I expected this year’s The Game Awards to be predictable. I was so sure, in fact, that I wrote an entire article predicting what we would and wouldn’t see. I knew that 2024’s show was rumoured to pack a punch, but also figured we’d be seeing a lot of games that we already knew were coming. Boy, was I wrong.
Nobody Predicted The Game Awards’ Announcements
I was so wrong, in fact, that nearly none of the games I said we’d likely see showed up. We saw Hideo Kojima, as I predicted, but nothing of Death Stranding 2, and definitely no OD or, sadly, Hunter Schafer. None of the superhero games I pegged were so much as mentioned. Fable, Avowed, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage were all skipped over, though the new Mafia game did make a showing, since that was confirmed beforehand.
There was no Judas, no new WolfEye game, no Project 007, no new Resident Evil. Shockingly, there was no Exodus, which I thought was a shoo-in. I can at least rest easy that the games I said wouldn’t show didn’t show, but that’s a bit of a cop-out. For the first time in a long time, The Game Awards were full of genuine surprises.
Related
Everything Revealed At The Game Awards 2024
Here are all the reveals, new trailers, and updates from The Game Awards 2024
You can see a full list of the games announced here, but I’ll describe the most exciting surprises. Obviously, Naughty Dog finally revealed its new (badly named) game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophecy. The Witcher 4 got a cinematic trailer, though we shouldn’t expect to see that game anytime soon. Okami is, to my great delight, getting a sequel. I don’t think anybody was predicting a sequel to Slay the Spire, but the trailer made my housemate leap to his feet from the couch and cheer. To my great surprise, a new multiplayer immersive sim from Deus Ex’s Warren Spector was announced in the pre-show – the pre-show, for god’s sake. The Sifu developers announced a 5v5 soccer game called Rematch that, yes, looks a lot like Sifu.
Elden Ring is getting a weird spin-off. Team Ico announced a mecha game. The Outer Worlds 2 showcased its first gameplay trailer. Hazelight showed off its new co-op game, Split Fiction, though we kind of knew that would come already. There’s a gorgeous new Long Dark game, a new Ryu Ga Gotoku game that looks kind of like Sleeping Dogs, a new Turok game, a new Onimusha game, and a new co-op game from the creators of Overcooked. Telltale also gave us a first look at the game it’s been working on, and I’m hyped.
And Yet, It Felt Exactly The Same
Despite all these exciting and unexpected announcements, The Game Awards still felt like the same old rollercoaster ride of ‘it’s so over’ and ‘we’re so back’. In between developers giving the briefest of award speeches, long barrages of trailers, and Statler and Waldorf bullying Geoff Keighley for his own incompetence instead of actually addressing the issues this show helps to perpetuate, were an endless stream of thoroughly irritating ads from big corporations like Amazon, Nintendo, and Lenovo. Xbox’s ‘this is an Xbox’ campaign made an appearance too. We saw Fortnite about a billion times, as if you forgot that existed.
We saw ads for games we already knew were coming that didn’t show us anything new, functioning solely as a reminder that they exist and we should buy them. I don’t care if everybody loves Infinity Nikki, it was up there for way too long. There were lots of crossover announcements and things that felt more like commercials than parts of an awards show.
It’s all to be expected – The Game Awards runs on advertiser money. But it all contributes to the fact that it can be a real slog to watch, especially live. I watched the show along with other members of TheGamer, and reactions oscillated wildly between ‘holy crap holy crap holy crap’ and boredom. Several of us began wishing we were either asleep or dead.
The show doesn’t need to be this long, but advertiser padding lengthens the show, throws off the hype generated by so many cool announcements, and generally makes people (me) want to tear our hair out. It’s particularly annoying that all the money made from giving these advertisers slots go into getting celebrity guests (Snoop Dogg, anyone?) on stage to do inane stuff that also acts as advertisements. Once again, the conclusion is that no matter how many cool games are announced, The Game Awards will always be The Game Awards, in the worst way.
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.