The end of the year has rolled around, which means it’s time to sum up 2017 with the Game of the Year Awards. PlayStation LifeStyle is doing our year-end awards slightly different from previous years. We wanted to put more importance on the nomination for each award, so we limited each category to five games. That’s not many, especially in a year stacked with great titles. It took a lot of careful deliberation to come up with each list.
There were some pretty big disappointments that came out of 2017, from the dismal launch version of the long-awaited Mass Effect: Andromeda, to the EA shutting down Visceral Games whilst simultaneously declaring that linear single-player games weren’t a hot commodity in the current gaming environment. This one’s quite subjective, so we’re sure that your opinion will differ from what we came up with.
Keeping everything that happened (gaming related) in 2017 in mind, here are PlayStation LifeStyle’s nominees for the Biggest Disappointment of 2017:
The winner (loser?) of our Biggest Disappointment of 2017 award will be announced next week on Tuesday, December 26. It will be a part of a week-long celebration of the best PlayStation titles of 2017. Ultimately, it’ll conclude on Friday, December 29, where we’ll reveal PlayStation LifeStyle’s Game of the Year 2017. This year will go down as one of the greatest in gaming (with a number of disappointments to counteract those highs), so we’re very excited to unveil all of our picks!
Of course, we’d also love to hear what you think. Let us know what your Biggest Disappontment of 2017 was, and which nominee you’ll think will win the award! Is it the gross mishandling of loot boxes and microntransactions by major publishers? How about the studio behind Saints Row disappointing with a lackluster spiritual successor in Agents of Mayhem? Stay tuned to find out the winner next week!
View the rest of the announced year-end award nominees.
GOTY Nominees Biggest Disappointment 2017
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Biggest Disappointment of 2017
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Agents of Mayhem
We'd expected more of the team behind the Saints Row games. They tried something new by offering a cadre of characters to play as, but forget to make Agents of Mayhem's open world interesting or meaningful at all. Read our review of the game.
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Handling of Loot Crates
Microtransactions and loot crates have largely coincided comfortably within games for years now, but 2017 was the year that gamers got pushed too far. Between EA and Battlefront II, and WB with Shadow of War (among other publishers and games), it's been a contentious year for how games monetize content.
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Mass Effect Andromeda
It wasn't just the lackluster animations that left us disappointed with Mass Effect Andromeda. By trying to separate itself from the original trilogy, it effectively created a game with an uninteresting plot, lackluster characters, and no reason to bear the Mass Effect title. Read our review.
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Sony Press Conferences
The breakneck pace of Sony press conferences has become little more than a YouTube playlist of game trailers. While that may get a lot of fans excited, it takes much of the heart and humanity out of the games by not allowing for each one to breathe, and letting the developers talk a bit about them. Sure, Sony's got a lot of games coming to PS4, but we want to know the quality, not the quantity that you can stuff into a 90 minute trailer reel.
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EA Closes Visceral Games
Knocking a huge blow to Dead Space fans hoping for a revivial, EA closed Visceral Games and shifted the Star Wars game they were working on to another studio. Reason? They cited single-player games not being a viable option anymore.
