Mid December appears to me like the perfect time to recap the game year 2019.
When I think back... what I remember most were the huge disappointments in 2019. Games people hoped to be good and which turned out to be either a complete joke or way behind expectations.
Very early this year Anthem was the biggest title released and the expectations were incredible high.
Bioware was known to be one of the top game developers and most players expected that Anthem would be good, that Bioware learned from the Mass Effect Andromeda debacle.
These hopes where instantly destroyed by a for sure good looking game... which had lots of technical problems, nearly no content worth to be played longer than a few days (despite being a looter-shooter) and a totally chaotic crisis management in the weeks following the release. It turned out that Anthem was a broken mess... without any balancing, broken game mechanics, a looter game without loot. The promises made prior release were broken, the roadmap was pushed back over and over again until completely canceled. And then the Kotaku article hit the playerbase, reveling that how mismanaged the development of the game was, how Bioware spent years redesigning stuff over and over again just to put the final game together in just a few months. The E3 trailer of Bioware was faked and looked totally different than the final product. Anthem turned into the prime example how mismanagement can destroy a game project and maybe even an entire company (no matter how successful it was before).
Meanwhile there are rumors about an Anthem 2.0... a complete redesign of the game.
I really hope that Bioware can come up with something that is able to turn this game into something worth playing because the gameplay, the general flight and combat system was really satisfying. That is what Anthem made fun to play... at least for some time... until you realized that everything around that core mechanic was somewhat dull.
I am not sure if that will ever work out... many people responsible for the mess that Anthem was has left Bioware in the past months. There is very little information about who actually remains working on the game and if these people actually have any experience with the game and the game engine. At this point I am not sure if it is good that the people which messed up the development have left. It could be good that they are gone... but it also could mean that nobody is left who knows how everything works together.
But I think that Anthem is not even the worst game title in 2019.
Bethesda said "hold my beer" and released the by far biggest mess in that year... Fallout 76.
A game which was broken from day one... and got worse with every patch. Bethesda games by default are broken... but usually not by such an extend.
Crashes, glitches, exploits, cheats, broken game mechanics and all the ingame troubles combined with the lack of real content (the game has not even NPCs) made Fallout 76 worst game in 2019.
But somehow Bethesda managed to distract from these flaws by attacking its playerbase, refusing refunds for this broken game, selling trash merchandise that lacked the promised features and quality and selling ingame features which would be free default in other games for a good amount of money.
I am at the point where I think that Fallout 76 was a social experiment where Bethesda tested how far they could go with all this shit. Well, they could go very far... selling a subscription model which even harmed the players that bought it. Selling merch that caused health issues.
There was not a month in 2019 where Bethesda did cause negative news.
There were a bunch more games in 2019 which were truely underwhelming. There were plenty of developers which instead of listening to the critics decided to attack the players. Bioware and Bethesda were not alone with this. A good bunch of games ended as disappointment but maybe it is time to look at the better game releases now.
For me personally four games were interesting.
StarWars - Jedi Fallen Order which I have not played yet (but intend to play soon) got very positive critics.
An EA game without lootboxes but instead with a good focus on storytelling and gameplay mechanics. That is refreshing to see these days.
Ive heard that Fallen Order is a bit too short... but maybe that isn't bad at all. Not every game has to be a long experience... if the short time is well done it still can be a great experience.
Death Stranding is another game I have not played yet but I can not get rid of the feeling that it is truely amazing. Somewhen in 2020 Ill try it and for sure see if all the good stuff I heard about it are actually true.
Very early this year I played Metro Exodus and was very surprised how this game felt. A strong focus on story in a shooter game where you between the missions just can return to your team and spend an incredible amount of time just talking with them... listening to their stories. This really took the pace out of the game and was an extremely good experience. The game was about the people that were traveling with you and instead of being the hero in the center of a story you were part of a group of people which were the story. That is different from other games in the shooter genre. Very refreshing... very well done. This game clearly was a highlight in 2019.
End of November The Outer Worlds was released and yes, it is the by far better Fallout type game.
Almost bug free, interesting story, interesting characters, crazy scifi/steampunk game world and absolutely no unnecessary bullshit. A solid singleplayer experience.
The game is technically now 100% perfect... I wish the developers would have delayed the release of the game to work on the graphics of the world maps a bit more. When I started the game I instantly thought something is wrong because I felt that the visual depth was missing. Mountains in the background looked like being rendered in foreground and distances were not so easy to estimate. Somehow the visual settings in the game are borked. But after some time you get used to it (or you install SweetFX like I did and compensate it via post processing).
However, once you got used to the graphics in the world maps (in buildings or cities everything looks perfect) the game starts to feel really good. It has a story that matters, fluid gameplay and the scifi setting with its steampunk elements feels really great. Yes the game was created by a small dev team and you see that assets where re-used over and over but that actually does not make the game worse. The RPG elements and the skill tree are meaningful, you can adjust the skills to the situations, nothing was out of place, nothing felt wasted.
The game size (map size) generally is much smaller than in other games of this type (Witcher, Fallout, the ElderScrolls games, etc.) but instead the map is packed full of content. Behind every stone you can find some hidden loot. Every 100m you have bandits or beasts waiting to be killed.
The decisions you make during conversations are influential. And the decisions always seem to be between pest or cholera. If you help one group of people another faction might suffer and it doesn't really help to make decisions when almost all people in the game are assholes. Really almost every NPC in the game has a dirty secret or is just openly a scumbag.
The good thing is that the reputation system allows you to help people and betray them at the same time. You as player fit perfectly into this sick world. A world in which you are the captain of the spaceship "Unreliable" which has an AI get gets almost gets an orgasm when the cleaning bot does its work.
The Outer Worlds clearly is a good game.... it would be great if the graphics engine would be tuned a bit better, with better depth and maybe better open world textures.
There is a 5th game which I discovered a few weeks ago and tested but I would not consider it a game that fits into a 2019 recap since it is still in early access.
It is called Satisfactory and currently is in early access.
The game is a open world, scifi game where you are employee of the "FicsIt" corporation and your job is to colonize and exploit the resources of an alien planet (or better to say currently 3 alien planets).
Satisfactory is highly complex... very good looking, runs totally smooth as far I can tell and is a great building game where you can be extremely creative. It is still in early access but already has an incredible amount of content. The grade of detail is amazing and as the name suggests the game is extremely satisfying. I have uploaded a 90 mins video showing the very beginning of the game that I finally recorded yesterday. I am always amazed by the detail of animations in every element of this game. Just alone the placing a mining robot or constructing the space elevator is lovely to watch. The developers really put a lot of effort into this game.
I tested the game and created a mid-tier production line earlier this year and it is just great to see how everything you build in this game works together. Originally I had plans to play it over Xmas, maybe even teaming up with other players but might delay this because there is going to be an update in January re-balancing the game. This for sure would break the existing production lines. I might wait a bit before really trying to build a big outpost on one of the 3 worlds.
What I like most about this game is that it is going to have a multiplayer. Well, that means it already has a coop mode where you can invite friends into your game but early 2020 dedicated server support will be added which will make it a perfect game for creative teamplay.
2019 contained some of the biggest game disappointments but in the end when you really consider all the games released it actually wasn't so bad.
For sure there were more good games that I did not mention above. I can not play all the games that were released during the year... I have to focus on the stuff that interests me most.
If you have games to add you can share your experiences here.
