Your favorite game company of 2023

I’m going with Square Enix:

• Final Fantasy 16
  • Square Enix took a chance taking the franchise into the action/adventure game route. Overall, they succeeded. The combat is fun, the Eikon and the Boss battles are epic, and we have that amazing Final Fantasy music. Now hopefully they can add some more depth to the combat for us action game enthusiasts.
• Octopath Traveler 2
  • This game is amazing if you’re a nostalgic fan of the Square Enix of old. The battle system, the characters, the stories, the fantasy elements, and the music are all top notch. I give credit to Square for sticking to what they did best and giving us memorable RPGs. Right now it’s competing with ToTK for my GOTY.
• Star Ocean 2 Remake
  • Only 5 hours in, but I appreciate that Square decided to remake the game. Love the aesthetics and the battle system so far is interesting. Never played the original, so I’m looking forward to seeing this through.
• Final Fantasy 1-6 Collection
  • Never played these games originally, so I appreciate that they re-released them in remastered format. I got the rare Switch Collector’s Edition!

On top of these titles, the marketing for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has been great and you can tell they are very confident in the game. We also got a new Mana game announcement as well. How about you, SW? What is your favorite game company of 2023?

Probably go with Nintendo.

- Fire Emblem Engage

- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

- Super Mario Bros. Wonder

- Super Mario RPG Remake

Favorite company?🤔 I have not viewed any company/game studio as a favorite. Once I am content with the purchase I am good. In that sense, I am pretty content with many studios and their offerings this year.

Nintendo, because of Fire Emblem, Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros Wonder.

Got a thing for underdogs and up-and-comers.

Fatshark for Darktide and for previous work on their two Vermintide games.

Motive for their Dead Space Remake putting other remakes to shame, can't wait for Dead Space 2 remake.

Teyon for managing to build an appreciative base with Terminator Resistance games despite its lackluster critical reception and going onto make Robocop: Rogue City which was one of my favorite games this year.

And Dambuster Studios (formerly Free Radical) for Dead Island 2, a studio who has been cursed for years since their days as Free Radical making Haze, their botch Battlefronts 3 game, becoming Crytek UK and batching Homefront Revolutions, I honestly had no hope with Dead Island 2 given I figure that ship sailed when Techland left Deep Silver to make Dying Light but to my surprise the IP still has legs and Dambuster nailed it.

Ubisoft thanks to Skulls and Bones beta. I have a feeling I will love that game. Just the right amount of grind and I love to grind.

I also enjoyed AC Valhalla and Far Cry 6 was alright. I haven’t tried Mirage and probably won‘t, but I hear it‘s decent and I can appreciate that it came out $20 cheaper than new games.

I bought Avatar Pandora but I haven’t tried it yet. Also heard good things.

Well, as much as it pains me to reward bad releases, I've got to go with Fatshark and CDPR. Both WH40K: Darktide and Cyberpunk 2077 have reinvented themselves into much, much better games than I could have imagined even if they had solid releases initially. In some ways, maybe it worked out for the best that they got a lot of public pressure and were "encouraged" to make things right.

Shoutout to Cloud Imperium Games, makers of Star Citizen. They've really made some serious progress with their game and with the announcement of Squadron 42 being "feature complete", we will hopefully be getting a game by the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025. Until then, I will continue to partake in the alpha-build of Star Citizen and enjoy every buggy, janky second of it. Their communication has been clear, their added features and content exciting, and their dialogue with the community excellent.

As far as actual, finished games go, I'd have to put Mimimi up there. We got yet another excellent stealth title from them, though some sad news that they are closing down. Yet before closing they announced mod tools for Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which means we can expect a lot of additional content from modders! Hooray!

Finally Massive Entertainment sort of came out of nowhere with Avatar: Frontier of Pandora, a game I was lukewarm about for most of its development, but suddenly really excited about after it got some good press and consumer reviews. The game runs well, looks amazing, and captures the Avatar energy the same way Jedi Survivor captured the energy of Star Wars. Just running through the forest, hunting, gathering, jumping and sliding...incredibly satisfying.

I think Remedy games are total rockstars in the industry...

Favourite is a weird thing to say, but I enjoyed the hell out of Remnant 2, so for the sake of this thread, I'm gonna go with Gunfire Games.

Nintendo. Nothing else comes close.

Laughable. Simply laughable.

EA: They made Dead Space games I really love about, they also made Mass Effect trilogy and Andromeda I enjoy. Titanfall 2 is up there. The Legendary Crysis too! I know people shit on EA for a good reasons but, you cannot denied they do make good games...SP that is. Oh how can I forget, they also made my all time favorite Star Wars games aka Jedi series.

RIP.

They could probably go to a crowd funding campaign if they wanted. They'd get enough good word of mouth.

Capcom. they turn overrated RE4 into masterpiece.

Probably Atlus or Nightdive for their good remasters of boomer shooters.

Haven’t seen any good companies.

We all know the answer for you is Microsoft lol.

Nintendo and Crytek for giving me Tears of the Kingdom and Hunt: Showdown updates.

I think EA Madden 24 is pretty good.

Nightdive:

• Quake 2 remaster: never got to try this great game before

• System Shock remake: never got to try this instant classic before

New Blood is a close second for releasing Gloomwood and Dusk HD.

MS's Xbox Games Studios by a light-year or three. :P

Nvidia. Creator of the RTX 4090.

Runner up is Larian Studios.

Valve

I ❤️ Steam Deck

@SolidGame_basic: Most of the games in the Final Fanfasy 1-6 collection are wonderful. Enjoy some of the best RPGs ever made and with actual, challenging combat.

Bethesda due to Starfield.

Which one is your favorite?

Good one😅

@R4gn4r0k said:

Nightdive:

• Quake 2 remaster: never got to try this great game before

• System Shock remake: never got to try this instant classic before

New Blood is a close second for releasing Gloomwood and Dusk HD.

Absolutely. Aside from Bladerunner they have been nothing but top tier.

While getting lazy bastards trying to charge contemporary prices for lazy low effort upscales, these bros go all in.

Quake II: Remaster is probably the single best remaster played, and didn't even have to drop a single penny on it.

Crazy, crazy stuff.

Meanwhile Gamespot being a meme an giving the MGS garbage collection an 8.

Nintendo as I loved Zelda TOTK and Super Mario Wonders.

Probably Nintendo

Pikmin 4, Super Mario Wonder, Super Mario RPG, Metriod Prime Remastered, Zelda TotK, and Fire Emblem Engage.

Square Enix would be my runner-up.

Probably Valve and Nvidia. They've been the epicenter of my gaming experiences for the last 15-20 years and im quite pleased with what they do.

Sucker Punch as I played Ghost of Tsushima this year..Fantastic game!

I love Starfield. Feel free to sue me.

Nintendo this year .. unstoppable!

Microsoft sucks.

@last_lap: GFG deserve absolutely no credit whatsoever until they let us GamePass PC players play with Xbox and PS5 users.

@pcgamerlaszlo: nVidia is king.

I'm gonna go with....

• Larian - Confident enough to release a full game (albiet a tad early) with no DRM and no extra monetization. Shows that a studio can release an independently published game at the AAA level to great success.
• WUBE - Working on a major expansion to Factorio. Another highly-respectable game developer making high-quality software without a publisher.

And it was a buggy mess.

@SolidGame_basic: Sorry for the late reply. FF5 is my favorite. It has the best and most challenging job system and combat system. The story is also fantastic, though perhaps not as good as FF6.

Nintendo

I want to say Nintendo ... but i can't, CapGod is back and arguably better than ever.

Not sure I have a favorite.... It's a case by case thing....

PlayStation Studios have been the most entertaining to watch self destruct.

Greed has got the better of them.

The only one that really comes to mind for me would be Larian Studios for their work on Baldur’s Gate 3.

Capcom

Re4 remake and SF6 in one year.

BG3 has been a complete shitshow in terms of bugs. On the PS5 I had to wait 2 weeks for them to release a patch just so I could finish act 3. On Xbox it has some bug that's deleting saves. This was completely ignored when it won all these awards but to be honest it didn't deserve them.

Larian and Nintendo were top tier.