No, quality is also very important. The vast majority of games that win a ton of GotY awards are also rather good. It's more like certain types of games are more likely to win them than others, even if plenty of other games are also of high quality, which I'd say is a fair point and one I'd agree with
Yeah, it's like:
Exactly. And that is why a racing game or a fighting game, regardless of how good it is in its genre, cannot possibly join the awards conversation in any given year. Some games are simply awards material, just like movies that are Oscar-bait.
That's because Miyazaki is just about the best game designer in the business.
Right, exactly. It's not exactly dissimilar to why, say, handheld games don't win much or why mainly Western games tend to win. For the most part, it's mainly the big console Western titles that nail both of those criteria and so they mainly take home most of the awards. It's just what it is. The games that don't win them aren't any lesser for not winning them. Plenty of stellar titles don't win much
The fact that some games flat out don't have a shot because of their genre or design philosophy does suck and is a reason as to why I tend to not be as absorbed as to what sort of game wins the majority of GotY awards. The other is that my own personal GotYs rarely, if ever, align with the majority pick. That being said, I wouldn't say that there are games that are simply awards material, unless you specifically mean more than others, as they're all still of fairly high quality, even if I'm not so hot about them
O Skyrim was definitely influential, how can it not be If everyone played it? But what im saying is that Skyrim was not the only game with its design philosophy and was definitely more iterative compared to Darksouls which left more of an impact on years to come since very few studios are even capable of designing a game like Skyrim since what it excelled at was scope. GoW 2018 is an example that has very obvious influences from Fromsoft ironically since its setting is Skyrim-like.
Dude. There's a guy in this thread complaining that "elitist gatekeepers are soooo vocal it just becomes about them most the time". Like, I haven't really read every post in the thread, maybe I missed all the elitist gatekeeping? or maybe it's not just closet From haters but closet From fan haters as well. In any case, they're running rampant in here ;)
The whole cinematic storytelling shift in games is basically traced back to Uncharted 2. That, plus just how well paced it is, and how well it seamlessly integrates setpieces, shootouts, and all around gameplay segments with its storytelling, and how seamlessly it does it, makes it stand out to this day, even when the technology available should theoretically allow for far better games on these fronts.
What games have direct Skyrim influence? Things like Modern warfare had a huge impact on game design for shooters to come but what did Skyrim bring to the table in terms of game design that made it so influential because the best part about Skyrim is its scope and very few games can achieve that but the studios that can like Rockstar doesnt seem to have parallels unlike Darksouls which without counting the almost exact clones of it like the Surge (and many, many more) did affect game design way more, even with small things like making Kratos have light and heavy on R1/R2.
Skyrim was very much the game that started the trend of open world RPGs from that point on instead of more (at least somewhat) linear narrative-based RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
Studios that have directly cited Skyrim as an influence, with their games alongside them:
Hmm....kinda curious to go back and see discussions on that since those are basically Era's two favorite games (somewhat recent and popularity-wise) to this day.
Funny. I remember the salt from Bloodborne not winning TGA GOTY and GAF spawning its own meme behind it. And the comments today, like Imps, saying GAFs was the only GOTY list that mattered because it got the GOTY "right."
Bioshock Infinite came out at a time when games media was desperate to have a game to point out as video games as art. This probably contributed to Walking Dead winning in 2012 as well. Of course, it got all of its wind stolen when Last of Us came out three months later.
I don't know if it's more influential, but the argument was whether or not it is influential at all, and I think that Demon's Souls is definitely an influential game.
Exceeded, or followed in its footsteps? Because the latter is influence, the former is quality.
I understand now. So Skyrim was so successful while being an open world that it popularized the concept of an open world and not any specific mechanic or design decision. Sounds like it was incredibly influential from a pivoting
Oh okay. I was gonna say, if you say Nioh, how dare you lol
I agree with your assessment, yes. Nothing plays like Skyrim (or BGS games in general), which is one reason for their enduring appeal, and its influence is more broad strokes and large scale. That said, however, I think that some Soulslikes aside, the actual influence of Dark Souls and the like is also broader—those games countered the movement towards cinematic games that all but played themselves, those games proved that you don't need to coddle the player, those games proved that you don't need excessive tutorialization, basically Dark Souls and Minecraft are the games that demonstrated to developers at large that you don't have to babysit the player. That mentality does continue to be imbibed across multiple games today. I think that mechanically, there are very few true followers of From's games; their larger influence is far broader.
But my argument is that Darksouls had very obvious and specific influence on many games to come and yes the lack of tutorial and difficulty is the broad influence it had on the industry but when it comes to specific design decisions like control scheme, bonfires equivalents, estus flask equivalents, 3d metroidvania-like levels, etc there are few games that have had such a specific impact on how games are designed in the last decade.
