I mostly agree with the list, except arc raiders. Love the game, but its only mildly innovative honestly. You could name a dozen games that innovated more. I guess popularity can do alot of heavy lifting.
Genuinely curious… What are some games that had better innovation? I agree with your sentiment on arc, but I haven’t been paying attention to other games and what they’ve been doing.
From the finalists, I voted for mage arena, that game is cool af. Yelling fireball at 2 in the morning is great. Not for the neighbors tho.
I haven’t played blue prince but people keep telling me its amazing and innovative so based off sentiment I guess that probably should have won.
But based off personal playing experience i would say Peak, it really changed how I look at ruining friendships. Nothing is more innovative than force feeding a friend poison. /s
The category is ambiguous on what actually innovation is. Graphics? Mechanics? How much money spent making the game? Technically would be an innovation right? Its somewhat difficult to pin down so I do understand why people look at arc, but I disagree with choice personally.
This feels a lot more like what we should have seen at TGA. I’ve got no qualms with E33 as GOTY (nor Silksong for that matter), but seeing almost every award go to it was so monotone and boring while basically nothing else got a look-in despite being more than good enough.
I feel as though games need more categories. Even best VR game seems limiting to me because I don’t care for horror so I’ll never look into that game either.
Best metroidvania, Best rogueli[k|t]e, Best puzzle game, Best Turn-Based RPG, Best Soulslike Game (I’m assuming that’s what “best game you suck at” is), Best Rhythm game, Best Couch Co-op Game, Best FPS, etc
Obviously there can be flaws with my examples but there are just so many different types of games out there. It just feels limiting to have what we have.
Agreed. I think the examples you named would lead to there being an insane amount of categories, not to mention the ludicrous amount of games that would fall under a category like “roguelike of the year” and some categories wouldn’t be present some years based on design trends. Categories absolutely need reform though. The way TGA currently does it is obnoxiously flawed.
Maybe a rule that a game can only win one award should be put into place, cause these results are far more interesting because it shows off an actual variety of games.
I’d back that. Possibly GOTY and genre GOTY, but then none of the “Best Soundtrack”, “Best Gameplay” and such. I think if a game is winning the top prize, it’s already pretty obvious it’s doing many of the aspect categories well too, so give some of the Spotlight to games that really shine in that particular aspect.
A friend of mine keeps making the argument of “What, we need to say ‘you’re winning too much’ and give pity prizes to the others? If it’s the best, it’s the best.” and I think that’s typically fine until we have years where games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Expedition 33 come out and make the award ceremony boring and not giving other games awards they deserve. My example this year is Dispatch and the difference between TGA and the Steam Awards. Dispatch is my personal GOTY, I love it, but I can easily say the gameplay was meh. Why I love it is the fact it absolutely nailed comic book superhero stories up-to-and-including the delayed gratification of the waiting period to think and theorise before the next piece comes out so, for a Story award category, I don’t think anything beats it.
Part of the challenge is not that many people played Dispatch compared to E33 so giving a much smaller competitor the award, I think, would be a great way of pointing the spotlight on an amazing work of art and possibly get more people to give it a go, possibly coming to a similar opinion on their own. Filtering out the crap and helping us players focus our time on the worthwhile games is already part of what we expect from gaming journalists, so why not a prestige event too?
Edit: Didn’t realise how much I rambled on for before hitting post so TL;DR: Individualising awards = Yay
In order to implement something like that, you’d need to rank awards from most important to least important, and it’s possible that every nominated game would have been disqualified for the later awards. There’s basically no way to prevent multiple awards going to a single game with a rule.
The difference between the Steam Awards and the VGA is that the VGA is a bunch of industry insiders who voted, so there’s a risk people will discuss their votes beforehand with each other, leading to bandwagoning.
Mark Kermode is a film critic that I absolutely adore.
He had the Kermode Awards every year (he’s quite self-deprecating about it) … the winners for his awards are ones that cannot be nominated by the Academy Awards.
It’s normally to highlight the missing actors/actresses/movies that he’s enjoyed over the year. Feels like something like that would be cool too.
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I mostly agree with the list, except arc raiders. Love the game, but its only mildly innovative honestly. You could name a dozen games that innovated more. I guess popularity can do alot of heavy lifting.
Genuinely curious… What are some games that had better innovation? I agree with your sentiment on arc, but I haven’t been paying attention to other games and what they’ve been doing.
From the finalists, I voted for mage arena, that game is cool af. Yelling fireball at 2 in the morning is great. Not for the neighbors tho.
I haven’t played blue prince but people keep telling me its amazing and innovative so based off sentiment I guess that probably should have won.
But based off personal playing experience i would say Peak, it really changed how I look at ruining friendships. Nothing is more innovative than force feeding a friend poison. /s
The category is ambiguous on what actually innovation is. Graphics? Mechanics? How much money spent making the game? Technically would be an innovation right? Its somewhat difficult to pin down so I do understand why people look at arc, but I disagree with choice personally.
There is absolutely nothing innovate about arc raiders. It’s rust lite.
I bought Arc Raiders and I was like, “oh it’s just an extraction shooter”
I was very surprised it won. I think people like their game and just want it to win something.
The use of machine learning with enemy AI is impressive, I’ve seen arc bots do some stuff that surprised me quite a bit.
I was very surprised it won when there were actual innovative games like Mage Arena.
This feels a lot more like what we should have seen at TGA. I’ve got no qualms with E33 as GOTY (nor Silksong for that matter), but seeing almost every award go to it was so monotone and boring while basically nothing else got a look-in despite being more than good enough.
I feel as though games need more categories. Even best VR game seems limiting to me because I don’t care for horror so I’ll never look into that game either.
Best metroidvania, Best rogueli[k|t]e, Best puzzle game, Best Turn-Based RPG, Best Soulslike Game (I’m assuming that’s what “best game you suck at” is), Best Rhythm game, Best Couch Co-op Game, Best FPS, etc
Obviously there can be flaws with my examples but there are just so many different types of games out there. It just feels limiting to have what we have.
Agreed. I think the examples you named would lead to there being an insane amount of categories, not to mention the ludicrous amount of games that would fall under a category like “roguelike of the year” and some categories wouldn’t be present some years based on design trends. Categories absolutely need reform though. The way TGA currently does it is obnoxiously flawed.
Maybe a rule that a game can only win one award should be put into place, cause these results are far more interesting because it shows off an actual variety of games.
I’d back that. Possibly GOTY and genre GOTY, but then none of the “Best Soundtrack”, “Best Gameplay” and such. I think if a game is winning the top prize, it’s already pretty obvious it’s doing many of the aspect categories well too, so give some of the Spotlight to games that really shine in that particular aspect.
A friend of mine keeps making the argument of “What, we need to say ‘you’re winning too much’ and give pity prizes to the others? If it’s the best, it’s the best.” and I think that’s typically fine until we have years where games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Expedition 33 come out and make the award ceremony boring and not giving other games awards they deserve. My example this year is Dispatch and the difference between TGA and the Steam Awards. Dispatch is my personal GOTY, I love it, but I can easily say the gameplay was meh. Why I love it is the fact it absolutely nailed comic book superhero stories up-to-and-including the delayed gratification of the waiting period to think and theorise before the next piece comes out so, for a Story award category, I don’t think anything beats it.
Part of the challenge is not that many people played Dispatch compared to E33 so giving a much smaller competitor the award, I think, would be a great way of pointing the spotlight on an amazing work of art and possibly get more people to give it a go, possibly coming to a similar opinion on their own. Filtering out the crap and helping us players focus our time on the worthwhile games is already part of what we expect from gaming journalists, so why not a prestige event too?
Edit: Didn’t realise how much I rambled on for before hitting post so TL;DR: Individualising awards = Yay
In order to implement something like that, you’d need to rank awards from most important to least important, and it’s possible that every nominated game would have been disqualified for the later awards. There’s basically no way to prevent multiple awards going to a single game with a rule.
The difference between the Steam Awards and the VGA is that the VGA is a bunch of industry insiders who voted, so there’s a risk people will discuss their votes beforehand with each other, leading to bandwagoning.
Surely TGA is big enough now that the organisers could reach out to the studios and ask them to rank the awards they were nominated for themselves.
TGA will be honest and actually good the same day the Emmys are.
Aka never.
It’s just a jerk off for the industry.
Mark Kermode is a film critic that I absolutely adore.
He had the Kermode Awards every year (he’s quite self-deprecating about it) … the winners for his awards are ones that cannot be nominated by the Academy Awards.
It’s normally to highlight the missing actors/actresses/movies that he’s enjoyed over the year. Feels like something like that would be cool too.