TSA Community Game Of The Year 2015 Winners

Each year, we embark on our Game of the Year awards and dole out praise for games across a wide spectrum of categories. However, while it’s all well and good asking our team of writers to vote and nominate games, it’s also important to find out what you, the readers think is the best.

So we presented you with the same categories and asked you to vote, and here are the results.

Best Soundtrack – Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture & The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt tied
Runners up: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Star Wars Battlefront

Just as we saw in the TSA writers’ vote, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was a very popular soundtrack, however the community matched it vote for vote with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s rustic and sweeping score, while Metal Gear Solid V and the nostalgia-laden Star Wars Battlefront were close behind.

Outstanding Audio Design – Star Wars Battlefront
Runners up: Bloodborne, Until Dawn

The strength of Star Wars Battlefront’s audio design was clear to see, as DICE worked closely with the team behind the film series to recreate the atmosphere and the sounds of battle in a galaxy far, far away on a games console quite close to your TV.

Outstanding Art Direction – The Order: 1886
Runners up: Star Wars Battlefront, Life Is Strange, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Just as in our writers’ vote, The Order: 1886 struck a chord with the community for its art direction and visual design. The tangibility of the alternate history London that Ready at Dawn created and the pristine presentation of a technical masterpiece saw it best the likes of Star Wars Battlefront, The Witcher 3, and a slightly surprising runner up in Life Is Strange.

Outstanding Narrative – Life Is Strange
Runners up: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, The Order: 1886

Best Character – Chloe Price (Life Is Strange)
Runners up: Geralt of Rivia (The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), Cayde-6 (Destiny: The Taken King)

The Outstanding Narrative and Best Character awards go hand in hand this year, as Life Is Strange and Chloe Price shone with a remarkably touching story and the depiction of a teenage life torn apart by tragedy, amidst the trappings of science fiction and time manipulation.

Best Multiplayer – Rocket League
Runners up: Star Wars Battlefront, Destiny: The Taken King

The first of three awards for Rocket League, getting the game into millions of gamers’ hands via PlayStation Plus was a masterstroke for Psyonix, but it would have all been for naught had it not featured some of the most compelling multiplayer action of the year.

Best Downloadable Content – Driveclub season pass
Runners up: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Hearts of Stone, Driveclub Bikes

Where the expanded world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Hearts of Stone won the staff award, it was the outstanding value and continued evolution of Driveclub which raced to victory in the community. The season pass provided plenty of new cars, races and challenges, amounting to hours of content each month. Not only that, but Driveclub Bikes also received enough votes to come in third place.

Best Remaster – Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection
Runners up: Journey (PS4), Gears of War Ultimate Edition

Easily the strongest contender for the Best Remaster award, the trilogy of games that were packaged together in The Nathan Collection weren’t just given a quick spit and polish and pushed out of the door by Bluepoint Games, but were extensively tweaked and altered so that they presented a much more consistent experience across the board.

Best Mobile Game – Fallout Shelter
Runners up: Lara Croft Go, Her Story

Fallout Shelter was a game that kept you busy and always wanting to check in to see how your shelter was going. With a compelling cocktail of game ideas, and endless stream of timers and things to do and, most importantly, completely optional microtransactions, Bethesda struck a fine balance with one of the biggest mobile game success stories of the year.

Best Independent Game – Rocket League
Runners up: SOMA, Undertale, Ori and the Blind Forest

Best Sports/Racing Game – Rocket League
Runners up: Project Cars, PES 16, FIFA 16, Forza 6

One of the strengths of indie development is that you can focus quite exclusively on a single idea. For Rocket League, it was that simple and compelling game of car football with rockets, and that singular focus helped it beat what some would argue are more nuanced and interesting independent games, as well as the more expansive AAA racing and sports games which it faces.

Best Fighting Game – Mortal Kombat X
Runners up: Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, WWE 2K16

I’ll level with you, I don’t know my Ken and Ryu from my Tekkens and your Sub-Zero. What I do know is that Mortal Kombat X was one of the biggest and broadest fighting games of recent times, and when you’re such a big fish in a relatively small pond like the fighting game genre, that’s bound to win you a lot of favour. Mortal Kombat X romped to victory in this category.

Best Strategy & Simulation Game – Fallout Shelter
Runners up: Football Manager 16, Cities: Skylines

Announced and released during Bethesda’s E3 press conference, Fallout Shelter’s popularity owes a lot to its widespread reach. It found success with landing itself on your phones and tablets – rather than needing you to boot up a PC in order to play – as well as its compulsive gameplay loop that kept you always wanting to check in and see how your fallout shelter is faring in the harsh, post-apocalyptic world.

Best Platformer – Tearaway Unfolded
Runners up: Super Mario Maker, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China

A major part of the charm of Tearaway is that it wants to tell you a story, and it does so by getting You involved in the game itself. It’s that cheer and imagination which helps to bring the world to life, and Media Molecule did a fine job in reimagining how the game plays and how you interact with the game – making use of all the possible inputs of the DualShock 4 – which helped it to win the community award.

Best Role Playing Game – Fallout 4
Runners up: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Bloodborne

It’s been an outstanding year for Role Playing Games of all sorts. We’ve had meaningful indie games such as Undertale, the continued resurgence of the Computer RPG with Pillars of Autumn and, of course, hugely anticipated titles like Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In the end, it was a remarkably close vote, with Fallout 4 just pipping The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to the community’s Best Role Playing Game award.

Best Shooter – Star Wars Battlefront
Runners up: Destiny: The Taken King, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3

Conversely, it’s been a relatively weak year for shooters. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 was another great attempt at refreshing the venerable series, while Bungie did a lot to right what was disappointing about Destiny with The Taken King, but it was the simple and accessible nature of Star Wars Battlefront that won the community award for Best Shooter.

Best Action Adventure Game – Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Runners up: Batman: Arkham Knight, The Order: 1886

Amidst the endless rumours, leaks and reports of Hideo Kojima’s falling out with Konami, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain released to a lot of praise at the start of September. No, it wasn’t perfect, with a disjointed story that tried too hard to tie up the series’ loose ends, but the wealth of options and variety in the game’s open world stealth was refreshing and invigorating.

TSA Community Game of the Year 2015 – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Runners up: Fallout 4, Life Is Strange, Until Dawn, Rocket League

From the multiplayer of Rocket League in fifth place to the branching stories of Until Dawn and Life Is Strange, and Bethesda’s latest in the incredibly popular Fallout franchise in second, the top five games that you voted for are a fascinating mixture of different genres.

However, amidst a crowd of worthy contenders, CD Projekt Red’s immersive and vast fantasy world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been voted the TSA Community Game of the Year 2015.

Come back later today to see what the TSA team voted for our own Game of the Year. There was a remarkable correlation between the two sets of voting thus far, but do we align on the GOTY as well?