I agree about the poll, the bracket does give it a March madness kind of feel.
Regarding Witcher 3 As it should be, when you have to preface with “you have to look past X factor and the game is amazing“ you don’t fairly apply that same logic to other games, why does this one get special treatment just because it’s made by CDPR.
Every game has flaws, that doesnt matter, what matters is if the game transcends its flaws or not, Witcher 3 for most people did just that, the combat part itself is over-exaggerated as fuck (its decent), and the same goes for controls, other than that there is no big issues for most people.
The game launched with some bugs and glitches but they were not game breaking for the most part, and lots of them got quickly patched, this way CDPR gained the love and trust of gamers around the world, unlike other companies who release their games and then dont give a shit about them or their feedback. After a while people complained about the controls being clunky and too heavy, CDPR also listen to this complain and issued a patch to update the movements and give the player another option called "Alternative Movements" which is another good job by them, as for the combat sure its not excellent combat you find in Devil May Cry or Dark Souls 3 or Monster Hunter, but that game was hyped as a"Open-World story driven RPG" not as a hack and slash like God of War, so people that went into the game expecting very high quality combat are imo just clueless about what they bought. Obviously CDPR cant fix or tweak the combat in the game because that would be too much work and they dont have the time for that given they are working on another game, so what they did basically was improving the gameplay with the DLC release, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine pretty much improved everything about the gameplay from: Tools/Weapons, Boss Fights, Mechanics, variety of builds, monster and difficulty.
With a release of two high quality DLC and with a lot of content and generous price compared to other expansions/dlc they AGAIN gained the respect and the trust of the gaming community.
Also Witcher 3 at first the budget was not as big as other open world titles like Rockstar games for example, so the part of gamers forgiving them for some things is actually reasonable given they WERE small company and it was their first experience in making open world game with this ambition and vision, and i think they succeeded very well with it.
Every game has flaws and the fans of a certain game will overlook a lot of the minor flaws because for them that game transcends them and goes beyond those flaws that for them those flaws dont matter anymore. Its what some people call a game that has a soul, another good example for that kind of game is two well known games: 1- Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl 2- Fallout New Vegas. Two games with a lot of flaws technical flaws and bugs but they are still loved to this day, and for a good reason, there are many other games like that as well, but you get the idea.
Saying you cant call Witcher 3 is your choice for game of the generation because of arbitrary scale for flaws is very ignorant. It was never about being flawless in the first place, its about the whole overall experience and what impact did it have on you and on the industry as a whole and to that i would say Witcher 3 has a solid foundation. I could list at least 10 reasons for why it could be game of the generation that would be hard for a lot of other games to compete with. In fact i already did that somewhere else when i wrote about it, but i will keep this from being too long.
