Before we end with a bang, we have a whimper. The only negative award serving to call out bad practices, get that schadenfreude experience over stupid decisions leading to even worse events, and games that had all the potential to be at least good… only to set up a disappointment.
Why? These games are either objectively the worst or the ones with so much squandered potential. Put in the trashfire where it belongs
- Anthem
- Fallout 76 (again)
- Left Alive
- Stadia
- YIIK
Deliberations Summary
Well, that’s a lineup of disappointment, isn’t it? Anthem is another symptom of a very serious issue plaguing Bioware. The once-revered RPG studio is in shambles, and Mass Effect Andromeda was not a one-off fluke thanks to it being made by a B-team. It barely makes a case for a looter-shooter (in fact throughout development it tries to distance itself from being one). And the story and world-building aspect where Bioware was known for its craftsmanship is no more- it’s uninteresting. Any post-launch support teased was immediately vanished, and unless a full reboot of the game is in the works, Anthem is, in many regards, dead.
But being dead has not stopped Fallout 76 being a disappointment, however. We put this on as a joke, but the defending champion of last year’s trashfire award somehow makes a great case to be included, again. Pre-order collectible items that need to be recalled because it can literally kill you. A subscription model that offers private servers (that are not private), VIP status (that leads to class warfare) for the price of a full-price game per year. And hackers are rampant, spawning unused Fallout 4 assets. This is just a whiff of what we’ve heard and seen happening to the online game. How it continues to be even worse, despite still being actively worked on, is baffling.
Left Alive was first revealed with an all-star cast of developers. It showed promised. It has mechs. Sounds promising indeed. But the game is actually a rehash of Metal Gear Survive. Yeah, that horrible spin-off. And Left Alive cannot meet even that level. Everything about the game is abysmal, a squandered potential that will leave the Fron Mission universe cold and untouched for who knows how long. Left Alive should be left for dead.
YIIK? More like “yeek”. There is a universe where a post-modern RPG satirising the current world through a nihilist view can be charming and relatable. But YIIK is the exact opposite of that. The self-insert main character is a straight-up horrible person that you wish to distance yourself from. The writing is pretentious rather than intriguing. And depicting a real person who passed away in poor taste is not cool.
But who would have thought we have to remove the “game” from the award title this year just to accommodate the winner. Everything about Stadia made us more wary about game streaming rather than being excited about it. Promises of “negative latency” didn’t help when it’s there’s so many footages of games on Stadia running sub-par. Promises of 4K 60fps games also didn’t hold up as not all games are matching that target.
The launch day doesn’t feel like a proper console launch, not because it’s not a console, but because there’s barely any hype. Getting it set up looks more like a hassle- you need two apps for Stadia, and the Stadia app only works on Google Pixel phones on launch? You still need to buy games like a regular console, some games are even pricier on Stadia. There are no first-party games either, they only just started to build new studios.
It doesn’t help that one of us is in the UK and has to be subjugated by those horrendous Stadia ads we only saw glimpses through The Game Awards.
Stadia sounds more like a hassle and various hoops you need to hop to stream games, rather than a good solution to play your games anywhere, anytime via the power of the internet. It’s even worse than an Ouya, which is a dead console but can still be repurposed for other Android projects. When Stadia is dead, all you have is… metadata.
If game streaming really is the future, then Google sure is trying really hard to bury it.
Stadia wins the Danial’s Trashfire Award for Most Disappointing.
Previously, we crowned the winner for Most Surprising Game. For the full list of awards, have a look at that here.
Now that we got that out of our system, tomorrow will be the big one. It’s the Game Of The Year Award, and also our Top 10 Games of 2019.