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Game of the Year

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Fellfrosch:
Gamespot has announced their Game of the Year awards for 2003, and the grand winner for best PC game of the year was Warcraft 3. W3 also won for best multiplayer strategy, and was a runner up for best single player strategy and best story. In their article about it they said: "Never in GameSpot's seven years of singling out the best choice for our PC Game of the Year award has the decision been this clear-cut."

Warcraft 3's single player campaign is certainly good (and much better than you guys had led me to believe)--it deserves the single-player strategy nomination as well as both of its wins--but the actual story was pretty lame. If you've played the first half of Neverwinter Nights and the second half of Diablo 2, you've already seen the story for Warcraft 3 done in much more detail. The game itself is great (I finished it this morning and I loved every minute), but if this cliched story can be nominated for best of the year, PC games in general must have pretty crappy stories.

Coincidentally, the game that I feel could really compete with Warcraft 3 for Game of the Year is the one that won Best Story: Freedom Force. Freedom Force had an incredible story, both on its own terms and in context of the silver age comicbooks it was emulating. Of course tactical RPGs are my favorite genre, so I'm a little biased.

Interestingly, they named Neverwinter Nights the best RPG of the year and didn't even nominate Dungeon Siege (which I never played but which was supposed to be really good). Civilization 3 won the Most Disappointing award because it didn't deliver everything it promised to, yet for some reason they didn't nominate Neverwinter Nights despite the fact that it left out about ten million promised features. Maybe they just felt stupid nominating the RPG of the year for the Most Disappointing award.

Prometheus:
I was actually thinking about the sorriness of the state of computer game plots while your post was loading on this blasted 56k connection I'm suffering. I didn't even think Starcraft's story was all that great...System Shock 2 was pretty good in that category as well as some of the Final Fantasy series, (I still need to play X sometime) but few others have shown much desire to compete for good plots. I guess game players just don't demand it.

Tage:
I think FFX is still my favorite game story, especially because of the ending. Still, I have to admit that I really enjoyed Starcraft, especially with the Brood War story.  WC3, though, was pretty disappointing.

Maybe someday I'll actually get around to playing Freedom Force.

Fellfrosch:
Part of their story category, apparently, is character, which makes the Warcraft 3 nomination a little more palatable--I have to admit that it did have very good characters. Including character with story, however, seems like cheating and covering up the real problem that Prometheus just mentioned: game plots are kind of weak right now.

Nicadymus:
Though I enjoyed Warcraft 3, I would agree that the storyline was lacking in originality.  :-/

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