Winner: Destiny: The Taken King
But wait Matt, didn't Destiny come out LAST year? Yes, but with the release of The Taken King expansion, the game came into its own in 2015. Gone are the convoluted methods of leveling up characters and gear. Gone are the disappointing purple-randomly-changed-to-blue loot drops—you can thank the Diablo folks for that. Destiny finally feels like a complete game.
The real reason I chose Destiny as my Game of the Year, however, is because of how perfectly the game has served as a microcosm of the industry in 2015. We saw how conflicting internal politics led to a game almost completely scrapped in the final hour, and how it took a whole year after that for the game to be "complete." Destiny's shift from paid DLC to microtransactions painted the story of a company whose ambition reached farther than the tools they had to make it. With the price of season passes increasing to effectively doubling the price of a video game, Bungie and Activision's decision to scrap future DLC plans could be seen as a reaction to market trends and the mobile market. The progress and development of Destiny in its second year has given us an unprecedented look into the ups and downs of modern AAA game development.
Read our Destiny: The Taken King review here>>
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