GoW 2018 best game ever?
omfg that is just stupid. It was good but really flawed - especially the level design suffered, it was so obviously constrained by the ps4 slow drive.. small areas with lots of corridors/climbing/squeezing for loading. That makes the game age quite badly
God of War is a solid game, its good, it looks good and it plays good and the story is decent enough. So overall its a solid package. But the problem is it doesnt have anything on its own to stand as among the best games of all time. It has nothing about it that stands out as something special about it, something you can point out to other and tell them.. See? this is why God of War is among the greatest games ever made. Instead its just a game that does most things solid except for few problems so the casual gamer doesnt hate it, also the game just recently got the Hype for Trailer of sequel so that really helps. In a dry year like this it even boosted the result if i had to guess.
God of War is uninspired game, you can claim that it took a huge risk, but did it really take them? The changes to its formula are things that are taken from successful GOTY that came before it, for example, God of War went towards the semi-open world design instead of pure linear design because at the start of the 2010 decade Skyrim popularized the open world formula, we can further support this by saying that God of War went to snowy fields with viking/norse background as the world design for it based on the success from Skyrim.
The story and the over the shoulder camera was influenced by the success of The Last of Us, a game with father-daughter relationship, God of War went for the same, despite for Kratos being a brutal god of war he got himself a wife and a son and became a dad to teach his son, a relationship story between 2 characters, with Cinematic over the shoulder camera, button mashing to open door and fight during a cinematic scripted fight, again inspired by The Last of Us.
Gameplay wise it took the combat of Dark Souls, it took influence from it and changed its formula from the hack and slash quick brutal combos style to a new methodical combat formula popularized by the Souls series and Fromsoftware.
3 Major design choices, all uninspired taken from other tried formulas.
The addition of the shallow lame and unnecessary RPG elements are a thing that not suited for this type of a game.
The enemy variety is not good, too many similar enemies that behave similar.
The boss fights are also repetitive with so many trolls and ogres, few of them are decent at best like the ones with the Thor sons, the Valkriyes fights are reskins with few move tweaks.
Difficulty implementation is bad its literally just damage sponges.
Some realms feel unfinished and incomplete.
Exploration is not very rewarding, but its decent enough imo.
Again, yes solid game, every game has its flaws but the sum of their part elevate them and they have something special about them that can be pointed out and remembered for ages. God of War doesnt have that. And with time the game will age and will have nothing to stand on, when a new similar game will be made with higher production values, it will easily replace it.
That's my take, i believe you that the choice is not good but i think you wrote it in controversial way without putting effort to really explain your opinion so i thought maybe i can try to do that.