- Impressive visuals and fantasy worlds: Witcher 3, Elden Ring
3. Finding new games is easy. Everyone and their dog have a must-play list. Finding games that you'd enjoy is frustrating. Reddit comments have proven to be the most misleading, even disingenuous. They'd write paragraphs praising Tetris's deep lore and high-fidelity graphics.
For this reason, my shortlisting process roughly looks like this:
- Accumulate suggestions over the long term from steam, reddit, YouTube, etc .
- Create your own wishlist, distribute it in tiers - GOTY winners and nominees, AAA, top steam ratings, sequels of games you've enjoyed in the past, etc.
- order games in each tier based on what factors you desire the most - graphics, gameplay, lore, time to beat. You may move certain games to higher tier based on your bias.
- Every time you hear another suggestion for game X, move it one position higher (within the tier).
I'd love to see a public backlog DB, howlongtobeat.com is a good one. But I'm also convinced it's a highly subjective and personal process, so I count as a customer who doesn't know what they want (in case you're looking to build something around this).
4. Recent favorites:
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - The 101 trailer was enough to convince me [1]. Also, its prequel Human Revolution was a favorite back in 2012 (got it from a friend).
- God of War 3: again, wanted closure for so long. 1 and 2 were favorites back then, source: friend.
- Death Stranding: received it for free on Epic. Had heard about it a lot, the relase date was recent, and the trailer was intriguing. Also, Kojima.
- Steam suggestions based on what I've liked in the past.
- Subreddits like gamingsuggestions to find games similar to X, or by genre.
- Gameplay footage from YT channels like gameranx that publish top 10 lists.
2. I crave:
- good stories: Assassin's Creed 2, Battlefield 3, Prince of Persia trilogy
- Satisfying gameplay: DMC4, Prototype, Resident Evil 4 (2005), Tomb Raider 2013
- Impressive visuals and fantasy worlds: Witcher 3, Elden Ring
3. Finding new games is easy. Everyone and their dog have a must-play list. Finding games that you'd enjoy is frustrating. Reddit comments have proven to be the most misleading, even disingenuous. They'd write paragraphs praising Tetris's deep lore and high-fidelity graphics.
For this reason, my shortlisting process roughly looks like this:
- Accumulate suggestions over the long term from steam, reddit, YouTube, etc .
- Create your own wishlist, distribute it in tiers - GOTY winners and nominees, AAA, top steam ratings, sequels of games you've enjoyed in the past, etc.
- order games in each tier based on what factors you desire the most - graphics, gameplay, lore, time to beat. You may move certain games to higher tier based on your bias.
- Every time you hear another suggestion for game X, move it one position higher (within the tier).
I'd love to see a public backlog DB, howlongtobeat.com is a good one. But I'm also convinced it's a highly subjective and personal process, so I count as a customer who doesn't know what they want (in case you're looking to build something around this).
4. Recent favorites:
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - The 101 trailer was enough to convince me [1]. Also, its prequel Human Revolution was a favorite back in 2012 (got it from a friend).
- God of War 3: again, wanted closure for so long. 1 and 2 were favorites back then, source: friend.
- Death Stranding: received it for free on Epic. Had heard about it a lot, the relase date was recent, and the trailer was intriguing. Also, Kojima.
[1] https://youtu.be/Sh_65yx-sc8?si=B6uoQ7akYRHHMI4B