XaiJu
SecondWindGroup
SecondWindGroup

patreon


The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023 | Fully Ramblomatic

This week's episode of Fully Ramblomatic is now available!

Reminder too that Yahtzee Tries livestreams will primarily be on the livestream channel going forward! https://www.youtube.com/live/tm3AXWyf6JA?si=EbrzNB0Z6nA3QY0v

The Best, Worst and Blandest of 2023 | Fully Ramblomatic

Comments

I am still shocked that Starfield won the "most innovative gameplay" category of the Steam awards. It's like someone is taking the piss by giving it the least applicable award possible.

SW

I meant purely the honorable mentions in the credits for that very reason

hairyson94

I mean, even given he did enjoy it a lot more than he usually does, I can see why it wouldn't make the top 5 of a surprising stacked year.

Swift Justice

Hey, monkey man excitement hitting things with a bone is a genuine and glorious kind of excited.

Swift Justice

Maybe if you’re playing on PC, you get hot bars. I play on console, so it’s three layers deep of radial menus. Although, I just looked up that if I go to the bg3 wiki it’ll tell me how to reorganize my radial menus, such a helpful feature that I’m sure is explained somewhere eventually inside the game’s many menus. But like many other things to read and get tooltips and explore within the menus and options, if I wanted to play a game with a manual open on my lap I’d play DnD. In person, so that I could just focus on one character and let the three other people at the table focus on their characters. Give me three characters’ sheets and make me run all of them? No thanks.

MDO

"Radically different strategy with almost no explanation"? The harpies sing. You cast "no sound bubble" on youself so you don't hear it. What is there to explain? And it's not like that's the required solution. You can beat it so many other ways, that was my whole point. Also, radial menus? The game doesn't have a single radial menu. It's a hotbar.

Péter-Szabó Dániel

Emeryville has some interesting stuff in it, but you HAVE to go looking for it. But then again, most of the SF Bay Area has gotten Bland in the last few years and I'm pissed by that...

z

Starfield topping the Blandest list couldn't be more fitting but I was sure he would make RE4R a de facto inclusion considering how much Capcom ripped out of the original for the remake.

SP_Rocks

I'd recommend going back and watching his SF6 review and then telling me if you're still that confident about it

hairyson94

I understand, a lot of people really vibe with the game, just like they vibed with D:OS I & II. I purchased D:OS before and had this same experience, and I’ve tried a few others (DE is interesting, less menu clutter, but I still lost interest pretty quickly). It’s not the third person Diablo-style view, because I’ve played Diablo 2 & 3 and those were fine. There’s just something that sinks my interest so fast about a screeching halt to combat where it’s all about looking through menus and checking distance lines and so many different decision options that just makes me feel paralyzed. Even the map design and camera don’t help me, because yes, there’s a mini map and some gold buttons on the edges to follow, but the map layouts are overly crammed with people and objects and directions to go in. I’ll freely admit that some people may see this as their preference, the way some people would face one enemy in dark souls, get killed, and put the game down, saying “it’s not for me.” But I’ve been trying to play BG3 since I bought it at launch and every time I pick it up, I’m squinting at a minimap to try to find where I’m going or I’m entering a battle and having to hunt for each character’s options like I’m running three characters in a dnd game. And I run dnd games in real life! There’s just something that is missing for me in the system, and I’ll keep trying to see if it clicks, but I can’t see it yet.

MDO

I didn't look up a single thing in a wiki throughout my entire playthrough, and the menus are really not that complex. Learning to use strategy in BG3 is not something that can only be achieved through dozens of hours of trial-and-error, I'm not sure why you believe that. BG3 is also a game (like Disco Elysium not coincidentally) that narratively embraces failure, so save-scumming not only ruins immersion but is also unnecessary. It's totally fine that you didn't vibe with the game, but I don't think the way you apparently approached it is the only way it can be approached.

ergotpoisoning

No, I suppose you’re right. I just find that hunting through radial menus, wikis, and multiple characters while the game sits there patiently paused and my dwindling free time ticks away not to be a fun exercise. In Elden Ring, the act of playing the game is the majority of the learning curve—timing, a few skills, weapons, ashes of war. To hit is a button, to hit hard is another button. I don’t like that my input in BG3 is not to play the character, to test my reflexes and hone my intuitive understanding, but to make a menu choice and maybe everything will work out. Or maybe it won’t, and I’ll have to spend hours hunting through more menus trying to figure out why. I’m not an incurious person, I’m an impatient person when my fundamental gaming experience is waiting in line. I can just “opt to hit”, but like you have pointed out, I should have actually done this radically different strategy with almost no explanation and which has this completely unexpected result that surely came to you after hours of careful replaying of different battles where you made every one of a dozen different choices just to stumble upon the right answer… or I could look up a guide and trounce the fight no problem, which is what most people are probably doing. I don’t play with guides, because I want to learn the mechanics of a system rather than just be handed the knowledge. If I wanted to play dnd with my PHB in my lap, flipping back and forth through pages and pages of class options for every single attack, *I’d be playing dnd with other people in person*.

MDO

I mean, for your example of the harpy fight there are a bunch of things to learn. Break their concentration with multi-hit attacks. Cast silence on your own party to not hear the song and skip the saves altogether. Use abilities that make you immune. Hit your own party with low damage to snap them back to reality... it's not just "level up or savescum"

Péter-Szabó Dániel

Yahtzee typically doesn't like fighting games (that's why MK1 is on his worst list). If he enjoys a game at all, it's DESPITE the fact that it's a fighting game. He probably didn't enjoy it as much as you think he did.

Holy Zen!

This year has been the year I had to most often remind myself that Yahtzee is very much biased against certain game genres...

Holy Zen!

They're in the last 5 years worth of Best, Blandest, Worst list videos. 😛

Looming Dementia

Well, and out appears that it wasn't very good, so the Hellboy fans were probably doing their best to ignore it.

Looming Dementia

Ok

Michael Alicea

Definitely, BG3 has gotten enough love. I might have stuck it in as an honorable mention, if I was doing the lists, myself, but better to focus on smaller games that were at least as good, in their own way. And it's a better way to do things than whatever the fuck was going on with the Steam Awards. 😄

Looming Dementia

Genuinely surprised Street Fighter 6 didnt even get a mid credits shout out coz Yahtzee seemed to really enjoy his time with it

hairyson94

Well I did want to see BG3 in the list but it did win GOTY so i guess it doesn’t need an additional award from Yahtzee.

Ascendant_Dio

There was a Hellboy game this year and almost nothing got said about it. Tells you just how weird 2023 was, I guess.

Matthew Parmeter

Maybe I’ve just been playing real-time games too long, but I just can’t get into the rhythm of turn-based crpgs like Baldur’s Gate 3. I tried with Divinity: Original Sin and hit a brick wall the moment that time stopped and I had to figure out what my character needed to do, only to make a choice and then have it fuck up later down the line and have to wait for my turn again to do what I was hoping to do the first time. I get that it’s a strategy game, but I game at night for a couple hours until I get tired. Having a static game with no real time limit makes my gaming time slow, tedious, and yawn inducing. Or ridiculously frustrating causing me to revert to older saves rather than learn anything. Yeah, the harpies are annoying, but there’s nothing to LEARN from the harpy fight, no brick wall to chip away at and get better. Just level up a bunch, get better gear, or save-scum so you can artificially inflate your saving throws. Not my bag.

MDO

Oh... Would you look at that

Connor Kelly-Eiding

https://youtu.be/Sid8xgIkcdo?si=TWOhi0XO5gtb7_Vd

Steady Goblin Wood

But where are all the games that came out five years ago that I only got around to playing this year because I'm unemployed? Where's that fucking tier list?!

Connor Kelly-Eiding


More Creators