Game Awards shenanigans

nah, it's a good game but it has lot of flaws. A 4 out of 5 stars as Rorie gave to it it's the most appropriate rating, at least for me. But it has not been a stellar year AAA wise so...

Zelda looks fucking great. I want it.

Zelda looks goddamned fantastic. That world map was huge, and just being able to hop off a mountain and glide around... it was pretty incredible. Also, I'm really okay with Imagine Dragons covering Zelda music here. It's real nice.

I think it's just as deserving as any other major contender this year. It has it's problems, sure, but the rest of the game makes for it in spades and then some. Just my 2 cents.

@shaka999: In a year like this, sure. It's by no means some amazing all-time best ever game, but looking at the candidates it basically just comes down to what sorta games the judges are more into.

WOW what a huge improvement.

Geoff really put a substantial amount of effort into this and it shows. No stupid celebrity bullshit, no fake video game fans. Recognized passionate people who helped build the medium what it is today. Great reveals. Good musical performances.

I'm looking forward to next year's

Yes, an RPG actually full of role playing. Characters and world are fantastic and they do a lot more with those than in previous games. The combat is also enjoyable and varied between multiple class specializations. It's also fucking gynormous.

The things I came away most excited for were Banner Saga 2 and Godzilla for PS4, they were the genuine surprises for me. Marty O'Donnell getting his award separately was the most awkward thing possible.

Also, maybe I'm missing something, but why are people so crazy about that Zelda footage? Sure it's new for a Zelda game, but all the horse and open world stuff are things that have been done before, and seemingly better, in countless other games. Nothing they showed was really all that amazing.

Props to Imagin Dragons for being good sports and playing some great video games music with a legendary composer.

Thank you for posting this, because I totally wanted to but was afraid of potentially offending people who are really excited for that game. There were some things in that trailer that I looked at and went, "Well that's not that fantastic..."

@joey2683: Wow, did you get bonked on the head and forget what these shows used to be? How wrong can one man be? It was SO bad before.

I'm sure there will be some sort of detailed list somewhere at some point but for the most part it was stuff everybody knows about but just some more info.

No big announcements per say, off the top off my head.
Metal Gear Online got announced.
The Gone Home people are doing a new game set in space called Tacoma.
Another group of people are doing a space game as well called Adrift that looks pretty cool, disaster survival in space.
Before, a prehistoric/caveman open world type game, looks pretty.
Human Element, a game set 35 years after the zombies do their zombie stuff, people are shooting guns at each other, all cgi trailer, didn't give much away, bang bang, pew pew, man is the real monster, etc.

I think those were the only games that weren't announced beforehand, besides that it was just new footage of games we knew about, the new Zelda, and what not.

So no, like, Fallout 4 or anything major like that. (Though I'm hyped as hell for the two space games announced in a row, hell yeah)

Better than it's been in previous years but still a lot of work to do. The show was way too long (most award shows are) and there needs to more focus on the actual awards. I know the premieres put the butts in the seats but the whole thing feels like an ad. Do we really need another E3?

The King's Quest part was definitely the highlight.

This was a good "first" award show. If they got all their technical shit on lockdown and made things snappier, it could be great.

• the Battlefield segment was about as poorly timed as it was during E3
• "a little Peter Dinklage" is a very poor choice of words
• that Roberta and Ken award segment was genuinely wonderful
• the musical performances were fine, and Koji Kondo playing with Imagine Dragons was cool
• they actually gave people awards and let them talk, but as it turns out balancing awards with trailers makes things feel pretty long. award shows already feel like an eternity when it's just awards.
• 5427642 times better than previous VGAs

Hopefully they'll do it again next year and tighten things up.

Also Dragon Age is the bee's knees.

Steam was mentioned and there is a special Steam sale for some games that were nominated for awards. That is kind of weird.

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/2014vgas/

Because that's what Zelda needed, minutes of travel through boring environments between mediocre action sequences.

I mean, maybe it will be awesome. But man did that "world premier" bore the crap out of me.

You can now eat apples in Zelda!

Watching Aonuma and Miyamoto have a bit of palaver over things non-Zelda seemed like a fun rib on the people who would be up for any information about the game to slake their interest. Even though we know practically nothing about it, I still bet it will be pretty good.

New game from the Fullbright Company (makers of Gone Home) called "Tacoma".

"Adrift," an FPX (presumably first person experience) that looked like Gravity: The Game.

New untitled game from the guy that made Brothers.

"Before," described as a prehistoric group survival game.

Witcher 3 has a second playable character.

Godzilla The Game.

"Human Element," a post apocalyptic zombie survival game from Robert Bowling.

Some new-ish footage of already announced games like Battlefield Hardline, The Order 1886, and several others.

I have a lot to say about this show, and I will make a blog post about it. But for the moment, I think it was not bad. Plenty to laugh at, but plenty that was kinda okay. For an awards show, generally decent.

Big highlights were the musical acts, some of the sincere acceptance speeches, and Roberta and Ken of King's Quest. That segment alone maybe made the whole thing worthwhile.

The Zelda footage looked really cool, but could they have maybe played it on a little bit bigger screen?

Oh, and...

WORLD PREMIERE

Yeah, that is pretty weird! The sale itself was actually mentioned on the show! Keighley straight up thanked Valve for doing that! This industry is fuckin weird as shit!

I had a moment where that really dawned on me when someone was trying to have a sentimental moment on stage and the camera cut to some cosplayers sitting at a table just casually watching the show.

The official YouTube channel has uploaded a bunch of stuff already for those who missed it. Click me, and receive Geofflyness.

Also good lord, Lindsey Sterling was born to be some sort of Elf wasn't she? She just leaps about stage like a little pixie or something.

And SHOVEL KNIGHT. heck yeah! A worthy award!

Really glad it got its due.

Pixie! That's the word. "Fairy" came to mind, but I figured someone would think I wasn't literally talking about fairies. The next thing that came to mind was "nymph", but, yeah, that's an easy one to misunderstand. By the time I got to "forest sprite" the show had already moved on.

And that's my Game Awards story.

@ll_exile_ll: Wait, what? A second playable character in the Witcher? Is it the other man you see fighting alongside Geralt?

I haven't seen all the "world premiers" but they seem like there were some interesting announcements. Tacoma had a very well-done teaser and it seems like the station has an art deco design? It's kind of a bummer though that it's not out until 2016. The Witcher 3 and No Man's Sky had very cool trailers, and I hope the music they use in the Witcher 3 trailers make into the game. Also, anyone else thought the The Witcher's trailer was possibly a bit spoiler-y?

They didn't specifically say who the second playable character was, but I assumed it was the white haired woman Geralt seemed to talking about in the narration.

Highs:

• The whole King's Quest segment was delightful. I was thinking that the new King's Quest would be absolutely terrible, but it looks like it could be great really
• Greg. Oh man.... What was that? Geoff Keighley was tripping on acid in Europe one night and found this dude named Greg who can play music with laser beams and he was trying to pitch him to Bungie's music director (after telling him that nobody wants to hire him). What an amazingly random segment.
• Two space/sci-fi games looks interesting, and I'll play a Hobo Simulator from the Brothers developer
• Imagine Dragons moment at the end was a good bit of fun.

Lows:

• Greg.
• The idea of showing off the next Legend of Zelda game by playing it on a small ass TV while talking about other games.
• They've made me tired of No Man's Sky. Every single time the game is shown off, we get a trailer that doesn't show anything in terms of what will make the game fun. Then the dude comes out (he seems like a good person), and the crowd just applauds him because they think he's done this amazing thing of building an infinite universe with his bare hands (it's randomly generated with a set amount of art, it's very impressive but let's just wait until the game comes out). Mark my words, write them down if you have to: No Man's Sky is going to be a massive letdown if we continue to hype the hell out of it.
• The show was just way too long. A solid hour-hour&thirty could have been cut out.

Definitely an improvement on last year, but an awards game show will never work out.

New box art for Bloodborne. Personally i preferred the old one.

@ll_exile_ll: There are screenshots of Ciri's character model, so it seems like it could be her. I wonder if she or whoever will play differently. I always assumed from the trailers that she was a sorceress, but in the screenshot she has a sword strapped on her back, much like Geralt.

@asilentprotagonist: It looks alright. I think it could've been worse; the box arts of Demon's and both Dark Souls games were sort of bland.

@pyrodactyl: Relax duder, it was just my personal opinion, it wasn't directed at you.

At least Nintendo is working on riding horses, because they don't run into trees in real life you guys! =P

@militantfreudian: Ciri has always been a sword fighter, however, she has powers that nobody else has like being able to travel between dimensions.

@joey2683: And his opinion is that yours was filled with hyperbole. I agree with his assessment if not entirely with the delivery.

I appreciate Nintendo's willingness to troll us by showing Zelda footage on a small screen while idly chatting about how it will be out next year.

@arbitrarywater: I thought it was pitch perfect. Instead of announcing the new Star Fox via a trailer or even a teaser image, Nintendo chose a casual rejoinder as the import for their almost "non"-announcement. The bait-and-switch tactics and artlessness of their video press statements prove some sort of superb psychological master craft.

Pretty sure I've seen a number of release videos from Japanese devs showing them sitting next to a monitor while playing their game and talking. Over here I think we just want to see the damn game and don't really care much what the devs have to say but it seems to be a thing over in Japan.

Also I'm sensing that a lot of people seem to be... tired of Zelda by this point, and inferring much from very little gameplay shown. We've seen one kind of environment in a game that presumeably has a whole number of them. Zelda mechanics adjusted based on A Link Between Worlds, combined with an open world sound fantastic to me, and another way for Nintendo to gain some more momentum.

Still disappointed that Bayonetta 2 didn't win but DA seems to be a really great game and I could see a lot of people enjoying it far more than other games this year.

@poortommy: I'm not discounting Nintendo being masters of dark wizardry. I just think it's really funny.

@starvinggamer said:

I'm hoping they took the final "world premier" slot by default because nobody else had shit to show. And then even though they win by default, either A) a shit ton of the scripting and enemy AI and Link abilities are still half-finished/up for debate so they showed nothing, or B) their PR plan is that they don't show any of that shit until E3, so they showed literally as little as possible.

The move where Link jumps off the horse and gets slow mo arrow time was neat, but good lord, nothing else about that was neat. Didn't Twilight Princess already have autorun horse that you could shoot arrows and stuff from? I guess the horse wouldn't auto-dodge trees, but like, meh. THEY LITERALLY SHOWED OFF THAT YOU COULD MOVE THE CAMERA AROUND WHILE THE HORSE AUTOSTEERED.

Also, speaking of boring environments, man, as kinda rad as having a horse was back in Ocarina of Time because I'm not sure any console game had done that up to that point, I don't think any Zelda game has had an interesting overworld to explore with the horse. The main fields in OoT and Majora's Mask are barren as shit, and all the cool shit in branches of the overworld have nothing to do with the horse. Wind Waker didn't have a horse, and has the best overworld in the whole damn series because it's a giant ocean with all kinds of cool random shit you might just barely spot on the horizon and want to go check out. Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field is fucking absurdly huge and has multiple zones, but has the same damn problem as OoT of "there is fuck all to do here", except for a couple scripted sequences with mounted combat against enemies/bosses. Thank god Twilight Princess had warp points all over the place so I didn't have to ride the horse across endless expanses of nothing. And then Skyward Sword didn't have a horse.

So putting in a horse was a bold move in like, 1998, but Jesus you guys, you've had a decade and a half to figure out something interesting to do with it, aside from that one badass time when Epona (impossibly) jumped across Gerudo Valley.

Just...so much of Zelda was impressive back in the Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time days because Zelda got fantasy action pretty right, right out of the gate, compared to most of the competitors. But I sorta can't keep caring now that other devs are also making fantasy action games, that play as well or better and have more modern gameplay conventions. Like, c'mon Nintendo, Okami and Darksiders exist.

New Zelda looked just like old Zelda concept art:

I'm not watching live, but skipping through an archive afterwards.

In the new Zelda you will be able to ride the horse and move the camera...wait for it...at the same time.

When I was watching the Zelda footage my first thought was "Wow, the world looks super bland. I hope this is a very early build." It did not look interesting at all to me.

So, I really don't see why people are so goddamn snarky and cynical at the show last night. Geoff funded that entire thing himself. Through his own personal finance and being able to get sponsors on board. That is the reality of putting a show of that magnitude on for free to watch on the internet mind you.

It was a great show and I thought that it was leagues better than the VGA stuff. There were a lot of really genuinely good moments last night. It was a bit too long possibly but other than that I really hope they do it again next year. Geoff seems to really care about putting on these shows every year and I appreciate it.

The show seemed okay. Not amazing, but certainly not as bad as last year. In terms of the games, next year has a lot of potential. I hope there aren't too many disappointments.

@csl316: That's pretty neat. Good catch!

@demoskinos: He summed it up perfectly at the end when he called it an experiment. I don't know what people expect for a first effort. I thought apart from some teething problems like audio issues and weird camera shots it was a good show.

I liked it. Dude put a lot of effort in and I hope he brings it back next year and irons the kinks out.

I didn't see the King's Quest tribute. Is it available anywhere?

EDIT: Nevermind, the whole show is on Youtube.

i thought that it was really good,and i dont really have any complaints about the show.if the show is like this every time i could see my self watching this every year from now on.

yes,imo its the best game of this year by far,and its also one of my fave games ever at this point.