The Escapist Reader’s Choice Game of the Year 2014 Winner Is …

After a month of voting, the winner of the Reader’s Choice Game of the Year for 2014 can finally be crowned.

I know a lot of people out there didn’t think 2014 was a very good year. Sure, it doesn’t beat the banner years of 2011 or 1999, but I personally had a lot of fun playing all kinds of different games in 2014. It’s easy to be cynical – it takes effort to show your love of the medium we all enjoy despite its foibles. You guys and girls did so this month by participating in our Reader’s Choice Game of the Year bracket for 2014 where we pit 16 games head-to-head. The winner would move on to the next round and face another game title, until only two games were left.

This year those two games were Dragon Age: Inquisition and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (see how I didn’t capitalize the “e” in earth like a boss???). Both of these games have similar fantasy trappings, but they felt extremely different in execution. DA:I is a sweeping epic RPG, while Mordor boasts a concise mechanic with tons of possibility for emergent storytelling with its nemesis system. Which was better? You voted in this championship round to determine the answer.

In the end, BioWare’s game earned the most support from Escapist readers, winning nearly two-thirds of the vote. You have spoken.

The Escapist Reader’s Choice Game of the year 2014 is Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Many congratulations to the team at BioWare for creating a wonderful RPG! You’ve certainly earned your winter break this year.

In addition to crowning the winning game, we also get to crown the winning Escapist readers who correctly predicted how the bracket would shake out. The best three will receive some awesome gaming gear from our friends at Roccat. There were six readers who perfectly predicted the entire bracket (holy shit) and we used an extremely scientific method (a d6) to randomly choose the prize winners. The rest of the top ten placing brackets (also chosen randomly) will receive a year’s subscription to The Escapist’s Publisher’s club.

We’ll be sending out PMs to the winners in the next week with instructions on how to claim your prize but here is a handy-dandy list of the winners for bragging rights.

1. Daelin Dwin
2. Lamnidae
3. dragonet111
4. suitepee7
5. Childe
6. LegendarySoap
7. Blazingdragoon04
8. tixmix
9. MacChris1991
10. Guilherme Bernardo

Congratulations to all of the winners! Thanks for participating in The Escapist’s Reader’s Choice Game of the Year bracket.

Happy gaming in 2015!