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PC Game of the Year 2013 Winner
lucyluffy101
Member UncommonPosts: 152
in LFGame
Path of Exile is the PC game of the year 2013. Because it's free and more fun to play!! Gratz GG 
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/pc-game-of-the-year-2013-winner/1100-6416467/
Comments
That`s surprising but also very well deserved. Definitely one of the best values in gaming for people who like ARPGs at all.
I thought Metro: Last Light would've won, but PoE is a great game, an amazing value, and proof that you do not need a major game studio to put out a quality product.
PoE arrived on the scene with critical acclaim, and a devout fanbase. They out "diablo'ed" Blizzard, lol, as the article stated it. They did what Diablo 3 couldn't and then some.
That game looks incredibly interesting.
Accept it's really not. It's a two hour game filled with cliche after cliche. The reviews are really annoyingly overrated. I mean, one of the few indie games where all the huge PC gaming sites all rave about... And it isn't even that great.
Smile
It could be said that Torchlight 2 also out 'diablo'ed Blizzard tbh, and its also a game that can be considered to be superior to PoE in some respects, and given such an amazingly short statement which is light (as in none existant) on details from gamespot, kind of wondering how they even rated the various games that were nominated, and an odd bunch they were too. If gamespot want to be taken seriously, then they really need to 'flesh' these things out, otherwise they might have people accusing them of doing strange things like, oh i don't know, taking kickbacks for ratings maybe?
Having said that PoE is a good game, im just not sure its a game thats GotY quality.
But without an interesting customization system like PoE has I find all ARPG combat the definition of boring. YMMV I guess.
I was sort of in the state of mind that no one took sites like gamespot, IGN, or even MMORPG.com seriously when it came to awards or some of the reviews.
Smile
Well I'm a sucker for heartfelt, lesbian, love story tear-jerkers. So it looks like this game might be right up my alley.
It doesn't look like "beating" it is the point of the game from what I can tell.
And thats just naming a very 'few' of the websites etc that deal with gaming, PC or otherwise, but even in that small group, is gamespot in the same category as IGN and this forum even, or how about Tentonhammer even, though having said that i never visit their website either
, and while one of my own favourites is PCGamer, until this year, i didnt know that they had 2 versions, one for here in the UK and one for in the states, and their really not the same, despite having the same name/company behind them. Sometimes its like a day out at Ascot, so many races, so many winners. So how many other 'GotY' winners do you think we'll have over the next month or two. Either way, i wouldn't lay down much on betting PoE wins many (if any!) of them either 
I'm gay myself, so it's not that I'm bigoted (obviously). It's the fact that she's still not over how hard it was to be in high school as a lesbian, like how many years later? Ten? I mean, I was over it when I got done with high school and went to college and realized there were people that existed that weren't from hick county.
It just doesn't feel at all realistic. I guess for straight people that don't know what that's really like, it's probably entertaining or something. I just feel like the whole lesbian thing was used as a way to sell the game instead of enhancing the story in any sort of rewarding way. It was a gimmick, and a cheap one at that.
Smile
I actually just picked up and played the game - and enjoyed it. As for Sam's story, all of her journal entries that we read throughout the course of the game were written during the past year, her first year at a new high school. She's still busy currently enduring her high school struggles, so I'm not sure why you'd expect her "to be over it" in her writings.
But that's besides the point. Everybody handles their personal adolescent struggles differently. To claim another coming out experience is invalid because it differs from your own is just ignorant and un-empathetic to all the things that comprise each person's individual identity.
But even that's besides the point, as I didn't think the main point of the game's narrative was just to tell a straight forward gay love story. Rather, Sam's story contains elements that everyone should be able to relate to on some level - gay, straight, male, female, black, white, alien, ghost or zombie. Everyone can remember their first kiss. Everyone went bonkers madly in love with someone. Everyone had their own "lie-to-mom-and-dad-situations." Everyone experienced parental injustice. Everyone played around with secret passage ways, and created story characters, and made mixed tapes. And yes, everyone has closets to come out of - little idiosyncracies about ourselves that we suddenly realize one day with horror do not conform to the social norms held by many. In many ways Gone Home felt like The Perks of Being a Wallflower to me, if you happened to read that.
What I really enjoyed about this game was that this all seemed to be a part of a larger goal, which was to essentially eliminate the gap between virtual and reality. As gamers, we're accustomed to bouncing between both worlds; but Gone Home blurs the line between gaming and reality, which resulted in a truly immersive experience for me. While the story had me relating to Sam through all of her, it turns out, really very ordinary adolescent experiences, the environment, music, and gaming references had me feeling like I was walking through my own house back in 1995 - if a significantly larger, spookier version of it. There were VHS tapes of Top Gun and X-files. There was a magazine featuring 90210. There was a note asking Sam if she want to go see the new movie Pulp Fiction that was coming out in theaters later that week, which I remember seeing in theaters when it came out. There was the notebook containing handwritten notes on how to execute special moves with Chun-Li in Street Fighter. Every gaming kid who grew up before the internet had a notebook where they recorded all the UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT codes they discovered. Even the mansion-crawling style of the game echos the classic 90s hit game Resident Evil, which many players are sure to have played in their own childhood.
All of this makes the game a journey into your own past, your own childhood. Everything about the game felt real and genuine to me.
As for the gay love story being a gimmick to sell the game, I respectfully disagree. For one, the average player wouldn't know anything about that before purchasing the game. For another, I did think the love story was legit, if simple. That pretty much is how high school love stories go for many kids. You fall in love with someone who becomes your world, and the thought of living without them is unbearable, Romeo and Juliet style. Lastly, if nothing else, the use of a gay love story has the undoubtedly intentional benefit of further normalizing such stories in our slowly progressing culture. Whether it was cheesy or cliche doesn't really matter (and I still don't concede that it was either). It still has a legitimizing effect.
I also commend the decision to use an almost exclusively female cast of characters.
It was definitely a better ARPG than D3, although I thought T2 was better than both of them (but that released last year, not this year). As for game of the year? Not even close really, not sure what sort of system they used but I guess it was heavily skewed by ARPG fans.
And no, I'm not a Blizz hater, I currently dabble with 2 Blizz titles, but D3 was a massive let down.