The Game Awards’ nominations have been announced, and like it does every year, that means discourse is abound. Amongst all the arguing over if Shadow of the Erdtree deserved to be eligible for Game of the Year and whether people’s favourite games got snubbed or not, one thing stood out.
Black Myth: Wukong has been nominated for Game of the Year, making it the lowest rated game out of all of this year’s nominations – it has an 81, and every other game has a Metacritic score of at least 90, with most being over that. It’s got a lower review score than many games that didn’t get a GOTY nomination, including Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Silent Hill 2, and Helldivers 2. In fact, it’s the lowest rated game to get a GOTY nomination in Game Awards history.
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The Game Awards Has Bigger Problems Than Shadow Of The Erdtree
I wish Shadow of the Erdtree’s potential nomination was the story of The Game Awards. It isn’t.
Black Myth: Wukong Is A Perfectly Fine Game…
As I’ve said before, review scores aren’t everything. Lots of games I thought were excellent didn’t get massive review scores, while games I didn’t like scored highly. The idea that reviews should even be scored assigns numeric value to entirely subjective, complex opinions that should be taken on their own merit, and scales differ widely from publication to publication. You can’t really base the merit of a game on its review score alone.
But Black Myth got a decent review score, because it’s a decent game. It has many things to its merit, as reviewers have highlighted: it’s a stunningly beautiful game, for one. Its systems work well together, and there are many wonderful moments in it. But reviewers have also highlighted disjointed storytelling and clumsy level design, and opinions have been mixed on whether its combat is excellent or too simplistic to be interesting for the game’s entire runtime.
It does what it does well, for the most part, but taking all its parts together, it isn’t particularly interesting as a video game, especially compared to other games nominated in the same category. Balatro is an entirely original idea that was so compelling it went viral within days. Astro Bot has been lauded as the best platformer of the modern gaming era.
Metaphor: ReFantazio uses Atlus’ Persona system as a base for one of the most moving, thematically complex fantasy stories a video game has ever told. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is… well… I don’t think it really deserves a nomination either, honestly. And Shadow of the Erdtree, arguably, shouldn’t have been eligible at all. In comparison, Black Myth is a perfectly good action game, but not one that’s particularly special.
… But It’s Biggest Achievement Is Making Lots Of Money
Really, the most interesting thing about Black Myth: Wukong has nothing to do with the game itself. Instead, it’s that it made a lot of money. It’s one of the fastest-selling games of all time, had an all-time peak of over 2.4 million concurrent players on Steam alone, and sold 20 million units in its first month. It’s an incredibly popular game.
This reminded me of last year’s Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. It had a crop of truly excellent films, including Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Poor Things, and Killer of the Flower Moon. It also had Barbie, the one massive sneak.
Barbie was a good movie, in that it was entertaining, funny, and even sweet, at times. But it was nowhere near the level of excellence that the other films in the category were on. Barbie’s biggest achievement was, like Black Myth, making a lot of money. In fact, it put so many butts in cinema seats that a category was made specifically to reward it for making so much money.
Popularity doesn’t make a game excellent. Black Myth: Wukong is a wildly popular, perfectly decent game, but it’s not excellent. There were other, more deserving games that were pushed out because of it, and if anything, it reaffirms that The Game Awards doesn’t understand what it’s really for.
The Game Awards
Founded by Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards is a video games event centered on celebrating the best of the year’s titles, with emphasis on reveals and promos for upcoming launches.