass but only after everyone and their mother said it's practically two additional games.
FO4 DLC on the other hand? Never bought a single one. If you check my steam profile you'll spot that I have *all* base game achievements but not a single one from DLC. I don't usually go for 100% a game, but in this case it was interesting. Not interesting enough though to let them milk these.

You can no longer vote for the GOTY 2019. Now I only need to find time to collect the results and prepare the two GOTY articles.

Hopefully there will be a surprise in the results. Surprises are good.

Well I can already guess two and probably all three if I wanted to.

Not in order just the top three based off the replies.

GreedFall
Outer Worlds
Disco Elysium

Yea boring. But maybe the other three will have a surprise ?

Couchpotato said:

Well I can already guess two and probably all three if I wanted to.

Not in order just the top three based off the replies.

GreedFall
Outer Worlds
Disco Elysium

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Couchpotato said:

Well I can already guess two and probably all three if I wanted to.

Not in order just the top three based off the replies.

GreedFall
Outer Worlds
Disco Elysium

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Me from December 10th 2019 post:

lackblogger said:

Hence this year it'll be easy to predict, as there's only two games which fit that bill this year:

The Outer Worlds
Greedfall

To which Disco Elysium will get the "I play indies as well you know" novelty vote and Outward will get a decent amount of remainders.

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A boring and predictable result awaiting us that is, strangely, a bit more exciting than usual for reasons that are unquantifiable other than it being a generally shit year and therefore will likely have some 'interesting' results in it somewhere

lackblogger said:

Me from December 10th 2019 post:



A boring and predictable result awaiting us that is, strangely, a bit more exciting than usual for reasons that are unquantifiable other than it being a generally shit year and therefore will likely have some 'interesting' results in it somewhere

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I said the same a few months back as well. Never paid attention to Disco Elysium as I was never interested in playing it, but from what I read many members like it.

Anyway next year Cyberpunk 2077, Bloodlines 2, or Wasteland 3 will most likely be on the list. That's if two or three of them don't get pushed back again to 2021.

No.
One or two of those three won't end up the next year's top3 goty. And you know which one is that definetly. The other one, depends.

joxer said:

No.
One or two of those three won't end up the next year's top3 goty. And you know which one is that definetly. The other one, depends.

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Pessimist.

All three for now have a 2020 release date.

Lucky Day said:

@Myrthos can we do a game of the decade after this?

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We could, but the list to choose from would be huge.


Perhaps I could take the top 5, or something like that, of the 10 GOTYs and put those in a list. That would 'only' be 50 games.

I know the issue is workload versus probability of actual votes, but the list would have to include some curation beyond a robotic syphoning of the tops-of-the-year, for several reasons:

1. A busy year might have all of our wanted top 10 whereas a weak year might have zero. So there's the issue of bias against games that come out in busy years.

2. A game released in January will have lost votes during that year due to the recency bias that votes always take place 12 months later. Likewise, games released towards the end of the year, particularly December'ish will always suffer from too recent a release date to have had their word-of-mouth spread their popularity.

3. Time will always bring forth different results to current year results, particularly with RPGs which are reknown for their long tails while games that happen to have had huge hype can be quickly forgotten. Prime examples: Planescape Torment took many years to become a beloved classic while its spiritual sequel got everyone playing it, but also most people forgetting it and not having very fond long-term memories.

This isn't to say to exclude any games such as the new Torment, as I'm sure there'll be a fan or two, but rather to try and include all games where we expect the game to get a fan or two rather than be robotically arbitrary because of each years current year hype.

And being a whole decade, it would be more interesting to see a top 25 than just a top 3 or 10 IMO and let people vote for up to 10 instead of 3 games.

I'm aware it's a question of workload though.

Why does there need to be a list? Couldn’t it just be a write in ballot? Everyone submits their top 5. Most voted for is 1st, 2nd most is second and so on.

sakichop said:

Why does there need to be a list? Couldn’t it just be a write in ballot? Everyone submits their top 5. Most voted for is 1st, 2nd most is second and so on.

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Sounds good in theory. But that's a huge load of work for whoever has to evaluate the results (I'd say even more than what lackblogger discusses). You'd first have to aggregate votes with different spelling / with or without sub-titles / Diablo II vs. Diablo 2, etc.

And it's not even easy to automate, because you'd have to distinguish between duplicates and different entries of a series.

sakichop said:

Why does there need to be a list? Couldn’t it just be a write in ballot? Everyone submits their top 5. Most voted for is 1st, 2nd most is second and so on.

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Because many would forget nonmainstream games special enough to deserve at least mentioning.

For example the unforgiving Blackguards. Build your party randomly = game over much before you reach the end.
Another such RPG not allowing you to progress with just any (random builds) setups in the past decade was which one? If there was any, I can't remember it.

Also the question is should all sequels of one franchise be there unless drastically changed? What'd be the point of having 78456578634578634856873 Avadons when each is the same. On the other hand TW2 and TW3, apart from character names and some models, feel like two completely different games.

joxer said:

Also the question is should all sequels of one franchise be there unless drastically changed? What'd be the point of having 78456578634578634856873 Avadons when each is the same. On the other hand TW2 and TW3, apart from character names and some models, feel like two completely different games.

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I think we need all entries from each series (if eligible). Otherwise, it becomes a "series of the decade" vote, or something like that. How do you compare all Mass Effect games to something singular like Disco Elysium? It's already hard enough if you only consider single entries.

I get the problem with "Avadon"-like game series though. A simple fix: when evaluating the results, provide rankings based on 3 subsets of the data: all games (as they are voted on, i.e., the full set) <> all single-entry games that are not part of a series <> all serial games. Pretty easy to do, once you have the results.

Or if you don't like to do that after the fact, simply set up additional votes, like "best series of the decade".

Cacheperl said:

Sounds good in theory. But that's a huge load of work for whoever has to evaluate the results (I'd say even more than what lackblogger discusses). You'd first have to aggregate votes with different spelling / with or without sub-titles / Diablo II vs. Diablo 2, etc.

And it's not even easy to automate, because you'd have to distinguish between duplicates and different entries of a series.

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What he said. Sure if only a couple vote not a problem.

As a data manager and analyst free text fields are the bane of my existence when trying to do aggregate results, use filters, or most anything with the data beyond providing the raw information.

joxer said:

Because many would forget nonmainstream games special enough to deserve at least mentioning.

For example the unforgiving Blackguards. Build your party randomly = game over much before you reach the end.
Another such RPG not allowing you to progress with just any (random builds) setups in the past decade was which one? If there was any, I can't remember it.

Also the question is should all sequels of one franchise be there unless drastically changed? What'd be the point of having 78456578634578634856873 Avadons when each is the same. On the other hand TW2 and TW3, apart from character names and some models, feel like two completely different games.

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Well, I’d argue that if you cant remember the game then it’s not Game of the decade worthy anyway. Besides if you care enough to vote I’m sure a quick google search to jog your memory wouldn’t be to much work. Lastly you wouldn’t include the kind of games your worried would be missed if you made a list as it would make for an endlessly long list.

Yes sequels should be included. Even if the games are extremely similar they’re will still be differences. Take the souls games for instance, very similar but I still have my favorite.

Cacheperl said:

Sounds good in theory. But that's a huge load of work for whoever has to evaluate the results (I'd say even more than what lackblogger discusses). You'd first have to aggregate votes with different spelling / with or without sub-titles / Diablo II vs. Diablo 2, etc.

And it's not even easy to automate, because you'd have to distinguish between duplicates and different entries of a series.

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Possibly but I’m sure some watchers would help if needed. I would.

Anyway, How many actual voters would they’re be. I’d be curious to see how many vote in the GOTY vote. I’m guessing its not a huge #. 25-50 maybe?

We could also do a multi stage vote instead, so that we have multiple votes of a few dozen games.

That way we could do a "Crawler of the Decade", "3rd Person RPG of the Decade", "ISO RPG of the decade", and so on, and then throw each finalists into a "RPG of the Decade" master voting.

I am already looking forward to discussions about which RPG belogs to which section.

sakichop said:

Anyway, How many actual voters would they’re be. I’d be curious to see how many vote in the GOTY vote. I’m guessing its not a huge #. 25-50 maybe?

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It is not a lot, something like 110-120 IIRC, but why bother with open questions? We had them in the past and they never brought a game into the top 10.

I can generate a list of all games released from Januari 1, 2010 up to and including December 31, 2019, with the numbers for number of news posts, comments and h-index. If someone is willing to go through this and select a reasonable short list of something like 100 games max. I can send that long list to that person.
We then can put that short list up for further discussion on the forums and perhaps reduce it further (or not). I can make a contest of the resulting list.

For this game of the decade, I think we should be able to vote for more than 3 games. Perhaps 10? Leaves the question on how to mathematically calculate the winner from that.