your year in gaming 2023

Gaming was a big decompressor for me this year, and I played a lot of really good shite for the first time while revisiting some favorites.

Started the year with Dishonored 2 (played DH1 at the end of last year) and then Kena: Bridge of Spirits, which was one of my surprise games for the year. Next, blew through Hogwarts Legacy which, in spite of all of its flaws, and they are legion, I enjoyed more than I thought I would. The next few months were taken up by (yet another) Mass Effect LE trilogy run, but this time somewhat heavily modded, so that was a lot of fun. Jedi Survivor next, which I very much enjoyed, but the performance issues were frustrating. Next was my first foray into Dark Souls, playing Remastered, 2 SotFS, and 3 one after the other over a three month period. Then I picked up BG3, which I've enjoyed more than I thought I would. About halfway through the second act before taking a break and going back to do several complete DkS1 runs and about to complete a second DkS3 run. Then likely back to BG3, but we'll see.

But overall, genuinely a hell of a gaming year for me.

my 2 biggest surprises:

1) Baldur's Gate 3

I had no desire to play it due to turn-based, but gave it a shot with my wife (who doesn't play video games at all) doing split screen co-op on the PS5 and we've had a blast the last couple of months. Just killed Raphael and have all of the netherstones so I think we mostly just have the brain stuff left. We are already planning to try Divinity Original Sin 2 assuming it's on PS5 (I think it is?)

2) Zelda Skyward Sword

I never played it on Wii. I bought it on Switch when the HD version originally came out but stopped playing after an hour or two. Decided to give it another shot and forced myself to at least play through the first real dungeon and have been mostly hooked. Just had to get used to the controls (holding L to use the camera and using the right stick to control the sword, for instance). I still have some issues here and there with controls and using items/gear but I've loved the dungeons and puzzle solving. I'm in the middle of the 2nd flame stuff so I should be getting close to the end.

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Biggest Disappointment: Jedi Survivor

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thats a little surprising to me. Any particular reason? i think i enjoyed the first installment more but still quite liked survivor. it would probably be on my top ten of the year.

It didn't really grab me like the first one

Admittedly, part of that is because my love for the interconnectivity of Star Wars and its stories has waned due to Disney.

Also, I didn't really play anything actually bad (other than MW3) this year so it's disappointing by default because it was the only thing that came to mind

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i was curious for you all, what was your best and/or favorite game of the year?

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While not new technically (remastered), but I waited so long to play The Witcher 3, that I thought it would be a drag. It was not.

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Worse/least favorite game of the year?

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You might laugh but I was pumped for Ghostwire:Tokyo. I was disappointed in it.

Biggest Surprise: How much fun I had playing Hogwarts Legacy. Also, I really enjoyed Gotham Knights.

Biggest Disappointment: Bungie and Destiny 2. It became a chore to play so I quit.

Didn’t play that much this year. I’ll go in order

FF7: crisis core- started the year off with this with the plan to play this then ff7 remake to really get the full story. Ended up getting to the end but not finishing it. It’s a pretty dated PSP game that got boring

It Takes Two-co-op that the fiancé and I beat together. Had a blast

Hogwarts Legacy: Played maybe a 10 hours. Idk why I bought it I’m not even into Harry Potter. It wasn’t bad just didn’t grab me.

Legend of Dragoon-old PS1 JRPG that I jumped all over when I saw they put it on ps store finally. The nostalgia was real. Platinumed it and had a blast

Final Fantasy 16-got about half way through and lost interest. I had such high hopes that this really didn’t have a chance of living up to the hype I created in my head. Some really cool aspects but mostly forgettable experience

Cyberpunk 2077 (2.0 patch)-have been grinding this for a few months now. About 80 hours in and just have the main story left. It’s been really fun

Best game I played: Ghost of Tsushima. This is a masterpiece. Visually stunning, super fun and satisfying combat, the most seamless wayfinding system I have ever seen, and it really had a lot of flexibility and room for creativity in your play style and how you completed missions. This is everything an open world RPG should be. I could nitpick some things, but overall an incredible game.

Biggest disappointment: Hogwarts Legacy. This is not a bad game. It has a fun combat system, a beautiful world to explore, a solid enough story, etc, but something is missing. I find the game very grindy and repetitive. I gave up on it after about 15 hours because it just wasn’t feeling “fun” despite it seemingly having everything that should be fun in it. This is still a good game, just couldn’t live up to expectations.

Biggest surprise: CD Projeckt Red released an update for the Witcher3 that nerfed the healing skill bonus when consuming food. While this was arguably balancing out a somewhat broken mechanic, I had grown used to it being the other way. If the game had used the post-patch version from the jump, this would have been fine, but I had already done multiple playthroughs with it the way it was.

I didn’t want the change nor did I like it. The huge difference in healing basically resulted in a massive difficulty increase to players playing on medium to low difficulty. That’s not where I want to experience massive difficulty jumps. I liked Witcher 3, in part, because it had a difficulty slider I could adjust at any time. If I got bored, I could slide it up to get challenged a little. If I got stuck, I could adjust it down so I could get past the part I’m stuck on without having to waste tens of hours backtracking, mindlessly grinding, or loading a previous save and losing hours of progress. NOTHING makes me drop a game faster than getting stuck on a boss I can’t beat or a room I can’t get out of forcing me to load a previous save and lose hours of progress. If a game has a bad difficulty/progress curve and expects me to grind mindlessly (not through fun sidequests, but random encounters) for hours just to level up and “get gud” enough to continue progressing through the story, I’mma quit. The game advancing in difficulty as you become more capable is a critical balancing act of any game.

I play on easy or medium because I don’t want to struggle too much. I just want to escape to a pretty world and have fun in the story role playing a character. I want to feel like in a bigger than average fight like I might lose, but rarely do without completely f$&king myself up. This MASSIVE spike in difficulty literally made me rage quit a game that I had sunk over 100 hours into, and I haven’t played it since. F$&k you, I wish I knew how to uninstall that update from my ps4 because it broke my enjoyment of literally one of my 3 favorite games for the PS4.

I'm always WAY behind in gaming due to kids/work/life so my choices here will be dated for sure. But I got to play a good bit this year so here it is

Best/Favorite: God of War
- Just another great installment in this series. Really liked the open world aspect and the graphics were amazing

Worse/least favorite: AC Valhalla
- I enjoyed it but the monotony of the game made it a chore at times. Plus how many hours it took to complete was insane. Way too much time wasted searching for new weapons/upgrades

Biggest surprise: Days Gone
- Currently playing this and I am really enjoying it. Got it for $15 in the PS store a few weeks ago on a flier thinking it would be decent and this is just behind God of War for my favorite played this year. Not a perfect game by any means but very enjoyable

Biggest disappointment: Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order
- Man I really wanted to like this one but I felt the mechanics of the game were just awful IMO. Might be in the minority there

Looking back, and realizing that the only 2023 releases I played are FF16 and Octopath Traveler 2. I may be too picky.

I really liked FF16 but it was a bit too ambitious and I strongly disliked the ending. I would say I was disappointed, but it's more of a mixed bag. It definitely could have been better in ways. But the normal combat was good and if you took the time to do all the side quests, the world immersion was really good. The boss fights against Titan and Ultima, in particular, were quite punishing yet rewarding.

OT2, however, blew my mind. Playing a "modernized" but still old school pixelated feeling JRPG with 8 separate and unique stories tied together by incredibly challenging endgame content to top it off, was a breath of fresh air in a gaming industry that's tripping all over itself trying to constantly reinvent the wheel. I haven't had as much fun playing a game since Skyrim and Witcher 3. If any of you old school JRPG fans haven't played it, you seriously don't know what you're missing.

Rest of the year I spent playing/replaying ACNH, Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma and CotW The Angler. Briefly played Graveyard Keeper, but couldn't learn all the intricacies of the system fast enough to enjoy it, so abandoned it pretty quickly.

I guess my big accomplishments was finally finishing Ghost of Tsushima and Burning Shores DLC for Horizon FW.

There is DLC for Tsushima so maybe I should check that out. I'm trying to finally play through Witcher 3 but dang, that game is dark on oppressing