A part of the metacritic is from a group that hates anything that is not Fallout 1 or 2 and to an extent NV, and anything that Bethesda has made in the Fallout world. Also it is now cool to hate Bethesda. It is cool to love everything that CD Red and Witcher 3 does even when they had tonnes of bugs at launch and a lot of issues with the downgraded graphics compared to what was being shown. Seems like everyone forgot those days.

Grats to Witcher for Winning still I think FO4 is the much better game but that is my opinion. Witcher 3 is still a good game

For me the only thing that matter is do I have fun playing the game and I had fun with both games with more fun playing FO4.

Also, their next RPG in the works will also include a large open-world environment, selectable classes, and first/third-person gameplay.

Bethesda really needs to revaluate their current plans and step it up. They worked on this title for seven years and this is the end result.

Witcher 3 was about three and a half years. Also, the seamless open-world of the Witcher 3 is incredible. The variation in dialogue and actual quality choice/consquence.

Witcher 3 deserved GOTY, no doubt. Some aspects were streamlined, there were bugs/glitches, but overall the good FAR outweighs the negative as where Fallout 4 is 50/50.

I just did that last night with all my friends...except all my friends were like WTH are you talking about?..what's a 'fallout'...

Yea so none of my friends are gamers...but FO4 came out on top for GOTY...it was close..

I don't think it's about the size of the map ^^

Skyrim's world was beautiful, but it didn't have as much variety...

there were dozens of caves that looked almost the same... same with the Dwemer ruins, the castles, the small villages

I feel like Fallout 4 finally is able to make every single building and area look special (except that one church that you see 4-5 times throughout the world )

many people will still feel like Skyrim's world looks better, because of the more 'beautiful' landscapes with it's healthy trees, the mountains, the snow...

but if you look at the overall details of the buildings, the interiors, the cities... Fallout 4 is way more detailed ^^

especially Boston itself is sooo well done

If you think that the reason for Fallout 4 not winning the overall GOTY of the last 2 GOTY awards, is solely Witcher 3's story telling, I think you are wrong.

Yes, the Witcher 3 did a very good job at presenting its stories, and it has interesting, well written stories. But I don't think that a simple thing such as this is enough to earn a game an overall GOTY award. Perhaps best story telling award, but for overall GOTY, there needs to be something more than that.

I think the reason critics choose The Witcher 3 over Fallout 4 is because of the overall improvement of Witcher 3 in comparison to its predecessors.

If you look at the Witcher series as a whole, it is clear that with every new installment the newer games are largely improved from their predecessors, in all aspects.

The GUI is more easily navigated, the menus better designed, the combat less clunky and more fun, leveling and crafting more straight forward and easy to understand without losing their depth, character animations are better,the difficulty more balanced, side activities more developed and deep, monster amount bigger with the different creatures feeling unique and thought out regarding the place they inhabit, the ways they attack and behave...

Witcher 3 is improved on every single aspect over Witcher 2, and it did so while adding new mechanics and features, and without losing its character, without upsetting older fans of the series.

Now if you look at Fallout 4, while it is overall a good game, it didn't improved much over Fallout 3. Its graphics improved over it, but not as much as people expected, and it has some new features like weapon modding and the crafting / settlement building. Plus it has a a way better character creation system. But a lot of aspects of the game weren't really improved, and the way some aspects changed in Fallout 4 made some people even feel that Fallout 4 became worse on them instead of improving, like for example the dialogues. The characters still look like puppets instead of people. The controlls on PC are bad enough for people who generally prefer to play with keyboard and mouse to choose to play with a controller that one. Plus a number of changes like the reduction of dialogue options and ways quests can escalate, and to a lesser extent the lack of skills, make some people feel that Fallout 4 isn't Fallout enough. The technical problems of the game like frame drops and textures not loading up or popping-in way too slow in front of your face, doesn't help either.

So basically my suggestion to Bethesda is that instead of focusing on streamlining gameplay to catch a more casual audience, and just adding a few new stuff while leaving some other aspects of their games undeveloped or unimproved, to try to refine the core aspects of their games, aiming for overall improvement. Instead of cutting out skills completely from Fallout 4, they could instead improve on the way the skill system is presented to the player, like making a better GUI, and making a more comprehensive tutorial of how the system work. That way new players wouldn't be overwhelmed by it, and at the same time the older fans who liked skills wouldn't get upset. Because cutting game mechanics does not equal better gameplay.

Damn, very well said and absolutely spot on.

I agree 100%

but the main reason for that, was that Witcher 2 wasn't all too great in the most aspects :/

it wasn't even an open world game, had only 15-30 hours of content and not the best combat mechanics

the story wasn't too great either...

I still don't get how Witcher 2 was able to get better scores than F:NV

while Witcher 3 is an amazing game, Witcher 2 was not

I still feel that the post-apocalyptic setting will always lose to the Fantasy one for the most people

Fallout 3 and New Vegas didn't win many awards either...

F4 got a lot of attention because Skyrim did so well, but not too many people enjoyed the setting

The video game map in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is more detailed than all of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and is also a huge map bigger than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's map.

Answers in the poll compete with each other so I didn't vote.

I hate being told what to like and dislike, so I give exactly no fornications that Beth didn't win some reviewers GOTY regurgitation of fan hype measurement. None of my favorite games ever have.

Further, there have been plenty of games that would have no business in a "most popular game"
competition anyway, but have been well worth the money none-the-less.

it's not about how huge a map is

it's about its details and its art design

things like the Skeletons lying around, that each tell a different story... the teddybear sitting on the toilet reading the paper, the skull having billiard balls in his eyes...

just the way, you enter each building and can tell what happened there, just by the way the developers placed the objects

the 'silent stories' is what makes Bethesda games so special ^^

Witcher doesn't have that and has a far more generic world

you see this house all over the map, every single village is full of them

http://guides.gamepressure.com/thewitcher3/gfx/word/533211698.jpg

and there are a lot other items that repeat themselves over and over in the world

What? Have you not played oblivion? Morrowind? Daggerfall? Arena? They were all open world games. skyrim didnt do this first hell daggerfall was as big as great Britain and arena had the entire continent of tamerial in one game. want to go from highrock to blackmarsh go for it valenwood to summerset isles more power to you. But out of the tes series skyrim didnt do it first.

To be frank I care not about if Fallout 4 didn't get a GOTY award. I know fallout 4 is a great game, I don't need some silly award to tell me that.

Well for me the teddies have really started to annoy me and break immersion. There is this joker who has a teddy bear factory and has started to place them all over the commonwealth in silly poses. Or the raiders, ghouls and super mutants have all developed some weird teddy bear fetish.

As for F4 and GOTY awards I don't care if they won or not. I'm having fun and that's what matters.

But they seriously have to step up on quest design, dialogue and writing.

It doesnt bother me that they removed skills, the perk system achieves the same resaults.

What I find disappointing is the amount of results that are "I don't care"

Fallout 3 did earned rewards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_3#Awards

As for Witcher 2, it was a game that I played through it and had its good moments but along with some negative parts that made getting the fun out of it harder. Mostly my personal complains with it was its convoluted menus, lack of enough tutorial / explanation on crafting / leveling / magic, and that I got lost and couldn't find were to go next some times. Other than that, wondering around, talking to NPCs and killing stuff was fun in it.

Plus, I'm thinking that the difference between 1st person and 3rd person is a factor when it comes to how the critics judge the games. Because of the perspective, I believe that critics judge the two games with other games too, even of different 'genres'.

I'll tell you what I mean. Fallout 4 is a 1st person game. Let's not say a FPS, but still a first person game. Now if you look at what some other FP games have done, it leaves some things to be desired. For example look at the recent Far Crys (3-4-Primal). Whenever you open a chest in them, you see the character's arms literaly openning the chests. Whenever you are to take parts out of a dead animal, you see the arms cutting the guts open and taking what there is to take. When your character gets on fire, you see him trying to stop it. After you have been hit a few times, you see the character's arms in blood. This doesn't have to do with the shooting at all, so its not like we should consider it an FPS thing. Even The Elder Scrolls Online, which is an MMO RPG has character animations for opening chests, pulling levers etc. This is just an example. My point is that the games that are first person, have been evolving, adding touches like this, yet Fallout 4 which is a game with the same perspective lacks them. And I guess some people will compare Fallout 4 with these games, because they are all played through the first person perspective.

Witcher 3 on the other hand is also compared to other 3rd person games, even not RPGs. Because what labeling a game 'RPG' has come to at this day and age is just having a game having a leveling system and optional side-quests. So if you judge it with some other 3rd person games, you might find that its up to other recent releases of 3rd person games. Witcher 3 doesn't have animations for the character openning chests or grabing body parts of creatures either, but that doesn't play much importance in judging the Witcher 3, beause well neither other 3rd person games do that, so people doesn't notice the lack of it in that game.

If a gaming company only comes out with one game in a specific year, isn't that game their "Game of the Year" anyway?
Why do they need somebody else to tell them they didn't release anything else that year?

good points ^^

even though I feel like it would be very annoying having those 1st person animations throughout hundreds of hours in Fallout, I can see that the gameplay may not feel exactly '2015'ish compared to other games... I'm already excited when I see my character actually pulling out a Stimpack, instead of just getting the health points

and I certainly had fun with Witcher 2 as well ^^ I just don't see it as the 9/10 game, that everyone else was calling it

I don't think it was too hard to improve on that, as it was fairly small and way more linear than what Bethesda's games were

They had it on the drawing board for seven years. Maybe some concept art and stuff. They didn't start working on it for real until they were finished with Skyrim. They have a small team, only about a hundred folk. You can't really work on two AAA games at one time with that small a team.

Funny how people are talking about The Witcher 2 as it was just ok, as i find it to be a masterpiece with almost no equal.

Not the worst ending I've ever played. The ending cinematic was poor, but the endcap quests were great.

You know they lost the award to another game with a voiced protagonist, yeah?

Anyway, winning this award or not is pretty immaterial. They should cultivate better writing in their games, because the writing isn't all that great - not because they didn't happen to win an award.

gamesas make fun games, but it's beyond time that they finally tightened up a lot of the flabby seams that have been in their games for a decade at this point. And it may also be time to finally adopt a less limited engine. Gambryo (and it's offshoot "Creation") have been solid workhorses for a long time, but they are incredibly long in the tooth.

I know their core team is small, but that's no longer an excuse when your games are selling this many millions of copies. And how big is CDPR's Witcher team?

240 on the Internal development team.