Thank you very much for the helpful write-up, I realised I don’t have the energy to watch the game awards archive.
…is this what getting old feels like?
Watching the Game Awards was somehow much more excruciating this year. Lots of just… ads. Like, not just World Premiere trailers, just like… here’s an ad reminding you that you can buy games on the Nintendo eShop, or just playing some old trailers from pressers earlier in the year. I wonder if it’s because they needed to fill time that’d usually be watching people walk up to the stage, audience applauding or hooting/hollering for their faves, that sort of thing?
Anyway, Sephiroth kicks ass and that trailer kicked ass. A lot of the other trailers… well, it’s been a weird year and Covid probably caused issues. There was an ad for Ark 2 where Vin Diesel was lovingly rendered down to the pores and then the blood splatter looked like a transparent .png grabbed off Google image search. Both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect trailers were like ‘we are indeed… still making video games, but don’t expect any of them to come out before 2023’.
Gal Gadot presenting Games for Impact felt like something Hard Drive would concoct.
The show on the whole felt like a radio ad for a pharmaceutical. A long fancy marketing statement, with someone rushing through the important bits at the end.
That said, Season looked dope. But like most things, hopefully it is coming to Switch! I feel like indie games especially miss out by not coming to Switch. I’m sure a lot of them are getting paid to release on specific platforms though and don’t have much of a choice.
Yakuzas 3-6 were announced for PC, and honestly, that’s all I needed from this show. If I can come away from these commercial cavalcades with one thing to look forward to, then I don’t mind sitting through three hours of The Game Awards wsg Neil Druckmann’s Godfather Poster.
I also came away with a bunch of smaller games to look forward to: Dungeon of the Endless Endless Dungeon, Open Roads, Road 96, and Season all looked great to me! Plus we learned that there’ll be a giant baboon who throws equally giant fruit at you in MonHun: Rise, and we all got to hear Ralph Macchio say “Under Night In-Birth”.
All that said: having Gal Gadot on to present the “Games for Impact” award really underlines how much of an afterthought that category has always been.
I think I said a similar thing last year but . . .
I don’t place much value in award shows in general, but I find it really distasteful that you would have a show to “celebrate” the people who make games, and yet so many of these award winners had no platform to thank anyone. Hades won two awards and I didn’t see an acceptance speech unless I missed it.
I mean I had low expectations but I’m still disappointed.
I am simultaneously very excited for a new Perfect Dark and very terrified for what quadruple a (which is what The Initiative supposedly is as a studio) game development means for the people who are making it.
My opinion is the only trailer you really needed to see last night was for Season.
I am irrationally excited for this game; there’s very little stuff out about it but I am in love with it’s look and premise and vibes and everything. It gives me HUGE Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou vibes. That might be seeing what I want to see, but “a contemplative journey set during a quiet environmental apocalypse” seems pretty close!
Honestly, the thing that sold me is that the thing they decided to use, for the first moment of their trailer, to show someone recording the sound of a dragonfly. That tells me so much about where the priorities of the creators live, and how they line up with mine.
Seconded! I loved everything about that trailer - the look, the music, the character design, the environmental design, the story concept, and the fact that you get to ride a bicycle! Riding a bicycle is one of the more pleasant things to do, a great alternative to the speed and the physical, and environmental, violence of cars (even if I love motorsports!). My most anticipated newly announced game.
I’m also super excited for Season for all the reasons said here but also because it seems to be a game about my actual job! I work on documenting cities as they go through massive changes, collecting sounds, videos, old photos, and other material and creating explorable archives out of it. I’m so excited to see a game built around this kind of work, more blurring between documentary story telling and games please!
Does this mean we get another version of one winged angel? I mean I’ll take it.
Such a weird award show. Having an award for most anticipated game just seems so stupid. As area all the game announcements mixed in with the shovelware.
I’m beyond excited for another perfect dark game but at the same time how similar will it be to the original? Playing Cyberpunk recently has just made me remember how cool Perfect Dark was.
Game Awards still don’t feel like much is placed on the Awards part. That’s to be expected though. Feel some type of way about Last of Us getting 3-4 speeches when a lot of winners got zilch. If you are going to have an award, you should make room for a speech. Even if that means the “pre-show” as some additional awards that they don’t care as much about giving that prime time spotlight to.
The show is about the GAMES though and on that front, I think the show more or less delivered. Sure, it didn’t have Elden Ring which feels criminal at this point but whatever. Crimson Desert certainly gave off some Dragons Dogma vibes. Though, the idea that it might be a live-game/MMO put me off. That looked like such big and pretty world that I wouldn’t want it to be a playground for me and my friends. We will see I guess.
They showed off some upcoming ART GAMES which now feels like tonally inconsistent with how these awards get dealt out. Seasons as everyone has mentioned looks awesome. Then Open Road is some real games as Arthouse Cinema. Road 76 looks conceptually like something I would be all about but not sure how that’s actually going to play out. Whatever though, on to 2021 where I look forward to see how many of these games come to Game Pass PC Day 1 out of selfish reasons.
World Premiere 
