This week we awarded our top gaming picks of 2014. It wasn't easy; there were many stand-outs this year!

Our Expansion of the Year award went to World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor. ZAM's VP of Technology, Michael "Argo" Ender, said that "World of Warcraft fell off my radar a bit after Wrath. With WoD they made the WoW game I've always wanted to play. Thank you Blizzard!" President Cody "Micajah" Bye added that the release of Draenor "revitalized an entire game." Check out contributing writer Michael "Ragar" Branham's story about how Warlords drew him back to Warcraft in our Expansion of the Year article.

Consoles saw a lot of new titles this year, but Destiny took the prize home for our Console Game of the Year award. Bungie reached for excellence and delivered on many levels with the title that has half of our staff hopelessly addicted. It may not be all roses, as ZAM Deputy Editor Colt "ShdwFlm" Casey mentions in our Console Game of the Year article, but at its core Destiny is a fun experience with room to improve.

PC gamers were treated to a plethora of excellent titles this year, with BioWare's Dragon Age: Inquisition landing our PC Game of the Year award. The in-depth story and replayability ultimately won many of us over as we took the Qunari by the horns and laid waste to all who stood to oppose Thedas. Managing Editor Ann "Cyliena" Hosler talked about how DAI excelled on every level in our PC Game of the Year article.

Finally, we looked forward to what next year will bring and agreed that Overwatch, which Blizzard unveiled during this year's BlizzCon, is our Most Anticipated Game of 2015. Project Manager Katie Welka teared up at the epic cinematic trailer, while Colt admitted that he gets the feels every time he watches it. ZAM's Brand Ambassador, Lindsay "Geektr0n" Ferguson, teamed up with Ann to explain why Overwatch is the game we all should be eagerly awaiting in our Most Anticipated Game of 2015 article.

Thanks for joining us for another fantastic year in gaming! We hope everyone is having a great holiday week and look forward to seeing what 2015 will bring!

Overwatch

2014 has been a fantastic year for gaming and one can only hope that 2015 is even better. So many announced titles are exciting, but one has stood out above the rest.

That one is Blizzard Entertainment's new IP: Overwatch.

At BlizzCon, Game Director Jeff Kaplan described the game as a "team-based multiplayer shooter that is completely action-packed." New heroes (us!) need to step up and battle in teams, aiming to emerge victorious on the field of battle. We went hands-on with Overwatch during BlizzCon and had a blast; the game felt user-friendly even to genre newbies and was highly engaging. ZAM has already launched a site, OverKing, dedicated to the game.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

When I wrote ZAM's Dragon Age: Inquisition review in mid-November, I was only about 45-50 hours into the game. At the time, my summary of BioWare's newest entry into the series was that it "feels very well-polished, vast, immersive and highly entertaining" and it was definitely worth running out to own immediately. Now, just over a month post-launch, my fellow co-workers have agreed that Inquisition offers such an epic, quality experience that it is well-deserving of our 2014 PC Game of the Year award.

Destiny

We love Destiny. Finding rare gear, upgrading talents, Public Events with strangers, dancing in the Tower. It blends an FPS and RPG as expertly as we could reasonably expect. It fills a niche in gaming we've always wanted. We forget how easily Destiny could simply not exist – but we're very glad it's real.

Individually, we've spent hundreds of hours acquiring new Exotics to laugh gleefully at their effects. Collectively, we've spent thousands of hours stomping the Fallen and fellow Guardians. When we're not playing Destiny, we're talking about it: our favorite Subclass, gear we're hoping to get, trash-talking the Cryptarch, or linking each other to items on DestinyDB (our Destiny site).

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

When I originally heard about Warlords of Draenor, I was excited, but a bit worried about the premise. As much as I liked the idea of fighting these big name Orc Warlords and seeing how powerful they truly could be when free of the Burning Legion’s corruption, when you mix in time travel and alternate realities into any fiction, things always have the potential to go off the rails and end up a mess. World of Warcraft has dealt with time travel in the past with dungeons and even the Mount Hyjal raid, but this is an entire expansion built around having an alternate reality invade our own? Can something like this really hold up to scrutiny? In a word: absolutely. For a longer description, I’ll use my own starting experience to give an example.

The staff at ZAM has spent many hours debating which of the games we’ve played over the past year were most deserving of an award. In several cases the votes were neck-and-neck while others had an overwhelming victory. We had so much love to spread around that we expanded our voting categories from six to twelve this year.

Congratulations to the final six winners and runners up of 2013!

Hello readers and thanks for joining me. I know it turns your world inside out and causes you to question everything you knew to be true, but we are indeed breaking our bi-weekly tradition to bring you a special episode of the Free Agent. That's right, it's that magical time of the year, when we sort through all the games we've played and admired throughout the year and summarily crown the Game of the Year.

If you missed ZAM's first six categories be sure to check out yesterday's 2013 Game Awards, as well as the final six categories going live tomorrow. But enough about that, you're here for the Free Agent and I'm pleased to say that I've been given the honor of handing out a special award today, The Free Agent's Game of the Year Award.

The staff at ZAM has spent many hours debating which games we’ve played over the past year were most deserving of an award. In several cases the votes were neck-and-neck while others had an overwhelming victory. We had so much love to spread around that we expanded our voting categories from six to twelve this year.

Congratulations to the first six winners and runners up of 2013!

UPDATE: The winner has been revealed!

To celebrate the games we all love, ZAM is holding its annual gaming awards! One of the categories will be entirely decided by our fantastic readership.

In the process of deciding what games we lost sleep over for all the right reasons this year, we reached out to the community and the staff at ZAM, Wowhead, LolKing, Guildhead, Torhead, BL2DB and all the other sites that make up the marvelous ZAM Network.

Congratulations to the winners and the runners up for ZAM's final awards for 2012,