Assassin Xaero said:
This is the reason why I never cared much for GOTY awards popularity contests. Dragon Age 2, the sequel to the worst game I ever had to force myself to finish (which from play the demo and what I've heard, DA2 is even worse than DA:O) gets "honorable mention", while my three favorite games of the year (Rage, Duke Nukem Forever, and Bulletstorm) are no where on the list. Oh well, not like the awards make the games better or anything, I still get to have my fun with games that I actually enjoy.
You might like Dragon Age 2 better. The reason I say this is that after I pre-ordered it, I went online and got the Dragon Age Origins: Ultimate Edition.
I only got a little over 20 hours into it and I couldn't continue, it was just too broken, outdated, boring and cliche.
I decided to keep my pre-order in place, and when I got DA2, I found it so awesome, it was the only game I played until I finished it, 54 hours in less then a month period. I also went back and started up and played a bit as the other two classes.
I willing to bet what you heard about the game has been bile out of the mouths of people that trash the game because, "It isn't like Origins".
Everything that was broken about Origins, they fixed, controls, more fine tuned inventory, much better and rewarding level and ability tree system, dialogue is much cleaner and better executed with the edition of dialogue wheel, the story is more personal to the player character and the party members actually feel like real people but unique from each other. The only problem the game had was the sort of small amount of dungeons that get reused, though since the rest of the game is phenomenal, that can easily be overlooked. I know I didn't notice it until I was almost finished with the game and somebody had to point it out.
Now about one point of the rest of your comment, how could you ever think Duke Nukem Forever would be on any critic site's game of the year list. If it was, it would most likely have been a joke. DNF was critically panned across the board. Heck, it was so critically fire-blasted that the guy that was head of the PR group that represented the game, in desperate attempt to make the ratings better, he actually threatened reviewers/review sites that they would never get another pre-release copy of games that they represent if they didn't stop saying DNF was a horrible game.
I was glad I waited for the reviews to make my decision, and since the consensus is that it is nothing like previous DN games, I'm definitely will never play it. I mean come on, DN3D had open explorable levels, you could carry all ten weapons at once, and it had health packs. DNF had linear levels, a two gun limit, and silly, suck thumb behind rock, regen health. And to top it off the sexual themes and jokes were at least 20 times over done compared to DN3D. The game is a travesty, it could have been so much more, but Gearbox was just so lazy when the got it and apparently didn't know thing one about what made a great DN game.