Crimson Desert is the clear GOTY so far if you actually played trough it. The distance between it and contestants for 2nd place is absolutely massive, like when Elden Ring won. They made 1 mistake tho; At the start they have you slowly figure out "whats wrong" in the first town, by making you do very random tasks (all subtly caused by the same problem) after which the story can start. Simultaniously, some of these tasks serve as controls-tutorial. A lot of Dishonest Journalists, who were tasked with shittalking the game, framed this as "The entire game is just random MMO quests". Its an incredible game, with a fun story. It was already easily the GOTY with countless awesome battles and the DLC Thats coming out in a few days looks even sicker. It was hit by the perfect storm of Lies from western journalists, and (probably) reverse guerilla marketeers of western "GOTY" games, while having been reviewbombed on launch by koreans who expected another onehanded idle mmo like black desert, instead of a controller-only action game.