The Video Game Awards

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

It's that time of the year again.

With December upon us and the end of 2022 just around the corner, it's time to look back at this year in gaming and vote on who paid Geoff Keighly the most money who produced the best and brightest among the medium. It is also a time for everyone to tune out of the awards and just wait for publishers to take advantage of the guaranteed audience to announce their new projects.

The current nominees for the game of the year category are

While everything here seems to be good, I'm dubious of God of War 5's inclusion. The game effectively released a week before this website went up, making it feel like a marketing ploy more than anything else. With that pessimism aside, who will you guys be voting for? Is your personal game of the year even on the ballot? Why aren't you voting for Elden Ring?

 

[Ronin]

Oh boy...


The GotY nominations are surprisingly varied this year. While the majority are "AAA", openworld games, it's nice to see two indie games make the cut. That aside, it's fairly obvious that the two big contenders are Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarok, with Horizon: Forbidden West and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 ending up in the middle (if the critical reception is anything to go by). However, as I've yet to beat Ragnarok and ER is lacking a crucial element (see below), my vote is gonna go towards Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Looks like we've got ourselves a nice little awakening.

Why aren't you voting for Elden Ring?

It doesn't have a story that inspires any particular evocative emotions. Everything is loosely tied to a disconnected framework that pieces together a larger yarn, but lacking the necessary "personal stakes" that Ragnarok, XC3, and even HFW encapsulate through direct conflict. Elden Ring does excel in the grimdark, impressionistic surrealism that good versus evil is meant to represent, nonetheless, which is kinda the point of FromSoft games.

 

[Mikey the Moblin]

the only game out of those I played is elden ring, and it isn't GOTY-worthy like sekiro was
whatever the game of the year is, I definitely didn't play it
it's not xenoblade tho (lol)

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

the only game out of those I played is elden ring, and it isn't GOTY-worthy like sekiro was
whatever the game of the year is, I definitely didn't play it
it's not xenoblade tho (lol)

I struggled to enjoy Sekiro. I was never much of a parry bro in Dark Souls, so it was hard to jump into. Meanwhile I kind of see Elden Ring as the culmination of everything I enjoyed about Breath of the Wild.

 

[MightyMario]

stray

it’s unique and I don’t the m-rated slasher gorefest to win again

 

[Fraxinus]

I haven't played any of them but they all seem to be solid contenders. Though I think I'm slightly rooting for Stray and A Plague Tale: Requiem just cuz they're indies and it's a huge deal they're standing against the big AAA games.

 

[Mikey the Moblin]

honestly indie titles winning goty back to back could have huge repercussions on the industry
the game awards mean a lot in terms of money to these companies

 

[ExLight]

the fact shifu was nominated as best fighting game when it's literally a 3D beat 'em up shows how poor is the gaming knowledge of whoever is hosting those and it kinda annoys me

honestly indie titles winning goty back to back could have huge repercussions on the industry
the game awards mean a lot in terms of money to these companies

are we talking about stray
because it's kinda shocking it made the cut

from the playthroughs I watched it seemed kinda bland and unpolished, not sure how the controls feel though

 

[Mikey the Moblin]

the fact shifu was nominated as best fighting game when it's literally a 3D beat 'em up shows how poor is the gaming knowledge of whoever is hosting those and it kinda annoys me


are we talking about stray
because it's kinda shocking it made the cut

from the playthroughs I watched it seemed kinda bland and unpolished, not sure how the controls feel though

plague tale seems like it could win to me

 

[Spiritual Mask Salesman]

The Game Awards are always hard to watch for me. The trailers for games are always spread out in a trickle feed, and sometimes I walk away feeling like I saw nothing very interesting. I hate that they start it so late and run it until it's like midnight here on the East Coast. I wouldn't mind if it was on a Friday or Saturday night, but it seems like they don't plan it that way. It lands on a Thursday night this year, so I can't stay up for all of it even if I wanted to.

The nominated titles this year all seem reasonable, though I do agree that God of War's inclusion when it has only been released for about a month raised an eyebrow from me. Is a mere month enough to judge something as Game of the Year material? I'm not so sure. They should have a cut off timeframe for games to be in the running for a specific year, if it doesn't fit, it gets bumped to the running for the next year.

 

[A Link In Time]

The Game Awards are always hard to watch for me. The trailers for games are always spread out in a trickle feed, and sometimes I walk away feeling like I saw nothing very interesting. I hate that they start it so late and run it until it's like midnight here on the East Coast. I wouldn't mind if it was on a Friday or Saturday night, but it seems like they don't plan it that way. It lands on a Thursday night this year, so I can't stay up for all of it even if I wanted to.

The nominated titles this year all seem reasonable, though I do agree that God of War's inclusion when it has only been released for about a month raised an eyebrow from me. Is a mere month enough to judge something as Game of the Year material? I'm not so sure. They should have a cut off timeframe for games to be in the running for a specific year, if it doesn't fit, it gets bumped to the running for the next year.

God of War should absolutely be in the running this year. The fact that December games aren't nominated in their given year is already terrible. TGA often forgets about them the next year. The one exception I can think of is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Anyhow, Elden Ring will easily win GOTY. It is the most influential videogame since Breath of the Wild and will be talked about for years to come. A deserved winner.

 

[CynicalSquid]

I’ve only played Elden Ring and Stray and I didn’t even finish Stray because my cats kept losing their minds when I played it.

I feel like the only real contenders are God of War and Elden Ring and I feel like Elden Ring has a slight edge because of how rabid From Soft fans are

 

[Azure Sage]

I didn't play anything on that list. I have no stakes in this but I think it'd be funny if Xenoblade 3 won just for the response alone. (Not that it isn't likely a good game... I hear a lot of good things.) I wouldn't be upset if Stray won either... cat cat kitty cat.

My personal goty is Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak. If expansions don't count, then it's Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes. Those two games alone have lasted me 5 whole months and I'm still playing a ton of Sunbreak. I must've gotten like 500 hours between the two of them since June. I really didn't play much else that was new this year.... I played Arceus, Rune Factory 5, and Skywalker Saga, and they were all great but none of those are goty material for me. I'm struggling to think of anything else I got this year that came out this year.

Anyway, game awards are rigged af and I can't bear to sit through the cringe influencers. I'll wait to hear if we get a Tears of the Kingdom trailer or something.

 

[Mikey the Moblin]

dunkey posted a review of stray that pretty much hit the nail on the head
people only care about it because cats
definitely not deserving of a goty title
people have also pretty much stopped talking about elden ring
despite being one of the most played games ever its peak:current numbers are pretty much perfectly correlating with dark souls 3 now (1 million:100k, 30k:3k), a 6 year old game, on steam
it was a flash in the pan and will get lost in the mix of emergent gameplay of the 2010s-2020s. I'm glad fromsoft got the recognition that they clearly deserve for their body of work tho, even if elden ring ain't the greatest thing they ever put out
whoever wins I probably won't be THAT excited about it, but the underdog in me is rooting for plague tale

 

[twilitfalchion]

Xenoblade 3 even being a nominee for GOTY makes me happy, even if it's got a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning that. Who knows, maybe there's a shot for best soundtrack. Anything is possible, I suppose.

Elden Ring was good, but not something I'd call my GOTY. Too many nitpicks and issues I had with it to think that highly of it.

Seeing FFXIV in the nominees is great. The community and dev support is some of the best of any game out there.

I don't really care about anything else the awards might have to show. Hell I don't even really care about something for BotW2 since we all know it's gonna be another trailer at best. Probably might tune in here and there, if I'm not doing anything else at the time.