The veil drops as the Blizzard Watch staff choose their picks for Game of the Year 2024
@Quaximus
As the calendar sets on 2024, we at Blizzard Watch recognize the work of countless developers by looking back fondly on our games of the year. Something we appreciate here is how games make us feel and the joy they give us. It’s always an amazing feeling when we experience a game that invokes such vivid feelings and attachment, and something to consider is who knows how often we’ll get to experience it in the future. 14,000 (and counting) people have lost their jobs in the game industry this year alone. Along with their lives being upended for the sake of corporate profit, the wealth of knowledge and experience they bring to game development and creation is lost, which directly games we enjoy. It’s hard not to look at layoffs continuing to hit the industry and worry about what the future may look like.
But for now, we’re looking back on our favorites of 2024 (next week we’ll talk about what we’re looking forward to in 2025). We’ve asked our staff to toss their votes and their words towards their choices for the Game of the Year 2024 and if you’ve ever read The Queue, you probably know what’s coming next.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard dominates the staff choice for GOTY
This latest, long-awaited entry in the Dragon Age series sank its claws into most of the staff and never let go. Who would have thought that a narratively driven, lore-rich, romance simulator where you can make a variety of choices would have such an impression on a group of imaginative writers, but that’s something they can tell you themselves:
Dragon Age: The Veilguard has gotten some mixed reviews, but I found it a delight. It let is venture into parts of Thedas we’ve only heard about before, gave us a cast of colorful characters to get to know, and presented the quintessential BioWare story of recruiting a team of people with issues that you have to sort out before coming together with the power of friendship to defeat evil. It had the best gameplay the series has ever had, as much lore as the last three games combined, much deeper stories for your companions, and an adorable baby gryphon.
I have some quibbles with the game, but I loved it and started a second playthrough as soon as I finished the first. My biggest problem with Veilguard is that we won’t be getting any DLC, and if BioWare keeps up its plodding pace it could be a decade before the next Dragon Age game. Veilguard has plenty of potential side-stories I’d love to explore, and reaching the end it begs the question of what comes next? But it could be a long while before we see anything else.
I didn’t play nearly as many games as I would have liked, but picking my GOTY for 2024 was pretty easy. After 10 long years, we finally have our next Dragon Age game, and it’s fantastic. There has been a lot of discourse about the game, but personally, it hits all the right buttons for me. The companions are memorable, the quests are interesting, the story itself is what makes Dragon Age such an endearing series.
I already played through the game once, and when the story was done, I immediately went back to the beginning because I wasn’t ready to leave Thedas just yet. It may not be the perfect game that fans were expecting, but it was perfect enough to show us that BioWare still knows how to turn out immersive stories. My only real complaint is that the game will not receive any DLC, and to me, that’s heartbreaking. There is so much story left to be told of Rook and their team of heroes.
I literally picked up Veilguard after WoW guild members mentioned there were cute animals you could pet. The joke is on me because now I have a minor addiction, and I am hoping this will be my next game to 100%. I’m wholly driven by the “what happens next??” of the story. It is SO good and doesn’t make me feel compelled to go back and play all its predecessors, which can be a sticking point for me regarding established franchises.
This has been a busy year and I didn’t get to play nearly as many games as I wanted to (like so many others) but I think of the ones I’ve played this year, Veilguard steals the show. I really enjoyed it as a game and as the next entry into the Dragon Age series. It left me wanting more immediately when I rolled credits, which is always a good sign. I enjoyed a lot of the character work, the story development and what it means for past games as well as the story going forward. I’m looking forward to many tin foil hats on this one.
For me, the best and most wonderful game of 2024 has been Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a game that did everything I love from a BioWare game while also letting me play a non-binary Qunari romancing another non-binary Qunari, a thing I didn’t even know I needed and was quite surprised by. The gameplay itself is lively and active, with combos and unique playstyles available through talent choices, gear choices and more, and also every lore speculation I’ve made about Dragon Age over the years happened. Even the crazy one I came up with when I saw Cole and Solas chatting about things back in Inquisition.
My Hawke died in Inquisition (sad, but I knew her and I knew she wouldn’t let anyone else die in the Fade) and so, when Bioware decided to let us equip and wear Hawke’s armor in Veilguard, I immediately started a headcanon that my Rook is actually a reincarnated Hawke and that’s why she has the armor, she remembered where Hawke left a cache of his gear. I only wish they had put the mage staff from the DA2 trailer in the game too.
I’m enjoying a lot of about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, especially after a lot of the early reviews were polarizing. A lot of the discourse around the game seems disingenuous — it has fun combat, beautiful set pieces, and interesting stories. Discussion around how it fits into the previous established world of Dragon Age is fair game to me, fake-outrage over certain characters and design choices is not.
Other 2024 games the staff enjoyed (and you might, too!)
While the connecting thread between all of the Blizzard Watch staff is the love of video games, we all dabble in different genres and playstyles. From RPGs to dopamine-feedback loops to remakes of classic childhood games, there were plenty of other 2024 games that captured the staff’s attention. Here are other staff favorites throughout 2024:
Balatro
Have you heard of a little game called Balatro? No? Do you want to? Do you want me to talk about it for hours? Because I can. I’ll do that for you. Steam claims I have 200+ hours in it, and that sounds correct; the earliest part of my year, once I finished last year’s playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, was consumed in a flurry of jokers, flushes, and two pair hands. In, around, and between every other game this year, there has been Balatro.
Even now, when I don’t know what else I want to do, there is Balatro. For several months I played it while I was awake, I thought about it while I was working, I dreamt about it while I was sleeping (and no, that’s not an exaggeration). I also lost a lot of sleep to Balatro. There’s a reason I haven’t downloaded the mobile version. I know myself better than that. I’d never sleep again.
Balatro is more innovative, more “of the moment,” and has more universal appeal, but I personally am not the biggest fan of card games or games where the point is to make the numbers go brrrr. Nevertheless, Balatro got me. And it got me both on desktop and for mobile, in a way that I’d recommend pretty much anyone pick it up. But it didn’t quite capture my heart the same way as my quirky little 85 caprice classic (his name is Mel).
Liz Patt:
Now, I didn’t have expectations when I wrote about Balatro in my first “what to play this weekend” post, but Kal’s recommendation (and Phil U.’s convincing) drew me in. Balatro is hypnotic, quirky, and, most of all, fun! I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed it and wish I’d played it more, but hey, I do need to sleep sometime.
I also played Balatro like everyone else, though it did not take over my gaming life for as long as others.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
I find it very hard to pick my GOTY for 2024 because there are so many good options. Persona 3 Reload deserved to be up there — it was probably the most “comfy” game I played all year, if that makes sense, and has an absolutely killer soundtrack. Metaphor: ReFantazio might also deserve to be up there — it’s leaning that way so far — but I haven’t finished it yet.
However, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth stole my heart. It made me feel more engrossed than any other game I played in recent times. It had been quite a while since I felt so immersed in a game world, got so lost in a story, or took so many screenshots. It’s a beautiful game, though it does have some flaws: two of the regions in the game (Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon) were kind of hellish to navigate, which frustrated me a lot at times, and the story events near the end of the game didn’t please me nearly as much as everything up to that point had. I finished the game with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth but despite all of that, looking back at it, it’s still clearly a masterpiece.
Silent Hill 2 (2024 Remake)
Outside of Bloodborne and Bugsnax — which will forever be tied for my GOTY picks — the Silent Hill 2 remake gets my top pick this year. As a horror fan, you’d think I’d have played the series before, but nope! This was my first entry and oh my Yogg, I get it. I love everything about this game. I could spend a long time gushing about it, but I wrote this whole thing out of order and I’m going to gush about Banjo-Tooie for a while shortly, so I’m just going to take a second to call out one specific element of Silent Hill 2: The sound design. I’ve played games with great sound design, but nothing had me raving the way SH2’s have. I know horror isn’t for everyone, but if it is for you, play Silent Hill 2, and play it with headphones. It’s terrifying in all the best ways.
Frostpunk 2
The 2018 post-apocalyptic city builder Frostpunk left behind large snowboots for its sequel to follow. Wisely, Frostpunk 2 changed enough to move beyond just a city builder, instead becoming a harsh nation builder set 30 years after the formation of New London. The world is still frozen over and peril is at every corner, but now your choices have a much larger scale in the survival of mankind.
Pacific Drive
Anna Bell:
The game that released in 2024 that captured my heart and set the mood for the year was Pacific Drive. Both narratively and ludonarratively, it’s basically “life is what happens when you’re making other plans (and those plans don’t usually involve electrostatic shocks)” in game form, and that was definitely the theme of 2024. It’s weird and wild and fun, and never, ever goes how I was expecting.
Tales of Kenzeru: ZAU
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU deserves all the accolades as an Indie Metroidvania game with a rich story environment.
World of Warcraft: The War Within
Christian “Kalcheus” Thoma:
I’m cheating with World of Warcraft because not everything I played was released this year, but a lot of great content I played (such as The War Within) was released this year. I feel like the game deserves some kudos for all the content it rolled out throughout 2024, particularly the fact that Blizzard somehow eliminated the end-of-expansion lull! Honestly it may be a little too much but Blizzard should get credit for giving players a reason to login both before and after an expansion launch.
Phil Xavier:
I’m going to have to steal Christian’s answer and go with World of Warcraft as well. The War Within rekindled my love for WoW in a way that I didn’t think possible after I took a very long 10-month break from the game during Dragonflight. I’m back, and the changes made to the game — such as Warbands, and the addition of Delves to the Great Vault — have made my time with it considerably better.
I’ve got two kids whose age doesn’t add up to ten, so I’m not working my way through my game backlog at this point in my life. In fact, my limited gaming time this year was once again almost solely dedicated to World of Warcraft. That being said, The War Within is everything I want from an expansion right now. The introduction of Warbands means my army of alts is running at 99% efficiency.
Joe Perez:
I loved where the story went for many of the characters, and while not perfect, it does tie up a lot of loose ends while creating new threads to chase, and it probably (at least to me) feels like the best Warcraft has been in ages.
Games that surprised us this year
It’s always a great feeling when you stumble upon a game you weren’t expecting to enjoy, whether it be a newly released 2024, the remake of a classic trilogy, or rediscovering a game from your childhood. Here are some of the surprise gems we ran into while gaming this year, even though they weren’t released this year.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Chris Chesno:
Prince of Persia wasn’t even on my radar until a friend had me try to demo, and it immediately became one of my top games of the year. A great Metroidvania with good platforming and an interesting plot, it came out of left field and was apparently my top played game on PS5 in 2025.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Phil Ulrich:
The appearance of Mass Effect here is probably as much a surprise to you as it was to me, but — I had actually never played anything past playing Mass Effect on my buddy’s Xbox back in 2007 when it came out. And so when it appeared on sale for $10 I figured, you know what, why not? I liked that game, I think! And after some discussions with EIC Liz Harper, I ended up not just playing mostly blind through all 3 games end-to-end, but also essentially liveblogging it in a thread in my guild Discord. And you know what? I absolutely loved it. I can often tell you how much I enjoy a game based on how much it consumes my non-gaming thought cycles, and for weeks, it was just Mass Effect for me.
Even my wife got into it — I was playing it on my Steam Deck docked to our TV, and it became our nightly activity together, replacing TV, movies, other games, everything. We laughed, we cried, we played all the way through, and I’m kind of thinking of doing it again.
Banjo-Tooie
Mitch:
The game that surprised me this year was actually one from my childhood. At some point in the spring, I played through Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie back-to-back. The first was because the original title had been added to the Switch Online library but the second — which has since been added to the Online library — got me to bust out my original N64. Anecdotal backstory aside, I was surprised by the sequel because of how much more involved of a game it was.
Tooie only released two years after the original, but it made the first (which is still in the list of gaming GOATs) feel like a concept test for a much larger idea; the short story to the sequel’s theatrical release. I think the fandom itself is split on which game is “better,” but from a developmental-case study standpoint, it was a little mind-blowing to see how much more expansive Tooie was. I don’t remember feeling like there was a big difference as a kid, but as an adult, it was so, so fascinating to see how interconnected and evolved the sequel felt.
And that’s a wrap for 2024. Next week we’ll be back with what the Blizzard Watch team is looking forward to in 2025.
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