What hurts them worse..

1. Putting out a (in some people's eyes) somewhat unfinished game on time?

Or..

2. A masterpiece completed months later than promised? (Possibly make next years GOTY)

I think # 1 hurt more...but then there are people who get very upset with game release delays..

And Bethesda is crying all the way to the bank.

So what exactly was revolutionary about the Witcher 3? And I have no idea how you can say they've removed features without replacing them. Literally everything you could do in Fallout 3, you can do in 4, and then some.

Every time i see a post where someone says the Witcher is deep, there's a counterpost from someone else who played it and thought it was shallow.

Agreed...an RPG beating a CoD game is a win for us all.

I did enjoy some Black Ops 2 and World at War with friends though but they can't compete with a solid single player RPG imo.

If you want to know what is revolutionary about Witcher 3 I suggest you play it.

No. You can not do "literally everything you could in FO3 and then some" and you know that. FO4 has no skills, no skill checks, perk checks or attribute checks in dialogue apart from some very limited charisma checks, it has no karma, it has fewer factions, it has fewer branching quest options, it is railroaded, it has removed any and everything that would take time to achieve or allow you to fail, the list goes on. As a result it has no replayability, because it's not an RPG anymore. Too much has been removed.

I'm getting a bit annoyed with people who feel they have to defend FO4 at any cost, even by telling untruths about what the game is and what it does and doesn't do.

I get it. You like the game. That's perfectly fine. You don't have to jump on the defense every single time someone has some critique about it as if you were personally attacked. You're not being personally attacked. It is possible to just treat critique in an honest fashion.

I've seen this with Skyrim and now it is happening again with FO4 and it is just not necessary.

EA is also currently on the way to the bank. Battlefront was a great success..... I understand that I'm going to an extreme, but declining quality being excused with sales figures always annoys me. Fallout should not go the way of Assassin's Creed. I understand that it won't be a yearly release, but it is still possible to suffer similar issues of overly streamlined mechanics which feel poorly implemented. (Settlements, dialogue, quest structure, etc..)

The Witcher 3 received nearly universal acclaim for its story, both professionally and even among users. The way that you paint it makes it sound as if there is balance between the two contrasting opinions, but there really isn't. The vast majority of people find that it was a deep and engaging title. It isn't like Fallout 4, where the userbase is highly divided on the quality of the game. Of course there will be individuals that didn't like the game, as with any other game. This doesn't mean that it has a significant impact on the overall public perception of the title.

The Game Awards are a strange show (it is their second year) created by Geoff Keighley, and the focus seems far less about honoring achievement and far more about trying to promote/sell games by showing lots of trailers.

I wouldn't take them too seriously yet. Especially when the voting panel is comprised of media outlets, and ONLY thirty of them.

Because the number of voters is so small, every vote counts - and in the pre-show discussion of GOTY candidates, one of the voting "jury" (as The Game Awards calls them) said, paraphrase, "I didn't play that GOTY candidate because I was too busy playing this other one, which should win!"

They don't have THAT many awards, and yet some awards they don't even do on stage, Keighley just says "and in the category of X the winner was Y" and then they play some more "ads."

So you can see why I consider this show to be a bit of a joke so far. I really hope they take the format of the show and the focus, and the way that nominees and voting are done, to be more like the Academy Awards in the future.

Personally, I don't care about GOTY awards. All I care about is "was the game fun?"

More general thoughts on awards..... only one game/movie/album/whatever, can win a particular award. That doesn't mean that the other nominees aren't good. So, the fact that a particular thing didn't win, doesn't mean a great deal.

(And if you as a dev, have an expectation/end goal of "win the top award"? That's just setting yourself up for failure. And/or believing your own hype & "drinking the kool aid". There's too many factors you can't control involved in being considered "the best" in a year. So, I can't see Beth going "OMG, we didn't win! We must change everything! ")

Just my $0.02.

edit: yeah, that reminds me.... when did the Spike VGA's become something so acclaimed? I haven't really paid any attention to them, since back at the beginning they were kind of embarrassing, trying too hard to be hip/cool/"extreme" as well as being on the frat-bro/boobs/beer channel.

...ah, checking Wikipedia:

So it's not directly the Spike awards, it's just brand-new awards run by the same head guy.

Don't care much for it, another game that I enjoyed this year and I'm currently playing didn't win anything.

That is literally what one of the thirty media outlet folks (who vote for The Game Awards) said in the pre-show: Fallout 4 has everything Fallout 3 had.

That's why I basically ignore modern game "journalism" - it's just plain awful.

(Since this award show was so close to Fallout 4's release, I think that might have hurt its chances, without as much time to play it. I also think that's why Rise of the Tomb Raider wasn't even nominated - I was surprised to see that it wasn't.)

I'm not telling any "untruths". Everything there was a skill for in Fallout 3, there are perks for in Fallout 4 - the only thing that was "removed" was degradation on ordinary weapons and armor, but instead we've got Scrapper, Power Armor degradation, and a much more detailed crafting system. I don't need a karma meter to know which side I'm on, and neither does the game. And fewer factions? Fallout 3's main quest forced you to side with the Brotherhood of Steel, and the only thing you could do for the Enclave was put the modified FEV into the purifier - in 4 you can go through the main quest with the Brotherhood, Railroad, or Minutemen, and even side with and do quests for the Institute.

Story
The open world RPG genre has always been wracked by the issue of storytelling. It was essentially a given in the past that the story would suffer as a result of the freedom that a player is allowed. The Witcher 3 didn't mange to just subvert this trend, but it managed to tell a story perhaps superior to that of linear titles. This is revolutionary because it's the first open world title to have pulled off such a wonderful narrative within the natural restraints of an open world game. It would be like an MMO that managed to get rid of grinding and tedium, or a shooter campaign which was completely open-ended.
Scale

The Witcher 3 pulled off a world that managed to feel like an actual world. The size of the map is enormous (3.5 times larger than Skyrim). It felt like the first fantasy game to be set in a real place. Novigrad is 72 square kilometers large, making it by far the grandest city by far to ever be incorporated into a single player RPG. Again, this was a first for the genre.

Side Quests

This is perhaps the most emphatic victory of the game. The side quests boil down to the same basics as other games, but the story they managed to include in every single encounter was astonishing. Most RPGs have side quests that feel like chores (kills 10 rats, etc) but the Witcher subverted this entirely through storytelling. In fact, there is a quest in the game in which you literally kill rats. However, this was overshadowed by an excellent plot arch showcasing the terrible end that was met by the daughter of nobility, and the tragedy that her former lover lived through. It didn't feel like it was grinding or busywork.

Of course, the other aspects of the game were just well done. Gwent was a great minigame, VA was superb, and there were tons of memorable characters. Or course, other games have done this too. But it is the fact that they added it onto these successful changes to the RPG format that is leading to such high praise and esteem for the game.

The quests in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are deeply written because they have more than one branching paths to completion. Some of the quests in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are also have choices and consequences like timed quests where you have a decision to make before before the time runs out.

Some quest NPC's are NPC's who fled a village because bandits took it over and if you kill all of the bandits then people move back into the settlements in real time dynamically. If you don't ever kill the bandit NPC's you fail the quests.

There are husband, wife, and daughter or son related quests, there are murder mystery quests, there are suicide investigations and disappearance quests, there are quests trying to figure out why a house is abandoned and if it's haunted or just a monster scaring people away instead of a ghost or some undead, there are robbery quests, there's a quest at a ball, there's a quest at a wedding, etc. All of these quests have branching paths to them.

The quests in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim don't have these if they do hardly any do.

When you kill Alduin nothing happens, when you finish the last main quests in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt stuff happens you got a lot of endings to choose from as well in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

A video game awards show lol

Well seeing as Geoff Keighly invested his money in creating it since 2013 and from what I hear he spends a few million dollars (USD) a year making The Video Game Awards show, not to mention some AAA video game developers and some AAA video game publishing executives like from Electronic Arts (EA) show up at the show. I think Bethesda Softworks and Bethesda Game Studios takes this show made by Geoff Keighly seriously.

No reason to laugh at it.

Now if it's a kotaku.com award or something like that then I guess you can laugh at it?

Or smaller, more focused games.


It's not a wheel!
It's a cross.
Wheel is 360.
Cross is four.


On topic, well deserved

Only this year. What about next year or their next release? Will they be crying to the bank or just crying? Let's hope they learn from this.

But this one was brought to you by DORITOS and MOUNTAIN DEW.

IMHO FO4 is a good games with some flaws I would like to see improved. ( better branching quests are one topic here ) but whether it wins one of the ( how many GOTY awards exits ? ) or not - I don't care

Bethesda Game Studios has no video games released for sale in 2016 other than Fallout 4 and Fallout 4 DLC's and Expansion Packs.

It would be in 2017, most likely in 2018 or 2019 when Th Elder Scrolls VI or whatever releases for sale. That's when we will see if a Bethesda Game Studios developed video game sales will start declining.

All I have to say is, if you haven't actually played the game, anything you say is extremely subjective opinion.

I was disappointed to hear about some of the changes. I bought it anyway. I like most of the changes, and this may be my favorite Bethesda game over Morrowind given more time to explore. That's my opinion, sure. But at least I played the game to come to my opinion.

That said, I don't give a rats ass about GotY awards. Some random YouTube personality could award one and a publisher would throw it on the cover if they got more sales for the title of that award.

Oh please.. almost everyone here was screaming about the GOTY awards a couple of weeks ago. Now that FO4 lost (which it should have) you suddenly don't care?

Of course you care.

Skyim won not because it was revolutionary, it won because it was the first truly open-world game with total freedom. Which this game is not. At all. Bethesda made the decision not too, for whatever reasons.There is nothing new or revolutionary about this game. Every feature it has, has been done; by Bethesda themselves or, hell - most of the enhancements in this game were "inspired" by mods from Skyrim or FONV.

Every Skyrim player has had settlement building (better than what FO4 has now too - go install Slyrim and get the mods - see for yourself) for years. In fact, ever since Hearthfire was released. Modders were building homes and towns long before Hearthfie hit. Hearthfire was to allow the console players to build a house.

Weapon mods: FONV had them. Then even better mods were released with weapons/mods. The same mod was ported to FO3.

Interesting companions? Are you kidding? Ever hear of IntrestingNPC's for Skyrim? A huge 8GB mod that add hundreds of NPCs/companions all with back stories and interrelated quests. For combat - that's a long list of player made mods for both FO3/NV and TES. So many, that you can tailor either game to the type of combat you like. And if you haven't played the Skyrim civil war yet, do so, but this time download the Civil War Overall mod. You are in for a surprise (get the Dragon Overall Mod too. and get ready).

Now to be fair, all these were mods made by players for the game. And Bethesda hasn't released the mod kit for FO4 yet (why is beyond me). But that's just my point.. all Bethesda did was beef up the graphics (already done for Skyrim and FO), copy some mods from both games, and hyped the marketing,

And FO4 doesn't even have a good story.

Now does this make FO4 a bad game bad? No, not at all. I'm playing it. I love it., And I'll keep it for at least long enough to see just how much we can do with the mod kit. But does it deserve an award? No. Not at all.

The best thing Bethesda did for the game was allow mods. Frankly, if they didn't half of us wouldn't even be playing. I love Bethesda for that. It's the only reason I overlook all the crap in their games (except for Dishonored - that game is just genius - but wait - Bethesda didn't write that game, they just distribute it). Allowing modding, even encouraging it, deserves praise (EA/Bioware, for example fights the modders) but not an award.

I've got to say, that those are three really impressively shallow reasons to entirely write off a game. But hey, everyone has their own preferences.

Not to mention, two of those will be taken care of with mods. As soon as the kit is released. I think the Dialog Wheel might be the only problem. A lot depends on "the voice".