Contest Stats and Discussion - Part 1377

Leonhart4 posted...

Huh, interesting poll. Glad they did this one.

At least we can get an idea of how Remake and Rebirth stack up against each other.

Yeah this idea is neat. If you add all of FF7’s votes as one the exact order is right, too.

LusterSoldier posted...

To be specific, only England used to have results by region.

It’s splitting hairs a bit, but the NUTS 1 statistical regions of the UK the old way was based on only divided England into regions, but considered the other three countries regions on their own. So both are true.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Territorial_Level

KamikazePotato posted...

Metroid Dread has every reason to overperform here. It's the only Nintendo game versus two FFs and two WRPGs.

Trying to sneak in “Elden Ring is a WRPG” lols

Anyway, Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably a top 10 game all time here.

How about "dark fantasy RPG with western aesthetics that heavily shares a fanbase with WRPG fans and is essentially considered one by many of them" for the pendants in the room. Elden Ring has far, far more overlap with Baldur's Gate than Final Fantasy.

They are totally different games, and I would argue if we’re talking fanbases then there is much more overlap with Final Fantasy. You could easily spin that the other way and say “Japanese action RPG with an open world that heavily shares a fanbase with JRPGs and is essentially considered one of them”.

Of course it doesn’t matter anyway as this is a solved problem, the term “Soulslike” is there to split the difference. Regardless, the JRPG/WRPG distinction has been meaningless for over a decade now.

The other thing to consider is that FFVII and Elden Ring have fanbases largely stemming from Playstation, while Baldur’s Gate 3 has a fanbase mainly stemming from the PC.

I think you're completely wrong outside of maybe platform distribution, but I don't feel like rehashing this argument when you can't even agree that FF is considered anime by the general public.

I don’t think the general public thinks about things that way at all as it happens! So yeah I’ll proudly wear that badge. So perhaps we can instead agree that genre distinctions are increasingly silly.

Actually, think of it this way: in the semifinal poll, FFVII Rebirth got 41.45%, here Remake and Rebirth combined are only on 24.62% combined. Rebirth is losing more to the alternatives than it is to Remake, quite a bit more in fact. We don’t know how much each is hurting it, but the impact of Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 on Rebirth individually can’t be too far from the impact of Remake. There is obviously massive overlap between the four games.

People thought Metaphor going out would help Rebirth, in fact it helped Astro. It is clear that just having the arbitrary “JRPG” moniker placed upon you means nothing. We have seen this twice in the last week!

oh ya go my bg3

Yeah BG3 is looking like an absolute beast now.

LightningStrikes posted...

It is clear that just having the arbitrary “JRPG” moniker placed upon you means nothing. We have seen this twice in the last week!

Not necessarily true. SFF doesn't stop existing just because Cloud and Sephiroth go even with each other. It just means in this case the genre overlap didn't result in non-transient voting patterns. Although I'm not sure on gamefaqs how much the jrpg and wrpg thing matters. We seem to be an RPG site in the general.

WRPGs are rpgs that just keep Winning

In terms of overlap, FF and BG have way more overlap with each other than BG does with Elden Ring. Heck, I'd say FF has more overlap with Elden Ring than BG too, considering they're both action RPGs. BG and ER have no particular reasons to overlap, other than both being extremely popular games. FF and BG - story-focused games with big parties of characters. FF and ER - action RPGs with combat people love. ER and BG - ??? Calling BG dark fantasy is absurd as well. It's not even close to as dark as ER, or there would be barely any characters to interact with, plus 90% of them would be dead by the end. BG3 and FFVII are more similar in levels of "darkness".

BG3 could be benefiting from being the one turn-based game in the poll too, since we all know gamefaqs loves those. But yeah, it's probably just really strong, likely dethroning Witcher 3 as the previous strongest WRPG.

Overlap is not necessarily about game similarity. Often it's not actually.

I'm going with whatever logic means Elden Ring is still the strongest 1 on 1

I’d say the number one cause for overlap is platform, which I think is why SFF has weakened so much. Everything but Nintendo’s on everything now, and even there people just have a Switch and another system.

Anyway, here’s my guess at the top ten games of the decade so far:

Baldur’s Gate 3
Tears of the Kingdom
Elden Ring
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Super Mario Bros Wonder
Metroid Dread
Ghost of Tsushima
Hades
Animal Crossing New Horizons

That Wonder placement is mostly because putting Dread over it seems wrong. Hard to say as we only saw it in one poll where it wasn’t getting SFF’d a lot. Looks like Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the second strongest game of the 21st century so far behind only BotW, as wild as that is to say.

pjbasis posted...

I'm going with whatever logic means Elden Ring is still the strongest 1 on 1

I think bg3 thumps er pretty easily, at least 58-42

What exactly are you using to say Baldur's Gate > Melee etc?

FFDragon posted...

I think bg3 thumps er pretty easily, at least 58-42

That requires Baldur's Gate to be held back here and I don't see why it would do better on Elden Ring 1v1 than it's doing here. It's currently 55-56 on Elden Ring. Don't see why it would at least increase that by 2-3% 1v1.

Baldur's Gate 3 being this strong doesn't surprise me because it was the first game to come out since Among Us to be a cultural event, and on top of that it's everything GameFAQs loves in a video game aside from being playable on Nintendo.

It's also getting the kinds of updates that only makes it more and more loved.

Well Melee has lost to Ultimate three times and gotten weaker in Gamecube polls to the point of barely being ahead of Wind Waker last time. Tears beats Wind Waker (even indirectly) and BG3 beats that. Overall though I just think BG3 is that strong.

Wait, why would Tears beat Wind Waker or Majora's Mask? It's pretty clearly much weaker than BotW.

I wonder how much Elden Ring beats Dark Souls by.

WarThaNemesis2 posted...

first game to come out since Among Us to be a cultural event

What? Elden Ring was as much of an event as BG3. Heck, Animal Crossing New Horizons was a bigger event than either.

Many way polls means nothing. See Mario losing to Yoshi and even Falcon. Even FFVI vs. FFVII was hugely misleading despite being 1v1.

If we go by this result, how do you think Elden Ring compares to Dark Souls?

I don’t see Tears as that much weaker than BotW. It was still pretty huge and obliterated everything in its path except for BG3. It did better on BG3 than Elden Ring is. Really I think it’s just that BG3 is that strong, not that Tears was weak enough to lose.

Do we have any data on how BotW does against OoT?

Just curious about what the ceiling of these new potential behemoths could be

Elden Ring beats Dark Souls comfortably I think, putting it above Skyrim and likely around the same as Witcher 3. Which probably means Baldur’s Gate 3 could give BotW quite the scare.

Is BotW > Tears a similar power difference to Rebirth > Remake?

LightningStrikes posted...

Baldur’s Gate 3
Tears of the Kingdom
Elden Ring
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Super Mario Bros Wonder
Metroid Dread
Ghost of Tsushima
Hades
Animal Crossing New Horizons

That Wonder placement is mostly because putting Dread over it seems wrong. Hard to say as we only saw it in one poll where it wasn’t getting SFF’d a lot. Looks like Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the second strongest game of the 21st century so far behind only BotW, as wild as that is to say.

I feel like Hades has a chance to be higher, like above Wonder, but maybe that's wishful thinking. I just don't feel like Wonder (or Dread) have the sticking power of other Mario games. It would likely beat any of the "New" games but nothing else.

LightningStrikes posted...

I’d say the number one cause for overlap is platform, which I think is why SFF has weakened so much. Everything but Nintendo’s on everything now, and even there people just have a Switch and another system.

Anyway, here’s my guess at the top ten games of the decade so far:

Baldur’s Gate 3
Tears of the Kingdom
Elden Ring
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Super Mario Bros Wonder
Metroid Dread
Ghost of Tsushima
Hades
Animal Crossing New Horizons

That Wonder placement is mostly because putting Dread over it seems wrong. Hard to say as we only saw it in one poll where it wasn’t getting SFF’d a lot. Looks like Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the second strongest game of the 21st century so far behind only BotW, as wild as that is to say.

If Rebirth is #4 and Astro Bot broke 45% on it 1-on-1, does it really make sense for the latter to be #11+?

pjbasis posted...

Do we have any data on how BotW does against OoT?

Just curious about what the ceiling of these new potential behemoths could be

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/ 6168-best-game-ever-day-35-division-vi-final-zelda-a-link-to-the
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/ 6173-best-game-ever-day-38-quarterfinal-zelda-ocarina-of-time-vs
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8090-bonus-battle-majoras-mask-vs-breath-of-the-wild

Which would imply BotW and OoT are about equal.

Of course...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7610-whats-your-all-time-favorite-legend-of-zelda-console-game

This tells another story.

AxemRedRanger posted...

If Rebirth is #4 and Astro Bot broke 45% on it 1-on-1, does it really make sense for the latter to be #11+?

Astro Bot also lost to Metaphor in the free for all poll. We don't know which of the two is actually stronger.

Yeah you’re absolutely right - Astro is probably around Dread level? Which probably then has Metaphor lurking around the bottom of that list. Maybe the solution is just to replace Wonder with Astro entirely, it didn’t look that great in that one poll.

Truthfully there is a clearly defined top 3 then it’s a giant mess lol. I would certainly take Astro over Metaphor though, with Astro gaining slightly more than Rebirth from Metaphor I imagine the opposite is also true. Maybe moreso given that Rebirth is a Playstation exclusive based on one of the most important Playstation games ever and Astro Bot is a giant Playstation wank fest (complimentary).

wow that zelda poll.

First I was drawn to how weak BotW looks there, and then I realized Ocarina didn't even win! You really gotta just throw these kinds of things out if you're looking for 1v1 patterns.

I don't think Elden Ring beats Dark Souls comfortably, I'm not even convinced it would win, though I think it would look better indirectly either way than it would in practice because the big Souls fans probably don't have Dark Souls as their favorite. Witcher 3 overperformed a decent bit on BotW already.

I think the cleanest comparison is using Super Mario Galaxy 2 through its match with Witcher 3 beucase that's a match with no overlap and I game that has no reason to not be consistent between the two contests. Using Skyrim's matches against Dark Souls and Witcher 3 predictsSuper Mario Galaxy 2 to break 45% on Dark Souls which puts Dark Souls putting the latter in its GotD title boost on the level of Smash Wii U in 2015, meaning barely avoiding a doubling against a pretty anti-voted FFVII. As I see it Elden Ring's strength hovers around the same, maybe slightly below or slightly above.

I think that just shows the dangers of extrapolating too much. Galaxy 2 twice lost to different Mass Effect games and I doubt you would hesitate to put Dark Souls above Mass Effect 2. Also, it is entirely possible that Galaxy 2 simply was stronger in GotD2 - after all, when its match against Witcher 3 happened, everybody was declaring the death of The Witcher 3. Then it turns out nope, Galaxy 2 just looked surprisingly strong. Possibly from the GotD effect, possibly from a generalised Nintendo boost caused by the Switch, who knows. The key point is, through BotW Galaxy 2 looked stronger than Mass Effect 2 so I wouldn’t assume consistency.

Baldur’s Gate 3 would easily beat Elden Ring 1v1 in a real contest and depending on the field it could win outright. That game is the Chrono Trigger of today’s era.

UltimaterializerX posted...

That game is the Chrono Trigger of today’s era.

so still loses to Melee

pjbasis posted...

so still loses to Melee

Baldur’s Gate 3 looking like it can win the whole thing then losing to a Melee rally seems very possible.

There is way more danger in taking non-contest polls at face value than extrapolating!

Mass Effect 2 is only below Galaxy 2 in x-stats because Witcher 3 rallies pretty heavily against BotW so that's kind of a moot point.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Baldur’s Gate 3 would easily beat Elden Ring 1v1 in a real contest and depending on the field it could win outright. That game is the Chrono Trigger of today’s era.

No Baldur's Gate is a way bigger game than Chrono Trigger ever was.

But not at all on this site!

I mean yeah it’s all silly as we probably won’t get a contest any time soon if ever. These polls are all we have. How much did Witcher 3 benefit from the rally, anybody know? If it would have ended up at the 41% it had after the power hour (and it likely would have been higher given its trends) then Galaxy 2 still overperformed, although slightly. I suspect the rally didn’t change too much.

Again, my memory of it was Witcher 3 didn’t do as well as expected on Galaxy 2, we were all thinking “maybe it isn’t as strong as we thought!” then it obliterated God of War and it was back to business as usual. So this to me seems more like Galaxy 2 overperforming than anything else.

Out of curiosity, what’s the biggest a major Nintendo game has gotten blown out by a western game? Could just be Nintendo has a strong floor where people will tend to vote for it over not Nintendo

In that contest I believe the most was Skyrim’s 61% on Mario Kart 8, basically the same range. There are bigger historical examples though it could simply be that modern Nintendo in a 1v1 setting is blowout proof.

I argued back then that there's only so much a non-Nintendo game can do against a Nintendo game because a lot of neutral voters will just default to Nintendo

Surprised at the lack of a "What scheduled 2025 game..." poll after finishing up the 2024 GotY polls. It's usually been a tradition to have that kind of poll after finishing up the GotY polls.

We made it through the main GotY polls fine at least, which was better than I was fearing considering the staff changes.

LightningStrikes posted...

Anyway, here’s my guess at the top ten games of the decade so far:

Since opinions are cheap and I feel like offering mine,

As incredibly as it's fared in GotY and GotY-adjacent polling, I simply don't believe all the way in Baldur's Gate 3 here. It's very fair to venture that it's probably down to me being out of the loop more than anything, given its past, current, and future trajectory. Still, I don't think it remotely has the worst of the overlap in yesterday's poll, and I do think it received some apathy votes from voters who have very-little-to-no experience with the five selected games on account of the years-first framing accentuating its ability to serve as a proxy for 2023's strength as a consensus year for games.

BG3 clearly tops the decade in a PotD setting, I'll say that much. I'm not so sure about a contest setting, however, as I really do think TotK would be better at drawing apathy votes by an offsetting margin. We'd see part of the reason in a BG3 playrate poll, I suspect, while another part for me comes in the respective strength of the franchises/brands at play here. For me, these factors matter at least as much as four-digit-vote PotD results among such an aging userbase. IMO, BG3's most compelling matches would be against the likes of Metroid Prime and Super Mario RPG as such, with Skyrim v Metroid Prime 2015 serving as an (albeit rally-affected) case in point there.

And chalk those up as wins, sure, but that to me doesn't mean BG3 would do any better than look respectable in losses against titans like Majora's Mask and Super Metroid... which brings me to Tears of the Kingdom, the only 2020s game with the pedigree among apathy voters to approach that hallowed tier of (essentially) our golden decade. ...And unfortunately, a clean 1v1 loss of any sort to anything from the last 15 years besides Breath of the Wild is deeply discrediting in that regard. I'm not so sure Wind Waker and Twilight Princess wouldn't do the same in regular PotDs, to be fair, but then they're old enough to catch nostalgia by now, and not quite as iterative to boot.

As for Elden Ring, it absolutely does have the sort of pedigree BG3 lacks here (if, inevitably, not a match for TotK there), and my gut feeling is it sustained rather worse LFF than the latter, to boot. Still, for all of Elden Ring's strengths and sterling reception, something like Black Myth: Wukong still gets called a Soulslike, or maybe a Soulsborne, not an Elden Ring-like. That sort of thing really matters in a contest setting, IMO - gets Dark Souls contest title credit Elden Ring only matches by being better-regarded nowadays.

Among the also-rans, I really think Metroid Dread has been getting underestimated. Sure, there seems to have been some general souring and failure to stick strongly since its release, and its most recent result was unimpressive, but that's against its decade's titans. Finally being a consensus very good-to-great, Nintendo Metroid probably matters much more in a contest, and its impressive GotY results in its year (no compelling enough reason to think Resident Evil Village was/is much worse than Resident Evil 7) give it plenty of leeway to have fallen a bit.

Speaking of Resident Evil, I think 4's remake gets at least a half-step of contest credit from its shared title and generally being so tied to the original Resident Evil 4. And speaking of remakes, I feel FFVII Rebirth got the best of FFVII Remake in yesterday's poll due to the one-two punch of novelty and Remake's branding being detrimental in that sort of setting - see also Persona 5 Royal getting demolished in 2020's GotY voting. Both FFVIIs would likely be stronger in a contest, Remake especially - unlike Astro Bot and Metaphor, which are currently very underplayed and need time to build their fanbases.

...this is about the point when I realized that lots of the discussion here isn't necessarily about how these games might fare in a hypothetical contest, but that's what I'm sticking with (and ranking indirect strength based on) regardless:

Tears of the Kingdom
Baldur's Gate 3
Elden Ring
(Persona 5 Royal)
~~~~
Metroid Dread
Resident Evil 4
Final Fantasy VII Remake
~~
Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Ghost of Tsushima
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
God of War: Ragnarok
(Hades)
~

With games within a given tier indirectly very close, in my estimation.

Yeah there are talks about western SFF lol.

Galaxy 2 extrapolated probably isn't entirely accurate, it's just to give an idea of how far Dark Souls is from top 10 games, which even in the outlier case is quite a while.

I agree with Metalmind. I'm sure that Baldur's Gate 3 is strong, but I'm not seeing anything that suggests it can break the glass ceiling that "modern" games like Mass Effect 2, Skyrim, and The Last of Us keep hitting.

Keep in mind that Skyrim looked really dominant back then too and even then its ceiling was Metroid Prime

Friendly reminder (mostly to myself) that the CBVIII retrospective begins this week!

xbox has clearly lost the console war

how long before they sega it up

Leonhart4 posted...

Keep in mind that Skyrim looked really dominant back then too and even then its ceiling was Metroid Prime

I suspect Skyrim kind of weakened between 2011 to 2015, though it was still very strong. Similarly, Metroid Prime has been getting stronger, doing better than it did against Fallout 3 on Skyrim seems like proof of that.I doubt even a diminished Skyrim is weaker than Fallout 3. It also went from winning by a hair against Half-Life 2 to beating it easily. Now that game probably did get weaker (because Valve borderline abandoned the franchise) but that was pretty good evidence of Prime strengthening. This certainly doesn’t happen again:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3467-division-6-round-1-gtavc-k-hearts-metroid-prime-paper-mario

It would be interesting to see how Prime does if the ever is another contest now that the series is back, kind of.

Anyway, on today’s poll of course Switch 1/2 is winning because we all want to find out what the Switch 2 lineup actually is!

FFDragon posted...

xbox has clearly lost the console war

how long before they sega it up

Probably not for at least five years as they will have new hardware. since it is I believe still profitable they have no reason not to keep going.