Thoughts on the Game Awards

I gotta say that this year's Keighley Awards were a big step up from the VGA or VGX or whatever else from previous years. The past shows have been a real fun time to shit on how terrible they were but this year actually deserves some praise I think.

I thought the the show ran like an hour longer than it needed to and unfortunately there weren't a tonne of announcements to get excited about but the format and presentation was pretty good overall. It was nice to actually get developers on stage this year, and the few celebrities they did have (Keifer Sutherland and Imagine Dragons guy) seemed to have genuine anecdotes about games and didn't give off the general impression that they were embarrassed to be there which was a pleasant change.

As for the commercial bits I was frankly really impressed. The show clearly has to make money somehow and as far as advertising goes I really found it pretty inoffensive to have some ads for games and Keighley occasionally shilling a Steam sale.

Overall I'm pretty impressed with how the show turned out. It seems like it finally got a lot closer to the event that Keighley has been trying to put on for the past few years. My main criticism would definitely be the length; about 90 minutes seems like about the right length for this kind of show. Hopefully next year they can trim a bit of the fat and put on a shorter more focused show but this year was definitely a big step in the right direction.

I got to the No Man's Sky thing and turned it off. Holy shit how long can that show be?

Otherwise it was a pretty well put together "Awards" show. Best that Keighley has ever put together.

More like the music awards! BOOM.

I was really surprised by the production values. They need to get some stuff a bit more together (i.e. audio cues/levels, better writing, etc.), but if this thing continues to grow, I'm sure that'll come naturally. Also the show was way too long. Like it could stand to be an hour shorter. Overall, though, much improved from last year's atrocity, so good on them for that.

Best of the gaming award shows that i have seen but still plenty to improve upon. Biggest problem right now is the pacing, some took too long, while some were too short.

I was fine with the length, but if they wanted to chop out the bits of him talking awkwardly to someone in the box off stage and then slamming an award they should've won on stage into their chest I'd be fine with that. That'd probably cut out a good 20 minutes.

That's what I think they need to work on most, is presenting more awards without being so awkward about it haha. But overall, ya, I think they're on the right track with how they did this one. With some work, this could be a fun show to look forward to.

Geoff Keighley deserves props.

Where's Bethesda's thing they were teasing?

Well, I'd say these award shows were never good. Though they're always an excuse for publishers to show off games on live TV, this time without the TV part it seems like the line-up is weaker... or maybe is it just an awkward time for video games? I don't know. I was expecting cool stuff to happen I guess.

The show was pretty dull.

Well I watched it muted and shrunk way down to a postage stamp size because i was busy watching a race in another window. I still didnt care for it much. I only really had it up just in case a Persona 5 trailer was shown.

I didn't really know what to expect after last year's debacle, and it probably didn't need as many musical bits as it had, but I'd say I liked it. The segment about Sierra was surprisingly earnest, and I felt things ran a lot more smoothly than they have in the past.

I still think they should just drop the illusion that it's an awards show and focus more on other aspects. More features like the Sierra thing, or time to talk to the industry people there, I think those sorts of things would be a better way to fill three hours than poorly delivered comedy. It doesn't necessarily need the same mass market appeal it needed on Spike, so if it was able to just sort of pay respect to the industry with more things like the "Industry Icon" segment, I think it'd be a better and more focused show. There's no way they'd completely get rid of the "World Premieres", it seems like that's the main draw of this show for a lot of people, myself included, but I guess I'd just like to see them take a bit of a different approach for whatever it is Geoff Keighley is hosting next year.

I was at a employee party and ended up missing the whole thing. I hope there'll be an archived version somewhere.

I agree that this year has been a huge improvement over the previous years. There are a number of things they still need to work on (technical issues, pacing, getting a better balance between trailers and awards) but overall I enjoyed it. Felt more respectful of gamers and it sets a much more solid foundation for future shows.

For anyone who missed the live show, here's the archived footage (show starts at around the 13:30 mark):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlLvCLP2h84

I liked it a lot. Still a little heavy on trailers, but it almost feels like a mini-E3 opportunity half a year later. If the reception is positive, I can see more big time surprises being revealed next year. This almost felt like a proving ground.

Chat complained about excessive music segments, but they were mostly pretty well done. Humor was handled better, award presentations weren't just glossed over and had me in suspense a couple times, the production was ok for a first time out, and it just felt a little more legitimate.

Koji Kondo was the star of this thing, I think. Whenever he was on, it just classed the whole thing up. A great way to start the show.

The Game Awards actually seemed like an Award Show about games, rather than just a weird mini-press conference/announcement hub like the VGAs.

The fact they got Ken and Roberta Williams to show up, and actually awarded/recognized them for the contributions they made to PC gaming was amazing. Warmed my heart.

What trailers were shown were pretty great (Fuck Yeah, King's Quest, Fuck Yeah, No Man's Sky. Hell, even the 1886 trailer was pretty good).

It maybe ran a little long, but please, Geoff, keep up this level of quality. You showed Spike that they gave up a good thing, and you hit the ground running. Better than any VGA ever.

I felt real bad for Roberta Williams. She had to beg to get to hold the award from Ken, and then he wouldn't even hold the microphone for her while someone adjusted it. She ended up with the mic poking at her forehead while she was talking, while the mic stand blocked her face from the camera.

After that, the asshole that was making the new King's Quest game wouldn't even humor her by keeping the hat on that she gave him. She handled everything with class but still, damn.

Ok that rant aside, the show just needs mtn dew and Doritos in the award shots and they should be all set.

I actually thought it was very well done. Props to Geoff.

it was fine, and it could have been far worse. People on Twitter seemed to explode about the run time but it seemed as long as other award shows. The Ken and Roberta Williams segment was awesome.

It was great! Better than E3 this year.

I really love game shows for some reason, but unfortunately I had to miss it for sinterklaas reasons.

The snippets I saw and read though were p cool, so I'm gonna watch the replay this weekend.

Sunset Overdrive didn't win soundtrack/game of the year so the whole thing sucks.

For real though, the thing was leaps and bounds beyond anything the Spike show was. Geoff paying out of his own pocket to fund it is incredible, so props to him.

Yeah that was...awkward to say the least. Even the audience's reaction to it was noticeable. I felt bad for her, but yeah, she handled it well.

I only looked at the website just now. When I saw the "Games for Change" category, I really hoped it would be for games under $5.

At least that way giving an award to the "Best Game for Change of 2014" would have made any damn sense.

Better than past VGAs obviously, but I still found it generally quite boring and awkward to be honest. None of the announcements/reveals interested me. Almost everyone who picked up a mic aside from Keighley sounded like they didn't know what to say unless they were reading from a prompter. Almost every award was handled on that little mini stage off to the side with Keighley and even then they just sorta blew past most of them. The pacing of the show felt like someone trying to cram too much shit into too little time. There was too much shit. The audience was weak most of the time. And I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting some other things too.

The old GPhoria awards on G4 back in the day (i.e. when they actually had money to put on a real awards show and not just an hour-long episode of X-Play...) sure as hell weren't perfect (they had an award for "hottest character" for fuck's sake), but they were miles more entertaining than this. Was it a complete shit show without any merit? Absolutely not, but there's much they can improve.

It was significantly better than it has been in years past. That said, if they are going to decide only to allow some award winners to go up while others do it in a 5 inches from Keighley's face then maybe they should just give out less awards. Some of it seemed really unorganized, like when Geoff cut off Reggie to present the award for ESport player of the year and clearly handed him the trophy that was originally meant for Reggie. Bungie also got that same half-assed presentation and it seemed disrespectful, especially when you had those two ass clowns (you know the ones) making shitty jokes for far too long on the main stage. There were also a few too many musical performances.

Other than that, I thought the show was great and I really hope Geoff is able to do this again next year and improve on some of the short comings from this year.

That stuck out to me too. The other lady that was with him seemed kinda shocked and immediately put it on. Also that one dude plugging Uncharted 4 at the PlayStation Experience seemed fucked up to me. If you aren't going to present it there then don't bother bringing it up. It would have been like Nintendo putting up an image of the new Zelda and saying "We will show more at a Nintendo Direct tomorrow!"

I think all award shows are boring. Being there it was more fun than watching it on TV or stream would have been, but it's still an award show. It ran longer than I expected, but was decently produced (I know nothing about production), It kept my interest the whole time, even through some of the awkwardness and dull parts. I think it was more because I thought it was cool to see all of these industry people in person while waiting for reveals. To be honest, I can't tell you who won most of the categories.

Trey Parker winning best performance was weird. He did most of the voices for South Park, but all of the voices in the show/game sound the same. I didn't think his performance in the game was better than anyone else that was up.

@themangalist: Bethesda said they weren't going to show anything earlier in the week. Anything you read of them teasing was fan speculation.

I thought it went alright. Some of the production was as bit weak, weird camera shots, badly mic'd crowd made it seem dead (or the crowd just didn't care) and lots of people either not speaking into the mics or a sever need of more big knob. The way some of the awards where just handed out like "oh here, you won, we won't mention the other nominations" was a bit weird. It's like they assumed either nobody cared who the other nominations where or that everyone has been following this with bated breath.

I think it was best summed up when Keighley said at the end "this experiment". That's what it was. It had some good parts and highlighted some bad parts without being awful. Next years should be better.

I wonder if Jeff is pissed off about the nomination for him as a "gamer" along all the youtubers. Maybe this nomination was an inside joke as I think Jeff do not like the youtube streamers very much.

Good show overall, MUCH better than previous shows. Good stuff from Geoff.

Lots of exposition for Nintendo, Sony was also visible, Microsoft not so much.

@kub: He talks about the nomination in the latest Bombcast. I think he's more of the opinion that he's too old to "get" YouTube personalities rather than outright hatred. The story of him getting pretty nominated is pretty funny though.

Jeff talked about the matter in the bombcast. ;D

Reggie did seem to treat it like a typical e3 keynote.

I think they should make it an hour long and cut the half of the awards. Youtube personality, best e-sports person, best developer, all of those are bullshit awards.
Just give out an award for best graphics, best sound/music, best story and best game overall or something.

And when every trailer is a 'world premiere', then just leave that intro out.

I must say I was amazed by some showings on stage (Kiefer Sutherland?!), but then again, it probably helped alot that those people were already in Vegas, because they were invited by Sony.

I only watched part of it but it did seem like a huge step up where you don't have to feel overly embarrassed about it the morning after.

I always defended Geoff Keighley when people bring up the stupid Doritos stuff over and over again because the guy genuinely seems to care about games and is trying real hard to merge the real world logistics of hosting a show that will cost thousands of dollars and still making it a decent viewing experience. It wasn't without hiccups of course - the moment I tuned in they had Kiefer talk about MGS and then right after Tim Schafer making jokes about celebrities presenting awards.

Still the presentation was pretty neat. The music was a bit too obnoxious and "dubsteppy" at times and the audio was wired in such a way that you kept hearing the one or two idiots constantly going "WOOOOO" "YAHHH!!!!!!" during any segment.

It was a lot better than the Spike awards shows, for sure, but that didn't stop me from wishing Joel McHale would show up to make Tim Schafer panic again. I enjoyed the trailers, the awards show bits less so, and some of those guests they had on were bad if I'm being generous. Still, definitely an improvement!

It seemed like a nightmare from an organizational standpoint, though; Kojima and some Naughty Dog guys weren't even allowed into the afterparty because the dress code said no sneakers. How do you have Kojima come out to show off Metal Gear Online and then just say "Alright, but you can't stay around with THOSE shoes".

I thought it was odd for Schafer to fire shots at anyone after how bad his company seems to be at managing finances and finishing Kickstarter projects.

TotalBiscuit getting the award is already great just for the outrage that it caused. I would certainly call the show a success. Good times!

They played Sonic 2's Chemical Plant theme on the laser harp, and that goes way above and beyond what I expected out of this show. It was pretty good actually, I wouldn't be embarrassed to show it to a friend.

I think it was very apparent that Keighley has been listening to the fans and I think he deserves a lot of credit for trying so hard to get this right. No more Sam Jackson constantly yelling at me and Jessica Alba telling us how much she loves Dark Souls. The show treated games and the creators with respect and gave them a fair amount of time to talk. That was the biggest problem really and they addressed it. Going forward, I think it should be more closer to 2 hours and probably cut down on the musical performances. If that's the worst I can say, I think the progress of Keighley's vision of a games award show has come a long way.

Was definitely a step up from the horrible VGX.

Thought it was a good show, just way too long.

Plus the awards are kind of the least exciting part to me. I mostly just want to see the trailers for new stuff, which I think ends up undermining the rest of the show. Game of the Year awards have been built on a publication-by-publication basis, so it's tough for an Oscars-style show to gain credibility. The real test of prestige isn't an individual reward, but the number of total awards, e.g. The Last of Us winning over 200 game of the year awards.

I'd hoped for a little more from Nintendo and thought that Zelda fell completely flat. Besides the brand there is nothing that looks interesting about what they've shown. Stupid question, but you don't gain exp in Zelda games, right? So why would you ever stop to fight stuff in the open world? Maybe for crafting mats or rupees? I thought it looked really bland, but maybe there's something I'm just not getting.

I thought it was a fair step above what we've seen the last few years. Koji Kondo and Ken and Roberta Williams were personal highlights of mine. I very much enjoyed what I saw and look forward to seeing it again next year if they decide to do one of course.

@nicked: In past Zelda games you have not, but the 3ds one and this new one were willing to mix things up so for all we know, maybe. For what it's worth in skyrim there wasn't a lot of reasons to stop to fight stuff in the open world either, mostly just fast traveled.

I think that's an example of one open environment and I imagine there are other ones that don't look like an open forest.

The Sierra bit was great, and the dude from Scotland playing lasers was awesome too.

It was waaaaay to long though. Went to bed after the NMS trailer.

I have no idea what even to say to that.

I thought it was fine. Kinda disappointing to see a lot of the known video game press being so down on the show (looking at you Jeff Green and Alex Navarro). This is the first time Keighley is running it the way he wants, and the fact that he has personal stakes in it makes this really commendable. I wish people could give criticism without acting like a huge dick. That kinda makes me think less of you.

Hopefully they'll iron out the kinks and get this a bit more tight for next year. If I have any criticism, it's that the show went on for too long, and the audio levels were warped. Other than that, it was pretty good. Loved Keifer Sutherland's appearance.

Why do you say that? Is there something wrong with some of the Jury members that they chose?

The show certainly had its flaws, but its definitely better than what we saw out of the Spike VGA's. Sure we did not get too many real big game announcements, but the World Premieres of game footage for already announced games looked really solid. Mario Maker, The new Legend of Zelda, King's Quest and Witcher 3 come to mind. The speech from Ken and Roberta Williams was a great and genuine, its awesome to see them be honored for their contributions to PC gaming. I did not have any problems with the winners of each the categories, but boy did Nintendo bring home some awards, and good on them! And the music was hit or miss: the No Man's Sky performance was cool, but that Hardline song sucked.

It terms of those flaws, the show seemed to of gone too long and they could of cut off some time. Also, the way they handed some of the awards seemed kind of nonchalant, if not awkward. After having that conversation with the Valiant Hearts guys, Geoff just hands them the award for best narrative, right on the spot. It just seemed weird to me, but I guess that was how they wanted to handle time management. Also when Miyamoto and Aonuma teased Star Fox coming out before Zelda, I was expecting Nintendo to show a teaser, but it never showed up. Guess Star Fox is not ready.

I still had an unnecessary amount of involuntary cringes. It happens at every one of these game award shows. They should have just let Tim Schafer make all the awards jokes.

I also stopped watching halfway through. It was much easier to watch the highlights the following morning.

it was great and exactly what i wanted out of a game awards show.

@bipa said:

Was definitely a step up from the horrible VGX.

I thought all the winners were really bizarre picks.

Shadow of Mordor best action game? Over Bayonetta? Really? Shadow of Mordor can be played with your monitor turned off; as ridiculously easy it is. It provides some interesting ideas based on the player character dying, yet it offers no challenge whatsoever to actually make death a realistic probability. Really fun the first 2 hours, until you realize there isn't any point to the Nemesis system and you more or less cleared it out. Repetitive and bland from that point forward. Meanwhile Bayonetta is an actual action game. One of the better ones. The choice is just baffling on all levels.

Then, Dragon Age wins? Why is a semi-broken game nominated to begin with? Leaving the game breaking bugs out, what is so special about it? It is a good game, but among the likes of Hearthstone, Dark Souls and Bayonetta? It just seems to me like it was the game most people played and therefor it won. It is a fantasy RPG, so very widespread. Hearthstone, Dark Souls and Bayonetta have much more specific target audiences.

Best shooter FarCry 4? Come on. It is satisfying to play, but Destiny plays so much better when you are actually shooting things. I just don't agree with any of the choices made.

I watched the first half of it before turning it off. It wasn't embarrassing or offensive like the Spike shows were but it also was rather boring in my opinion. I think it was a great first attempt though. They really need to iron out some of the production issues, though, especially on the audio side. It seemed pretty sloppy in a lot of spots but for a first time show without the backing of a major TV studio I guess that is to be expected.

I guess the whole thing still feels much less like an awards show than a sort of big year-end trailer revealing ceremony. I honestly wouldn't mind it if they just dropped the whole pretense of being an awards show next year and just spent an hour and a half interviewing designers and showing off trailers. Basically make it like an E3 press conference type of thing.