crispy4000

Pyre. It feels like the game I would have wanted Banner Saga to be. Still is a bit too repditive, and there's too much downtime between matches. But the presentation is flawless. It's pretty enough that it makes you forget you're doing the same thing over and over. Really neat idea for how to progress the game once you get through the first tournament. There's some hard choices, but not in ways that punish you obtusely. In typical Supergaint style, it becomes as hard you make it. I gave up on Witness after putting about 12 hours in. It's okay, but overall pretty joyless. Give Supraland a shot if it wasn't up to your speed.

So-so game, but this level is classic.

Not my knowledge. The better Bond games tend to be 1st person though. I'm just curious if they'd consider it.

Good fit. Wonder if it'll be 3rd or 1st person.

Actually, no. The consoles are quite a bit behind both AMD cards. Watch Dogs Legion can’t hold 4k30 at a ‘low’ RT setting on them, which isn’t even a menu option on PC. These cards should be more than enough until a console refresh. You might have to make some compromises though depending on the game. (ie: 1440p, 30fps, lowering RT settings)

This didn't age well.

Ori 2? The Pathless? Monster Train? Hades will probably win anyways, so it doesn't matter.

I'm playing through Pyre right now because I don't own Hades yet. Ori 2 and Demon's Souls are the most notable omission from the GOTY list

I'll leave it to @Commissar SFLUFAN to post the reviews.

I played through the campaign with dynamic resolution enabled (at 4k) on my 1060. Worked fine. The only times I ever got framerate dips was in cutscenes. The game goes above and beyond with it on high end PCs too. You can run it higher than native and super sample it down, while still keeping it dynamic to cover frame drops.

Titanfall 2 did it well to my memory.

Preference for steady framerate over locked resolution. When it's done right, I prefer it. Especially with the high resolutions most modern games target.

Portal. Yep, I never played it. The best part was escaping at the end, since it felt a bit more organic rather than designed to be solved. Although there were still hidden messages to guide you along. It's pretty easy on the whole, though some of the more interesting solutions take some patience with the game's physics. Overall, I can see why it was lauded for its time, and it still holds up. The core mechanic is still novel, especially carrying momentum through portals. But its puzzles didn't surprise me in the way Supraland did earlier this year. I would have liked more multi-layered, multi-room puzzles too.

Lots of could-be's at the moment. It's impossible to say for sure what the bottlenecks are on either system yet. But for now, it's still uncanny how close they are performance-wise in general with cross-gen stuff. DMC5 could be a sign that Series X will have an RT advantage in the future, though I don't think it would pull away hard and fast in that until an upscaling solution materializes. (that's better suited for Series X, presumably)

We already know their APIs are good now! Because of logic: Just gotta wait for a good developer to properly use them! ... In all seriousness, I expect it'll get patched soon.

That's really unfortunate. They've always been consistently no bullshit with good editorial.

My disagreements with this are why I prefer the PS4/XBO/WiiU/Switch. If you look at its list, very few of the most critically acclaimed games doubled down on monetization. You never had to resort to paying into the schemes to have fun this gen. You might even have more fun avoiding the games that went there. This was also the generation that indie games stopped feeling so small and constrained, IMO. I'm sure budgets were still tight, but I no longer went into them expecting significant compromises. Games like Edith Finch, Life is Strange, Hat in Time, Hollow Knight, Inside, Hellblade, Rime, Ori ... there's nothing absent there. They're just great, and honestly, better than AA/B-tier games at their prime (in the PS2 era). There's still tons of high-budget/high-effort looking ones I haven't played yet. Sure, I'll agree that there's too many pixel art indies. But the cream of the crop ended up being fantastic (Undertale, Celeste, Dead Cells, Stardew Valley, Into the Breach, etc). Also, backburner genres like 3D platformers, arcade racers, survival horror and platform fighters made a comeback, thanks to how the indie space has grown. I could go on about how 3rd party Japanese developers started to get their groove back too, whereas the PS3/360/Wii was a low point. Can't stop thinking about how good DQXI turned out, for example. HD towns, lol. The only caveat I have is that there's a ton of open world glut and over-reliance on skill trees. Those things became trendy in the same way the 3rd person cover mechanics did.

I took the top 5 GOTY-awarded games each year for these generations to build this. Took my best guess on 2020 games, to make it equal entries for each. This is just a snapshot of critic 'consensus' at the time. A few games that are oddly absent gained greater recognition after their debut. (Dark Souls, Fortnite, Hollow Knight, etc) Which generation's games do you prefer? Would any unlisted games tilt the balance?

Remake or not, those kind of scores are a rarity for a launch game. And the PS3 game was still pretty niche on the whole.