Judging and reviewing games is already hard because any kind of problem the reviewers might have can just be patched away, therefore making any review outdated by the time the patch comes out. Now to add an extra layer of confusion, expansions can be judged as new games and run for accolades and such.
Destiny: Taken King might have taken people by surprise by appearing on the Best Shooter of 2015 awards, like the other two expansions before it, it was tangentially related to the 2014 game Destiny, but unlike those it added a full single player campaign that made it stand out as a single game. It even got a "Legendary Edition", where it got a physical release along with the two previous expansions, but not Destiny itself.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt blew people away to say the least, since Blood and Wine, the second expansion, was released a different year, it ran for Best RPG and won, but there is something off about it, it's the name. It is called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt ? Blood and Wine, not The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, it's almost as if we're pitching the competitors to The Witcher 3 + its expansion and that is incredibly unfair, I guess the people behind it could be a little more specific. But then TW3 got a "Game of the Year" release, that includes both expansions, just to add an extra layer of confusion.
Just to be clear, I am not judging these on lenght or price, I'm judging them by physical/digital re-release and how they stand as games, which makes comfortable when I say I like Left Behind and Ground Zeroes more than The Last of Us and MGS: The Phantom Pain. I know this is a bunch technicalities and ifs, but the root of the problem lies in our definitions of what a game is and what a game isn't and when an expansion is just more of a game or a new game.
Destiny: Taken King might have taken people by surprise by appearing on the Best Shooter of 2015 awards, like the other two expansions before it, it was tangentially related to the 2014 game Destiny, but unlike those it added a full single player campaign that made it stand out as a single game. It even got a "Legendary Edition", where it got a physical release along with the two previous expansions, but not Destiny itself.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt blew people away to say the least, since Blood and Wine, the second expansion, was released a different year, it ran for Best RPG and won, but there is something off about it, it's the name. It is called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt ? Blood and Wine, not The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, it's almost as if we're pitching the competitors to The Witcher 3 + its expansion and that is incredibly unfair, I guess the people behind it could be a little more specific. But then TW3 got a "Game of the Year" release, that includes both expansions, just to add an extra layer of confusion.
Just to be clear, I am not judging these on lenght or price, I'm judging them by physical/digital re-release and how they stand as games, which makes comfortable when I say I like Left Behind and Ground Zeroes more than The Last of Us and MGS: The Phantom Pain. I know this is a bunch technicalities and ifs, but the root of the problem lies in our definitions of what a game is and what a game isn't and when an expansion is just more of a game or a new game.
