Another year is almost over, which means another end of year conversation about games. I didn't play as much new stuff as usual this year, but there are still some gems.

Horizon Forbidden West
Oh, Horizon. Always the bridesmaid with knack for terrible timing. Last time it was Breath of the Wild, this time it was Elden Ring. I can rest well knowing the best game of whatever year will launch a week after Horizon 3.

Horizon Forbidden West is an odd game for me. Make no mistake, I loved it. It's genuinely great. It suffers, though, from being just more Horizon. It's bigger and better and prettier, but it really is just more Horizon. That's a good thing! I didn't realize, however, how much the first Horizon really relied on the mystery of the old world and discovering all of those logs to see just how the modern Horizon world came about, who Aloy was, etc. Without that same sense of mystery, Forbidden West suffers a bit in way that I didn't really suspect. It's a shame, becuase I think the dialogue is generally much better than in the original, and the side stories make a great effort to actually show off and explore the different cultures and personality of all the people Aloy meets during her journey. That's my favorite aspect of the game, whereas I think the supposed driving factor of the main quest is fairly weak (or at least disappointing in its culmination).

The gameplay is much improved upon the first game, I think. It is almost a very (very!) light version of Monster Hunter. If you want to upgrade your gear, you must focus on destroying specific parts of the machines to break off the exact thing you need. There is an option in the game to turn that off so that any part can drop from just killing a machine without breaking specific parts. I loved having to strategize fights around parts I needed for upgrades though. Weapon variety is increased in some cool ways (no more just tear arrowing your way through everything), although needing so many different bows just to cover basic elemental damage types is a bit annoying still.

The world is expansive and beautiful and much improved over the first game. It feels a bit more real and natural.

It's a great game that I love, it's absolutely worth playing, but I can't help but be disappointed that it didn't capture me the same way the first one did.

Elden Ring

Undoubtedly game of the year for a large group of people. I can agree with that, but, like Horizon, I end up more disappointed in it than I expected. Also like Horizon, it's an incredibly game. It's open world Dark Souls, that has to rule right? Yeah, it absolutely does.

I can't help but think this is the game From Soft made to really trying and bring more people into their style of games, and it comes at the cost of being weird for veterans of the series. Old Dark Souls players have internalized the way those games work, know how the game is going to trick you, know to be thorough in exploration. Playing Elden Ring in the manner I would play Dark Souls undermined my enjoyment of the game, though, in that it's just too goddamn long. I put 65 hours in and never finished. I'm near the end, but I ran out of steam. Trying to really explore that massive world and running into the 100th identical catacomb with the same boss at the end got really old.

The level design is some of the best they've every done when I'm in the big set piece dungeons. There just wasn't quite enough of that and too much open world for me. It's an incredible first 50 hours, and then it just gets less exciting. I came away hoping their next game is a more traditional Souls style game instead of another massive open world.

Gran Turismo 7

I don't have much to say about this one. I didn't play as much as I expected, but what I did is good. It looks incredible, and it feels fantastic on a good wheel setup. I've longed for a more old school racing game where you start with slow cars and have to work your way up, as opposed to Forza which drowns you in Ferraris and Porsches within thirty minutes of launching the game. GT7 is what I wanted, but perhaps too aggressively. Good cars are an actual grind to get. And that would be fine, if it weren't for the multiplayer mode being entirely reliant on having good cars to compete. And the actual single player mode sucks. It's not racing. It is always the player starting at the very back of a long line of slower cars and having to pass them all in three laps. It doesn't even attempt to capture the sense of actual auto racing in the mode that's forced upon players to actually earn money to buy cars.

Death Stranding Director's Cut

I still haven't played as much as I wanted, but I'm intending to return soon. I picked up my original save, which was maybe halfway through the game. I played for a few hours and was loving it, but found that I couldn't really recall anything that had happened. So I started a new save from the beginning. It's a truly unique, incredible game.

God of War Ragnarok

God of War Ragnarok is my game of the year. Like Horizon, it can be boiled down to just more of the first game. It looks and plays basically the same, but, unlike with Horizon, all of the small improvements they made to every gameplay element add up to being more than the sum of their parts. It's difficult to really articulate, but everything feels just a bit better than it did in God of War 2018, and it all adds up to being much more enjoyable. I also really loved the story. It goes to some neat places, and it does all of the things that seem obvious, but it does them in surprising ways that I really enjoyed. I finished the main story in the last week or so, and it's pretty likely I'll get the Platinum, as it actually opens up some new things after the story is done.

Destiny

It's been a weird year for Destiny. I'm still in it for the long haul, though I've found a much healtheir relationship with the game. I'm much more comfortable just skipping entire seasons if I don't enjoy what they're offering.

The Witch Queen campaign was fantastic to play on Legendary. The rest of that expansion sort of sucked. I don't think the Throne World is engaging. I'll forever hate the upgrade system that just wants me to grind Patrol activities just to unlock the ability to hold X to get a chest within the world. I don't think Wellspring is particularly engaging.

I like weapon crafting. It's nice to have some form of long term roll guarantees while not completely negating random rolls. Crafted Weapons are undoubtedly strong, and I can see the argument that they're too strong in some cases, but I've never felt particularly bothered by not having fast access to crafting patterns. It seems like it's at least in the ballpark of a great system.

This season has been a miss for me. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't enough to keep me engaged and leveled enough to play GMs or anything. Season of the Haunted, however, really nailed it. The best season of Destiny by a longshot since they went to that model. I loved the Leviathan Patrol (I spent like three hours in there last night while chatting with Claude and Stabbim and Korny). I didn't particularly need anything, it's just the best place to casually shoot stuff in the game right now, and it remains fun in that regard. As I've said before, Duality might be my favorite thing in Destiny. The story missions were bespoke and fun and even had some interesting small mechanics. It was just a great season.

I'm really looking forward to Lightfall and am eager to see the improvements they continue to make, even if they're often two steps forward, one step back.

Genshin Impact

Perhaps the best live service game I've ever played. I genuinely love this game. It's not just good for a live service free to play game--it's good, period, full stop. Great characters and story, fun gameplay, and an incredible soundtrack. It's engaging on every level.

Deep Rock Galactic

I played a bit more recently, and it's still fun. It'll never be a consistent presence in my life, as it never really holds my attention for long, but it's always really fun to drop in every nine months or so and play hard for two weeks to see all the cool new mission types and random events and caves they've added since the last time I played.

It Takes Two

Cody and I played It Takes Two earlier in the year. We had a thread about it here already, so I won't repeat myself, but that game is absolutely awesome. If you have a coop partner, it's well worth playing.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare II

I can't stop thinking about this fucking game. I never thought I would say that about a Call of Duty game again, not since the original Modern Warfare 2. I played a decent amount of Black Ops 2 because it's what all my Air Force friends played at the time, but I didn't really love it. I played a decent amount of Warzone over the past year, and it's always been fun, but it suffered in that I came into it late and always felt like I was a step behind because of it.
I played the beta all weekend when it was available for the current Modern Warfare II, and I really enjoyed it. I skipped buying it, though, knowing that I'd probably play for two weeks and then drop it.

A few weeks after the game released, Warzone 2.0 finally came out, and it changed everything. Warzone is the Battle Royale mode. 150 players or thereabouts drop onto a massive map and the last one standing wins. Everyone surely knows what a Battle Royale game is at this point. Warzone has changed the game by brining back an old feature, though: proximity chat.

Proximity chat is massive game changer. It has already lead to an influx of great viral videos and a fair number of personal experiences, some large, some minor, but almost all super fun. Just knowing that other people can now hear Korny and Sammy and I bullshitting as we rummage for ammo changes the entire atmosphere. It is incredibly tense in a way I find really enjoyable. Long stretches of silence while within distance of another team as we stalk them through buildings, or even trick them by giving bad instructions to one another (Korny telling us he's zip-lining to the roof while we actually surround the buttom floor, for instance). In one game, I was downed at the top of a set of stairs in a small building. The player who killed me starts yelling "Where's your teammate?!" We're both laughing about it, because it's sort of novel to be able to talk to each other at all in that circumstance, and it's funny--he knows I'm not alone and that Korny is out there somewhere. After a few seconds of this, Korny hits the top of the stairs and blasts him in the face, while I say "He's right there." It's a small thing, and it's not even half as fun in a text story as it was an actual experience while playing the game.

Actually, here's a video Korny kindly sent me of that moment:

You can find all sorts of fun videos of Warzone proximity chat. And, surprisingly, I have actually not encountered much of what most would probably think comes out of a modern public chat lobby. I'm sure it's happening, and probably not infrequently, but folks have been really chill in my experience. Heck, we even randomly teamed up with another squad in the new DMZ mode.

DMZ is a looting and extraction based mode. It's played on the same battle royale map, but there are fewer teams and lots of AI enemies running around. Instead of being the last one standing, you are given a set of missions to complete. Sometimes simple, like doing a basic contract to bust open safes, or kill AI enemies in specific areas, or loot specific Strongholds. Other players are still on the map and they can and will kill you, and some missions even require it. The whole idea is to get loot and find one of the three extraction points on the map to call in a helicopter and get out with it.

You can load in with a team of three people total. However, DMZ allows you to invite other players within that match to join your team, up to a total of six. Korny, Sammy, and I were playing and just doing our thing and got into a very short gunfight with another squad. I went down and the other team simply asked us to join them instead of continuing to fight. We joined them, they helped us do an annoying mission we were on, we helped them do a couple of missions, then we all extracted and went our separate ways. It was really cool! Proximity chat allows for enemy teams to bargain and make deals, casual conversation, taunting enemies, trolling, etc. It's just a great addtion to the game, and it feels as revelatory today as it did back in Halo 2, if not more so just because of the style of game that Warzone is.

Because Warzone 2.0 and DMZ were so fun, I talked myself into buying Modern Warfare II and I'm also playing it's traditional multiplayer mode, which is only available with purchase, unlike the other two modes, which are free to play. Progression is carried between it and Warzone, so it's one cohesive multiplayer experience. Along with the traditional smaller multiplayer modes, it also has Ground War and Invasion modes, which are much bigger affairs. Ground War even has vehicles and ends up feeling like a light version of Battlefield (which is good, because 2042 is on Game Pass and it fucking sucks). It's large scale chaos and is really fun.

As I said, I never thought I'd buy a CoD again, but Modern Warfare II is a return to form for the series, and it rules. I really didn't expect a modern multiplayer shooter to grab me in this way anymore, but this one certainly has, and I'm honestly thrilled about it.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some smaller games. I played Citizen Sleepr on Game Pass for instance. It's a really cool RPG that I just never made time to finish (although it's still installed, just waiting for the day I get back to it!).