It’s around that time of the year where every gaming site and channel figures to do a top ten of the year, or a piece on what the biggest game of the year was. In a way, I do intend on joining in on that, but not quite in the same manner.
First of all, I don’t think I am personally qualified to say what the best game of the year was. That’s one of those titles to me that feels near impossible in a time in which dozens of games come out weekly. It’s much more lofty when we take into account that gaming as a medium works for different people in different ways. Where a highly artistic narrative-focused game like What Remains of Edith Finch is undoubtedly fantastic, it’s ludicrous to me to put it on scales against something like Sonic Mania and try to figure which is the better game. They’re both great in different ways, and each add something different to the medium.
Second, I think talking about a year in gaming merits discussion more than just isolated games. It’s important to look back and not only see titles, but also trends and tidbits of where we thought games were going and where they went instead. Of course, I again don’t find myself extremely qualified in that even if I tried I cannot possibly follow all news events of the year. But still, as a personal exercise in reflection, I definitely want to cover trends of the year that were of particular interest, at the very least to me.
So with all that in mind, I’ll go ahead and talk about different aspects of what 2017 in gaming brought about, and from there finish by talking about my favorite gaming experiences of the year.
Gaming in 2017
The Success of the Nintendo Switch
It’s really difficult to look back on 2017 and not bring up the runaway success that the Switch has been. By no means is it a marvelous piece of hardware, and yet it has been able to secure its place in top-selling lists across the year.
To me this is interesting in a couple of ways. The first is the fact that I recall a year ago or so nearly every analyst in the industry being pretty much convinced that VR and AR were THE next major steps in gaming. Every job in the industry seemed to revolve around VR, and at that time Microsoft and a multitude of other companies couldn’t wait to sell you all their headsets and gloves and whatever else they could come up with to sell the idea of VR as the next big step.
When you fast-forward from that hype into a year where some of the most valuable gaming platforms of the year were rather cheap portable/console hybrids, it forces you to take a step back and think. Think about the ultimate reality that accessibility still matters, and while a significant portion of the industry wants us to move towards high-end products and the latest technology, the market is not entirely in the same place. With that in mind, I don’t deny that VR has been doing well and providing solid experiences, securing its place for multiple people. Nevertheless, when soooo much of the industry wants to literally shift everything to VR, it is a nice cold bucket of reality to have something like the Switch outperform pretty much everything else.
Most of that is also because the success of the Switch brings about other successes: the success of independent development, and the success of local multiplayer. Let me talk about each one in turn.
When it comes to independent studios, the success of the Switch offers multiple opportunities. First is the fact you get to participate in a moderated storefront that is not as replete as Steam is. Nintendo, by opening the Switch to indie development, can open that door of visibility to projects that would not have had it otherwise. It helps on top of that that the Switch is an easy way for indie developers to explore a portable market that may not have been easy to pursue before.
Then there’s local multiplayer. It’s no secret that the industry does not really believe in single player experiences or local multiplayer. Namely, because the real money is in online multiplayer services, like with Overwatch, where you can have players participating endlessly. Ideally also spending endlessly, of course. In turn with this, less and less titles even bother to have local multiplayer, since there is no incentive (“why would I want anyone playing my game without first having to buy it?”) and supposedly no market. The Switch succeeding on this front, and featuring several titles that thrive on this local set-up, is a nice reminder to the industry that local multiplayer is an experience that still matters. More on this later as I discuss some of this year’s titles. But now to something completely different.
Mascot Platformers
Probably one of the strangest things I witnessed this year, something I never thought would happen in the year 2017, was the following video:
We’re far into the years of high-end graphics and nearly every significant game being shooter after shooter, occasionally with the implementation of skill trees and skin customization. That, to me, was triple-A gaming much in the same way Croc, Glover, Gex and a myriad other mascots were business as usual when I was a kid.
This year, however, we saw significant presence when it comes to mascot platformers and their ilk. We got the likes of Yooka-Laylee, A Hat in Time, Crash N. Sane Trilogy, Sonic Mania AND Sonic Forces, Bubsy (for some reason), and even a random original IP from Microsoft featuring a fox with a cape I think… Tails? Lucky? Something like that. Most of these titles were rather noteworthy around their release and seemingly significant enough that people want more of companies diving into their past. I particularly loved the discussion about difficulty in modern games prompted by the N. Sane Trilogy.
And then we got Super Mario Odyssey. I will keep it brief since I devoted so much time to it previously, but Odyssey essentially managed to marry the interests of classic platformers like Super Mario 64 with the interests of both current open-world design AND portable gaming. The industry reception of this was also fantastic, and compounded with the success of Sonic Mania as well as the renewed desire for open world thanks to Breath of the Wild, I would be very surprised if we didn’t see more 3D platformers come about in the future. It’s been pretty much the revival of a dead genre.
Loot Boxes Going Too Far
This is a product of this year that admittedly affected me very little, but has been a sore point of mine since my days of localization testing.
To summarize the situation very briefly, the industry has been very slowly inching towards finding new ways to make money out of games. Something about high-costs of development and the like means that sometimes the retail price of a game just doesn’t cut it. In came DLC, and that became standard eventually, but apparently was still not enough. Sure, the extra content sells ok, but if one player buys it then they obviously can’t buy it again right?
Now, I don’t know specifically where it began, but I can easily imagine how it came about. A very brilliant designer somewhere thought of trading card booster packs and figured: “What if the content in-game existed as cards and people bought booster packs?” This is the version I saw first. Titles where customizables, characters, weapons and a myriad of other things were in-game cards, and the player would have decks that they could expand via booster packs and the like.
The booster pack model means that where someone would have spent, say, $2 on DLC, now they would instead spend, say, 50 cents on a pack with 5 random bits of DLC. You then ensure, as a designer, that more powerful or intrinsically valuable items are rarer, and where you would have had everyone buying that content once, you now have multiple users paying 50 cents hundreds of times until they obtain the content they want.
Overall, it’s a sound design concept. When I say it came about from very brilliant design, I am not being sarcastic. It is VERY brilliant design, and whoever came up with it should have an award from the industry. The problem comes about from… well, what has been happening this year. For years now the main defense of this practice has been the fact that these features in games remain completely “optional”. As in, the player can technically go from the beginning of the game to the end without ever having to use these features. Of course, I personally don’t buy this particular line myself: I do believe fiercely that if there is content in-game that has intrinsic value, then it makes sense to assume it is valuable to the game experience and as a result not entirely ancillary.
In any case, that line of defense was finally violated when games began coming out with loot box mechanics on content vital to the core experience. And when that line was crossed, it prompted (finally) notice from government regulators which led to the very important bit of conversation regarding at what point we are encouraging gambling in games aimed at younger audiences.
This conversation is currently ongoing, with various industry folk shaking their heads saying it’s not gambling, “by definition”. And given how lucrative a design it is, I fully expect gaming lobbyists to fight with everything they have to preserve the practice. Nevertheless, the pooch has been screwed to such a degree that now games boast about not having loot boxes, and that makes this bit of 2017 drama one of my favorite, most significant leaps for gaming of the year.
Games
With all that aside, let me actually talk about games of this year.
Sonic Mania and Super Mario Odyssey are both obviously titles that I highly appreciate. Each of these titles featured such fantastic production value that I see myself playing them for years to come despite having already completed both of them 100%. It says something about the fun of an experience when there is value to repeating it again despite the lack of extrinsic rewards.
Arms is a title I honestly played very little, in part because I do not respect the online infrastructure Nintendo claims to have. Nevertheless, I want to bring it up because it was a game with a core mechanic I doubted from its announcement to the day I played it. And yet, after playing it, it is hard to describe just how enjoyable the notion of punching at the air can be when the mechanics of the game support strategy and thought. This game existing prompted me to wonder about the fighting genre as a whole and variations of those mechanics, and in doing so became a significant title of the year for me.
Tumbleseed, meanwhile, was the game I was sold on from the moment I heard of it, and it felt amazing from the second I touched it. I have it on the Switch, and when there were no other titles after I got bored from Zelda, this is the one I kept coming back to and the one I played the most in portable mode. I love how much work it takes to actually complete this game, and I love the originality of the concept. At one point this game was deemed so difficult it was given an update, simplifying the story structure and adding other features. Personally though? I don’t feel that update was necessary for it to be a great game. Hopefully it was bought by more people after it though.
And then there’s the game that has made my passion for games burn stronger, easily my favorite of this great year:
Cuphead
In a year where everyone and their mom is in love with open-world Zelda and the Hunger Games/Battle Royale game that has yet to be finished, Cuphead is the title I personally will remember the most.
The production value of this game is top-notch. I highly respect the decision from the developers, Studio MDHR, to take into account the popularity of the project and then expand the scope of it in response regardless of delays in its release. Then, there’s the artistic direction which is nothing short of astounding, and something I can see impacting how other games in the future approach their art.
Because it’s not entirely just about the fact it looks like an old-timey cartoon. It’s about the fact that animation, sound, and music were all done so well in tune with each other and with the gameplay. It’s about the fact that someone out there was able to look at classic cartoons and marry the animation interests of expressing a character’s motions with the design interests of creating visible tells for attacks and pattern recognition. Now that it exists, it baffles my mind that this sort of aesthetic hasn’t been more prevalent in games.
On top of it all, what ultimately makes this more of a knockout experience is the fact the game feels so fun and rewarding while also being a genuine pain. It’s a game with very limited content, but the journey I have experienced from learning each boss for the very first time and taking hours on each one, to learning each boss again to complete the perfect ranking for days, to now playing the entirety of it within an hour… it’s the sort of learning experience I value very highly within games. I won’t soon forget the victory shouts and high-fives from completing these bosses, and it’s made each boss such a personality and character to where I seriously hope this becomes a franchise in one way or another.
It’s a game that has color, that is bursting at the seams with joy and personality, that is entertaining to watch, that is challenging to play, and that overall remains with you. Most important is that on top of this are sprinkled great design ideas, from the notion of parries leading players to pay more attention to projectiles, to the choice where the bosses taunt you while a meter shows how close each player came to completing the stage. And remember how I mentioned the value of local multiplayer experiences? This game gave us an excellent approach to co-op that cannot be overlooked. Everything about this game has made a great impression on me, and it’s what I expect to be playing for a while up until 2018’s big hit comes along.
Stray Notes:
(Kind of copying the AV Club here, but I realized from the last post that I really like dropping in random thoughts at the end. I expect to do this more in the future.)
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a game that I personally am not playing, and from what I see it doesn’t stand out to me as much as the previous one in the series. That said, it should not be ignored by JRPG fans.
- We got some excellent music tracks in game this year. I want to particularly give a shout-out to the Sonic Mania remixes by Tee Lopes, the Kingdom of Tantal song from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and the Splatoon 2 soundtrack.
- Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle is another title I want to call-out despite not playing. Not every person can take a game aesthetic that seems aimed at kids, toss in a challenging turn-based strategy game into it, and still find it working well and being successful. I have nothing but respect to the team of individuals that made this work despite everyone’s skepticism.
- Everyone’s into Player Unknown: Battlegrounds at the moment, but personally I’m still sort of more interested in seeing what Microsoft’s The Darwin Project does when it comes to emulating that Battle Royale/Hunger Games feel. I think perhaps it’s just a matter of style for me, as I am more a sucker for highly stylized games than realistic-looking ones.
- A final farewell to the Nintendo 3DS. In part because I highly appreciate what a great library it has, and in part because I seriously, seriously hope that by now all devs working on it begin transitioning to the Switch.