2014 for Gaming: The worst year since '83?

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The year 2014 is set to end in ~30 minutes in the Eastern U.S. and has already ended in most of the world.
2014 is considered by many hardcore/real gamers as the worst in gaming history since the market crash of 1983.

What has given 2014 a black eye(s)?

1) the lack of high quality AAA releases (yes I have heard and read plenty about how empty and barren the release schedule was in 2014)

2) Broken games

3) Over entitled gamers

4) Too many "casual"/"kiddy" games

5)Nintendo up to it's usual destruction of gaming!!

6)Onslaught of those pesky indie games

7) PC gamers up to no good again

Others not mentioned



Was 2014 ruined for you?
If so what caused it?

Did you find enough high quality AAA releases (Nintendo and Indies, do not count), as in 90+ Metacritic score?

Will 2015 surpass 2014?
Or will 2015 have a drought as well?


Let's talk about how 2014 has been for us gaming wise...!

I mostly had fun, primarily due to Nintendo. Sure, the broken glitchy messes of games like Assassin's Creed Unity, the bullcrap challenges required to unlock collectibles in Smash Bros Wii U, the RNG in Smash Bros 3DS and my utter lack of ability in most games hurt a lot of my enjoyment.....but overall I had fun. Smash Bros, Hyrule Warriors, Diablo III Ultimate Evil Edition, Pokemon ORAS, Mario Kart 8 and even some of my backlog ( I bought a few older games I hadn't gotten around to yet like Mirror's Edge and FINALLY getting a Professor Layton game ). Great year, and with games like Arkham Knight, Halo 5, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Splatoon, Yoshi's Wooly World, Kirby & The Rainbow Curse, Final Fantasy Type-0 HD, Final Fantasy XV and Zelda Wii U 2015 will be even better *crosses fingers for E3 reveal of Golden Sun 4*

It was a quieter year for gaming, but honestly, even these "quiet" years cannot be compared to 1983. Even years like 2006 and 2010 when there were only a few "Triple A" titles, they still had good games.

In 2014 alone we had;

- Dragon Age Inquisition
- Assassin's Creed Rogue
- Borderlands the Pre-Sequel
- Bayonetta 2
- Dark Souls 2
- Hyrule Warriors
- Super Smash Bros.
- Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD Remix
- Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls
- The Wolf Among Us (technically a 2013 game, but 4 episodes came out this year)
- The Walking Dead Season 2 (same as above)
- The Banner Saga
- Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII
- Bravely Default
- Transistor
- Tales of Xillia 2
- Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor
- Binding of Isaac Rebirth

Probably some others I'm forgetting, but hardly a terrible year by any standards.

As far as I'm concerned, it was bloody fantastic.

....but then, I'm mostly a PC gamer, and one that tends to dislike mainstream AAA games. I'll play anything from very small indie games to mega-budget ones, and I know just where to look for all of it.

Not that ALL of it was PC stuff... but most of it was.

I'll list a few, though I doubt that most here would know alot of these.

The few console games first:

Smash Bros U
Blazblue SomethingOrOther (I forget the full name. The most recent game in the series)
Persona 4 Arena.... something. I forget the rest of that name too.
LittleBigPlanet 3

Er...

And I blank out there. I aint used the consoles much this year aside from those.

But other than that? Hoboy. It's a long list for me. I'm not going to list too many, as again, most in this particular place wont know what these are:

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (one that some here should know)
Risk of Rain
Five Nights at Freddy's 1 & 2 (another that some here will know)
AI War (the newest expansion to it, anyway)
Goat Simulator (yes, I like this one alot. Shut up.)
Nuclear Throne
Strife
Hearthstone
Our Darker Purpose
Probability 0
Spintires
The Last Federation
Crimzon Clover
Age of Wonders 3
Heavy Bullets
Heroes of the Storm
Heroes of a Broken Land


And that's just the beginning. I've barely gone more than a week at a time without buying something. Often more than one thing in a week. Heck if I know just how many games I"ve grabbed over the year. And I'm careful about my choices, and am rarely disappointed as a result.

And that's just the PC stuff (the start of it, anyway). I also do alot of iOS gaming as well.

I don't judge a game solely by how much money is behind it, so for me it was a pretty good year. I found several new titles I enjoyed playing, saw some failures that were good discussion fodder, saw some interesting phases go by, and rediscovered a genre.

2014 was a bad year for gaming like all years for music are bad years for music for people who refuse to turn off the Top 40 radio station and stop listening to Bieber and Gaga.

Hmm... The only 2014 game I played in 2014, was Wasteland 2. So, it was a GREAT year for me.

My 'newest' games are Saint's Row IV and Borderlands 2 . I just snagged them on Steam (with all DLCs) for less than a 10'er each...

The only 2015 game I plan to buy in 2015 is Arkham Knight and I won't buy that 'till Steam puts it on sale...

Yeah, I'm a cheap bashtid.

I agree on both counts. I don't get what was so bad about the year, and I don't generally give two s**ts about AAA games nor do I think they're a useful metric of how well 'gaming' is doing. The set of available poll options is biased as well.

Only games that really interested this me were Alien Insolation and Shadow of Mordor, I still supported a few indie early access games though, but yea, pc has been terrible for AAA games.

The occulus rift comes out this year assuming it doesn't get delayed, so this year ought to be a fun milestone for us pc gamers, and I think dying light / dead island 2 should be some pretty great AAA games too!

So this year is definitely looking up.

Alot of people though simply dont know (or care) about the vast majority of the games out there that actually exist. Only the AAA ones, and games somewhat near that level (AKA, games high enough to warrant physical copies on consoles) get heard about much by many gamers, and they sure as heck are the only ones that get TALKED about much by news sites and such.

Heck, of my entire group of friends that I know, *all* of them are gamers, every single one of them. But I dont really DISCUSS gaming with *any* of them much, because most of the time, they have no freaking clue what in the heck I'm talking about. 95% of the games I could mention are unknown to them. And for some people there's also graphics and blah blah blah to consider. If it's not got super mega resolution ultimate HDR bloom anti-aliased bump-mapped shadow reflections, clearly it's not much of a game!! ! Exasperated sigh.

a lot of the games i want got delayed til later date. and going be til 2016 for another battlefield game I'll like
next fall will be the best unless they delay again. still I have 4 games this year, bf4, gta5, watch dogs, killzone shadow fall. which is the total of games I had on the ps3 for its whole life. though I was a xbox 360 gamer which had like 15 games. so I suppose not a terrible year. just sucks the games I really want aren't out and are one is far from out if ever . wheres fallout 4 wah.

I had a lot of fun last year. I play games on PC and console. I built a new PC in the summer and I have enjoyed playing Civ 5 and other games that don't come to console. There are so many great and original indie games being released both on console and on the PC. I bought an Xbox One in October and that has occupied most of my gaming time since then. I should really have spent more money and built a gaming PC in the summer but I only really wanted it as a media server so I got a cheap AMD apu. Then I started buying indie games on Steam during sales at bargain prices. I have 82 games on Steam, many of which are from various Humble Bundles. I also have 10 or so games on GOG.

I really love the sensory hit I get from the detailed graphics and lighting in new-gen games. I could just wander around Dragon Age Inquisition's landscapes for hours just enjoying the view. Far Cry 4 is equally stunning.

Wrong year. My interest in new gaming ended around 2005, when I started to appreciate the vast libraries of awesome games that were already available on current and past consoles. Even though future systems could surpass them in graphics and sound, they could not surpass them in quality. I concluded that I wasn't missing anything of importance by staying where I was. I also wasn't interested in any of the new machines that would be coming out, as all of them had significant drawbacks in my view.

I spent 2014 playing on the PlayStation 2 and the Dreamcast, as well as the Atari 2600 when my mother decided to buy one.

broken games and over-entitled gamers were the bad parts for me; with AC: unity being a deep depth (although i didn't buy it myself, so i wasn't affected).

however, i had fun still, mainly becouse i mainly play indies. the AAA releases rarely hold stock for me, i am barely enthousiastic about AAAs, they are mainly sequels to existing games (which were not my kind in the first place).

the biggest problem is that of the gamers; they want everything to be perfect just for them, their console (or pc) being the "most important one" where everything needs to be developed on, and be at least the first release if not exclusive.
this is what made AAA games underwhelming/buggy, since they have to be rushed to meet the (unrealistic) demands.

I seriously thought this whole thread was going to be about GamerGate and the fact that there's a newly negative perception towards gamer culture. Seriously, if I had to think of any major changes in the gaming world in 2014, it's the explosion of misogyny in male gamer culture and the intense media coverage that surrounded it.

Why do casual games get such a bad rap? I read that the majority of casual gamers are female, so I guess if women like something then it must be truly terrible. Women are terrible. I get it. We suck, we are so stupid and lame and we should be in the kitchen makin' sammiches instead of trashing a guy's butt at Super Smash Brothers.

And yet Pac-Man in the arcades was possibly one of the first popular casual games.

It's like you're not allowed to have fun playing a game any more, which is the whole reason for doing so, that's why they call it "playing" a game. Now people think real games have to be hard-core. It's almost as bad as professional organized sports.

And I want to slay anyone who says anything nasty about Nintendo.

I prefer to just ignore it or laugh at it.

The definition of what is and isnt a casual game doesnt even make sense.

Alot of the "REAL games" these days are linear, easy, hold the player's hand alot, give infinite lives/continues, and try to be more movie than game. They often contain simplistic mechanics as well.

I play alot of bullet-hell shmups.... the REALLY hard ones, and I dont mean Touhou... as well as roguelikes, and things like Dwarf Fortress. Most "mainstream" gamers wouldnt even complete one level of the shmups in particular, let alone beat any of those games (continues not allowed with those!).

Yet I dont play Call of Halos. I must be a casual gamer.

Even something like Pac-Man, or... pretty much any arcade game from that era.... MUCH harder and more difficult to master than alot of the mainstream crap these days.

Bloody stupid, all of it. To me, the definition is the other way around, really.