2024 has been a wildly successful year for your average gamer. Not for the industry itself, mind, but video game fans sure have been eating particularly well. The obvious choices have been known for quite a while now, but two hugely important newcomers from Microsoft have muddled things further still.
The kicker? I honestly didn’t expect this to happen. As I’ve written before, I’m still quite conflicted about the state of STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. At the same time, the game is a largely compelling experience even with all of its faults. Then in comes Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which I genuinely thought would fall flat on its face in regard to mainstream appeal. I’ll discuss this at greater length below, but the important bit is this: two of Microsoft’s latest releases have already proven themselves awesome, and I genuinely don’t think anyone saw this coming.
What makes STALKER 2 and Indiana Jones potential GOTYs?
I’m not saying that I thought STALKER 2 or Indiana Jones would be bad. I expected The Great Circle to be solid, but I was surprised by how popular it ended up being. While Indiana Jones certainly has no shortage of fans, it’d be silly to pretend that the franchise isn’t way past its heyday in 2024.
Well, it’s now suddenly back in the limelight because Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a good game, an excellent love letter to the series in general, and a return to form for Indy himself. It’s not a 10/10, but I think anyone jumping into it will find themselves having loads of fun.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, on the other hand, launched half-broken, and I was certain that it would be almost universally panned outside of us series veterans. Specifically, those of us who remember just how utterly borked Shadow of Chernobyl was back in 2007. Yet, it moved over a million copies by November 22, a mere two days after it first came out.
That’s not all, though. Let’s not forget about Microsoft Flight Sim 2024, whose reliance on online servers made it such a horror show that even STALKER 2 looked perfectly fine on day one in comparison. Well, it just so happens that the game itself is incredible, a genuine show-stopper in all the ways that matter, as long as you’ve got a good internet connection. Which I do not, coincidentally.
The unfair possibility
Even though I’m mainly focusing on recent flagship releases from under Microsoft’s umbrella, that’s not to say I’m forgetting about all the other awesome games that have come out in 2024: Balatro, Astro Bot, FF7R, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and (naturally) Black Myth: Wukong are all still fresh in my mind, but they are also all prominently featured as part of the arguably de facto Game Of The Year showpiece: The Game Awards 2024. Astro Bot won in the end, but none of Microsoft’s aforementioned games were featured. Specifically, all of them were released after the November 22nd cutoff (or released close to it/in a broken state), which made them ineligible.
We’ve also had many other top-tier titles in 2024: Helldivers 2, Silent Hill 2, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Frostpunk 2, just to list a few. I’m not trying to deliberately leave good games off the table here. It’s just that Microsoft’s arguably excellent offerings have come out too late in the year to make a difference in 2024.
“So?” you might be saying. “They’ll get to shine at next year’s TGAs.” To which I say maybe, but also not really. All of these major Microsoft releases will stay relevant in people’s minds for the next couple of months until something new and fancy comes in. Like, say, Avowed. Or heck, if we want to be daring, how about Grand Theft Auto 6? That’s just how these things go, and even though STALKER 2 will inevitably have a long modding tail, this, too, will pale in comparison to true mainstream attention.
This is just me bemoaning that a game as good as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle might fall off the docket for many players when it genuinely does trade punches with this year’s best of the best. If GTA 6 does come out next year, it’s going to sweep everything else by the wayside, including Microsoft’s awkwardly positioned 2024/2025 offerings.
Did anyone expect Microsoft to make its way onto their personal GOTY 2024?
Microsoft’s recent flagships haven’t been able to leave a mark on TGA 2024, then, but Game of the Year awards have been infamously fragmented for decades now. Every outlet and industry event seems to have its own GOTY, which is fair enough as it’s an entirely unofficial title.
This means that, even though TGAs wrapped up precisely how everyone expected them to, the gaming community is still shaping its own opinion on what the game(s) of the year were, and STALKER 2 and Indiana Jones are very much eligible in this regard. For example, Raphael Colantonio of Dishonored and Prey fame has already announced that STALKER 2 is his own personal GOTY, which is a heck of a recommendation.
And that’s the bit that’s exciting about this whole discussion: Microsoft’s studios have managed to deliver several serious contenders for the players’ own personal GOTY opinions, and that’s a huge win. Xbox has been stacking questionable decisions that don’t make sense from a fan’s perspective for a while now, and having a series of genuinely compelling games come out is a big deal. To have them all good enough to compare with popular-vote GOTYs is an extremely promising sign.
Now, the only question remains whether Microsoft/Xbox can keep this streak up. Either way, we, the players, should be thrilled with it while it lasts.
