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Who Won The Game Awards?
Astro Bot won Game of the Year! It was not what anyone expected, but I’m certainly not disappointed. I’ve always enjoyed the Astro Bot series of games, which are designed to celebrate and show off Sony’s tech by setting the little robot’s adventures across various PlayStation devices.
This platformer deserves all the praise it gets. Also, Astro is just a cute lil’ guy.
We love seeing games get recognized for their achievements, but the real meat n’ potatoes here are the world premieres – and The Game Awards packed punch after punch this year!
Major Announcements
There are too many to count! The Witcher 4 debuted with a blood-pumping cinematic trailer, showing fan-favorite Ciri as the new protagonist. FromSoftware dropped a bomb out of nowhere when they unveiled Elden Ring: Nightreign (I may have screamed).
Turok, a cult-hit dinosaur-hunting series, is getting a new co-op game, Turok: Origins. Naughty Dog, producers of classic PlayStation hits from every generation, such as Crash Bandicoot and The Last Of Us, revealed an in-engine trailer of their new game with an 80’s sci-fi aesthetic, Intergalactic!
Even Okami, a Capcom classic that fans have been waiting over a decade for more of, is getting a sequel! The Game Awards pumped its announcement trailer up with a beautiful, live rendition of its original score.
Puzzle Games
Us escape room enthusiasts are usually left dry during these shows. Our niche is just too cool for the zeitgeist to handle – or something like that, but there definitely wasn’t nothing in the puzzle game department this year!
Split-Fiction, from the creators of It Takes Two, is a co-op game featuring two writers that are trapped in some weird warp of a Sci-Fi and Fantasy story! cooperation is an important aspect of escape rooms, and we trust the dev team at Hazelight Studios to keep the gears in our brains turning on this one.
If you want a little more action while you’re doing all that thinking, The Game Awards also unveiled Splitgate 2, a highly anticipated sequel. This game can be described most aptly as the child of Halo and Portal. I don’t usually play PvP First-Person Shooter games, but being able to think about portal placement during a match really clicks with that creative, puzzle-solver in me.
Awkward Moments
It wouldn’t be a live show about video games if we didn’t have some strange, out-of-place moments. We’ve come a loooong way since the early days of E3, where development leads would waddle onto a tiny stage and mumble something before throwing a game trailer onto a little projection screen above them; but man, something always has to be a little odd, still, huh?
Most The Game Awards bingo cards have a square with something like “random celebrity guest,” since oddball choices for guest appearances – usually with no connection to video games – have always been a staple. One infamous incident in my recent memory was “The Rock” filming himself at a gym? For an attempt at a candid ad about his new movie (it was bad and no one remembers it)?
This year didn’t go so strangely in that department, as Harrison Ford appeared to hype up Bethesda’s new Indiana Jones game, said some words, then let the show go on.
Snoop Dogg appeared to present an award and perform live, though he was fun to watch and didn’t feel like he was just dropped in for the sake of it. In fact, I learned that night that he and his son are diving into the gaming industry themselves! But the only awkward part of his performance was watching game developers trying to dance in the audience – remember what Commander Shepard looked like in Mass Effect 2? Yeah…
Real Talk At The Game Awards
I can always appreciate when a developer actually makes a bold, interesting statement that may or may not agitate some of the corporate side of the gaming community. And who better than the head of last year’s Game of the Year, Swen Vincke?
As the Larian CEO was preparing to present the GotY award, he went on a cheeky little tangent about how an oracle told him what the Game of the Year would be for every year to come. Here’s the quote.
“It’s stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves. They created it because it hadn’t been created before. They didn’t make it to increase market share. They didn’t make it to serve the brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets, or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets.”
“Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue and didn’t serve the game design. They didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn’t treat their players as users to exploit. And they didn’t make decisions they knew were short-sighted in function of a bonus or politics. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue will follow.
“They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers don’t have fun, nobody was going to have any fun. They understood the value of respect, that if they treated their developers and players well, the same developers and players would forgive them when things didn’t go as planned. But above all they cared about their games, because they love games. It’s really that simple.”
The impact of this quote is empowered by it coming from the face of the company that made Baldur’s Gate 3, a game which took the world by storm in 2023; Larian Studios markets itself by prioritizing its players and developers, making promises – such as no microtransactions – and sticking to them.
Vincke’s words absolutely struck a chord with the audience, and while I know at the end of the day, this is all just for show, I’d love for this to be a wakeup call for some of the industry.