Once per year, The Game Awards take
place in Los Angeles. Despite being called The Game Awards, the show has always
been split into three aspects: the awards themselves, the new trailers for
upcoming releases, and the commercials, musical acts, and everything else that
constantly slows the show down but is forced down our throats every time. And
because of that, I’ll be splitting this article three ways, giving my thoughts
on all aspects of the show.
The Awards
Frankly, so few awards were actually
given away onstage tonight that you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d tuned into
the wrong show. I personally don’t really care about wins or loses (especially
since I make my own Game of the Year lists in early January), I just enjoy
seeing some great games being recognized.
A lot of the winners were pretty easy
to guess: Inside won Best Art Direction, Uncharted 4 won Best Narrative, That
Dragon Cancer won Most Impactful Game, and so on and so forth. Overwatch turned
out to be the big winner of the night, taking home Game of the Year among other
awards, which I feel is deserved. There were no real controversial picks this
year, preventing any silly Twitter arguments, so that’s good. Again though, the
awards themselves were probably the smallest part of the show, with most of it
going to teasing new games.
The Trailers
The real highlights of the night
turned out to be The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Death Stranding,
both of which had brand new trailers to show. We saw some new content for
Zelda, including a race of NPC bird-people that push my theory that this is a
Wind Waker sequel even further. Nintendo is continuing to be very tight-lipped
about the whole game, which I like, as it’ll make it even more a surprise when
it finally launches sometime next year.
Hideo Kojima was actually there this
year, now that Konami doesn’t have him on a leash anymore. After a speech by
Geoff Keighley that I was surprised didn’t end with a proposal of marriage,
Kojima took the stage to unveil the next Death Stranding trailer. As expected,
this new trailer makes about as much sense as the first one, with giant
tentacle tanks, black goop everywhere, and of course a fetus in a jar, because
why not? The big reveal was that Mads Mikkelsen will be playing a role in the
game, possibly as the villain. But really, who can be sure at this point?
Those were the two biggest reveals,
and they came at the very start of the show, leaving few interesting trailers
after it. Telltale finally confirmed they’re working on a Guardians of the
Galaxy project, but had no footage to show. We also learned of Dauntless, a new
free to play action-RPG from former Bioware and Riot Games developers. It
looked pretty cool, although it followed a trend we saw tonight of showing no
actual gameplay. Games like Halo Wars 2, Dead Rising 4, and a new TellTale
Walking Dead game were also in attendance, but they also didn’t show any
gameplay, making it hard to get excited about them.
We did see some gameplay in some
cases, including a brief segment for Mass Effect Andromeda, a new trailer for
Prey, and announcement for the next Shovel Knight expansion. Prey still looks
like pretty standard fare to me, with grabbing guns and shooting up black goopy
monsters. Also, you can turn into a mug. Mass Effect looked like a Mass Effect
game, complete with really impressive visuals, and Shovel Knight: Scepter of
Torment looked to be a unique spin on the classic Shovel Knight gameplay.
That was really it for the trailers,
because we had to make room for…
Everything Else
Imagine advertisements as far as the
eye can see, and you’ve got roughly the amount of ads that were in this year’s
show. Everything from old games to new games to unreleased games were
advertised during commercial breaks. I was thankful that we didn’t have to
endure a Go90 ad every 5 minutes again like last year, but the show more than
made up for it with an assortment of commercials.
The Assassin’s Creed movie took on the
role played by Star Wars: Battlefront last year, interrupting the show several
times to talk to a presenter or someone who won an award about how excited they were for the movie and how unique the Assassin’s Creed: The Movie:
The VR Experience was. Thankfully it wasn’t used as much as Battlefront was
last year, but it was still really annoying.
The other thing that littered the show
were memes, because they were everywhere. Between Jeff Kaplan slipping a
Harambe joke in his acceptance speech for Overwatch’s win of Best Game
Direction and a musical number that included a man running around shirtless and
wearing tinfoil pants, you’d think one of those would be the meme moment of the
night. But you’d be wrong, because we got to experience the glory that was
Schick Hydroman.
Who is Schick Hydroman and why was he
at a video game award show? Nobody knows. All I know is that he was the best
part of the show and needs to come back next year.
This is to say nothing of the out of
place musical numbers, weird choices for award presenters like Michael Phelps,
Conan O’Brien and MatPat from Game Theory, and the weirdest opening sketch I’ve
ever seen, making this show overall only slightly more bearable than your
average Ubisoft E3 conference.
I’m glad that these games and developers are getting the
recognition they deserve, but ultimately The Game Awards serve one purpose and
one purpose only: to give our industry a chance to pat itself on the back and
say “look how great we did this year!” Looking at how most of the time was
spent for ads as opposed to new trailers or the actual awards this show was
named for, that should be obvious. Granted, 2016 has been an awesome year for
video games, but this display of consumerism shouldn’t be how we celebrate it.
Maybe next year, guys.
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