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.
