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Matthew Rorie
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Senior Community Producer, Giant Bomb
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GOTY is always an interesting time around these parts! While I'm not involved with the site deliberations, I still take a fair amount of time thinking about and writing my list every year. I don't play as many games as the rest of the editorial crew does on any given year, so I don't always have ten titles that stand out to me, but that's fine: our individual GOTY lists are generally pretty free-form, and if I only decide I want to call out six games, then six games it is. I always do some hemming and hawing about whether to include games that I haven't finished on my list, but when you're facing something like Assassin's Creed Valhalla which I have been playing for months and am only halfway through, it's generally better to err on the side of including games that I had fun without worrying about being too scientific in my methodologies for inclusion. For the same reason I generally also tend to just pick one game to win GOTY and then just mention a bunch of other stuff without worrying too much about the order.
I take the process seriously, in other words, but not TOO seriously. It is always somewhat strange to me, then, that some people take the proceedings Very Seriously Indeed. I'm not talking about the usual "I can't believe you cut this game from this category!" or "You ranked this game too high on the top 10!" kind of stuff; that's all well and good so long as you avoid personal insults. I'm thinking more of the people who start stanning for a specific game to get Game of the Year as soon as it comes out and do nothing but tweet at game sites about it, or get weirdly obsessive about Metacritic scores for games they have no personal investment in. We all attach our egos to things that have no real bearing on our survival, of course; my life is not materially affected by whether the Warriors win a basketball game, but it feels good when they do simply because I have chosen for that to be the case. And, of course we all like for the things that we like to be liked by others. For instance, I like DOOM Eternal a bunch, and I know that you all like it as well, and that makes me feel real good.
(I know that some people - uncool people who don't read this newsletter, obviously - have different opinions on the subject, and that's kind of rude of them, in my opinion. They should think hard about the choices they're making and try being more correct.)
Anyway, with the 13th (!) Giant Bomb GOTY in the books, it's time to look forward to 2021. I alluded to it briefly in my own GOTY list, but my current obsession is finding a new video card. My 1080ti is showing its age at this point, to the point where games are starting to do crazy things like adjust the resolution scaling down to 70% on installation just to get the framerate up. (This is what Valhalla did, by the by, and while it's acceptable, it's definitely not ideal.) But, alas, pretty much all of the new model video cards are practically impossible to find due to scalpers and bitcoin miners. I'm a part of what seems likely to be the biggest Discord dedicated to letting people know when video cards are available, but with 23,000 users online at any given time, every link that gets posted more or less immediately crashes the linked site or gets sold out immediately. Apparently everyone else wants the same video card that I do, and that's kind of rude of them, in my opinion.
It seems like supply of these cards probably won't be sufficient to actually get one without ridiculous tricks for a few months yet, and despite my fervor for one, I'm slowly becoming resigned to waiting a bit. It'd be easier to find a 3070 (only slight FPS gains over my current card) or a 3090 (twice the cost of a 3080 for 15% more performance!) or an AMD card (not sure how well it'd work with my GSYNC monitor), but there isn't really a huge suite of amazing games in the pipe for the first few months of 2021, so I guess I can wait for a bit longer before needing to drop the cash on something. Now I know how all those sneakerheads and Supreme fans must feel pretty much all the time. Except this is way worse because it's me. (And, before you ask, I am well aware that this is probably a bad time to complain about not being able to spend 900 dollars on a video card! Sorry! It's my job. Complaining, that is.)
Before I sign off the latest wonderful Giant Bomb Newsletter, I'd like to go ahead and give a shout out to one Ben Pack who recently departed from Giant Bomb. We have a wonderful Best Of Giant Bomb if you'd like to relive some of his highlights! Click that link below and don't forget to like comment and subscribe this newsletter for more wonderful newsletters in the future.
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