2023 Video Game Awards Season - Tracking and Discussion Thread
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I see it as the opposite. Western multiplat that sold millions and has the entire pc crowd wanting it to win against a japanese exclusive game. Being and indie dev matters little really. Yeah it is Nintendo but very rarely they win even if they have critical acclaim, just look at every 3d mario and Bayonetta 2
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I assume there were a lot more people at home to play and write about games in that year. There are slow years were outlets won't bother choosing an actual GOTY. Years like 2022 and 2020 prove most outlets will come out and plant their GOTY flag on a highly popular game. But also yeah outlets come and go too.
Numerous reasons but the main one is that it was Peak Covid, way more people at home, way more blogs/podcasts/outlets making a list - the year is also inflated due to lots of low quality outlets that counted where a simple twitter poll with like 20 votes counted as a reader's choice, they all counted for that year and last year we on era decided to sharpen some of the requirements such as no individual lists, platform/outlet must have been around for a while, the date cutoff etc moving forward starting the 2022 season and beyond.
Poor Zelda, it only sold 19.5 million copies and is tied for highest reviewed game of the year.
I can see this remain a pretty close split between the three games in the critics choices. I don't think it will be close in audience awards though.
The Legend of Niche-da and Niche-Man never stood a chance against the mass market appeal of Baldur's Gate and Alan Wake.
Statistically, they aren't wrong.
The only instance where Nintendo has 'won big' in recent years is BotW. Every other year their games struggle to get any number over 50. Whether they're critically acclaimed, massive sellers, or both, they have never competed in the same way other publishers, genres, etc have. They might get nominations, yes, but they rarely see wins, which is really all that matters to most folk. Similarly, Japanese titles only account for 3/12 'overall' winners, and 3/9 Game Awards winners.
Meanwhile, mainstream core-focused RPGs account for 4/12 of the 'overall GOTY winners.' Dragon Age: Inquisition had a nearly 100-award lead in 2014 despite it sharing the spotlight with more critically-acclaimed and, frankly, well-remembered games like Bayonetta 2, Dark Souls 2, Kentucky Route Zero, and so on. In the Game Award's votes right now, BG3 is leading handily despite having fewer sales than TotK to this point, and a DLC to a core-focused RPG is vying for second-place over full, brand-new titles. Western titles, in turn, account for 9/12 'overall' winners, and 6/9 Game Awards winners, with a smaller - but still substantial - majority when it comes to Game Awards nominations.
People absolutely love games like BG3 (i.e. Western mainstream critically-acclaimed core-focused RPG titles); they're on the same level as Sony's suite of 3rd-person action/adventure titles when it comes to how beloved they are in awards seasons. Comparatively, everything else has a much harder time getting those major wins.
Whilst the 'star game' of the year being BG3 - instead of Starfield - is a bit of a surprise, it's still true that a Nintendo title has a harder time getting major GOTY wins than core-focused RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3. Painting BG3 as some ultimate underdog at this point is simply untrue. It may have been somewhat true back in July, but now? The game has utterly blown up and is the absolute frontrunner for everything. It has all the motivation, fan fervour, and attention placed on it, and all the big awards are its to lose, not to win. It's like the whole 'developers are panicking' drama which used Larian's supposedly 'small size' to crap on the developer of... El Paso, Elsewhere.
BG3 is in no way the same kind of game as DA:I and TW3 o_O Come on, it is in fact the antithesis to most gameplay aspects of these games (particularly DA:I). People now love games like BG3 but that only became a fact this year. Before, no top-down Western RPG would have had a chance at a GOTY nomination in the TGAs. Disco Elysium got shafted in favor of friggin' TOW despite the later receiving much less love from users and critics.
Ofc, BG3 did manage to become a sales hit and that was partly due to lucky bear marketing and Larian's emphasis on delivering a good presentation, but a big part of its reach came from the 'developers are panicking' drama.' You had a lot of pretty popular YouTubers praising Larian despite admitting not wanting to stream the game because it was too slow-paced. You're right that it's no longer "THE" underdog and that Larian was already a respected dev, but going from "haha no way a boring TB game is GOTY" in last year's TGA stream to being one of the top 3 favorites qualifies as a underdog sleeper hit in my book.
Anyway, I love your analyses but it's a bit shallow to focus this on Japanese vs Western biases; it ignores the impact of game design staples: 3rd person action with lots of explosions, good graphics and likeable characters? Massive bonus. Great gameplay with decent sandbox mechanics that diverge from Ubisoft's? Another huge bonus. Great presentation for a game's narrative? Yup, that's a bonus, but in no way as big as the former two. And we all know that Zelda is still a sandbox game in an era where sandbox games sell better than linear third-person action ones and review as well as they do.
Btw, I do not in any way endorse the racist idiots that ganged up on the Organ Trail dev. Screw them.
In no way? Really? Yes, it is a top-down CRPG instead of a real-time MMO-lite RPG, or action-RPG, but fundamentally it shares significant amounts of DNA with those two titles. From the heavily choice-focused narrative, to the dark-ish fantasy settings, to the focus on player expression through varying builds, to inventory systems, to their cinematic over-the-shoulder dialogue systems.
The latter of which is, arguably, a major, major part of why BG3 became such a success. I genuinely believe that if BG3 had released with the same dialogue system as D:OS2 then it wouldn't have blown up to nearly the same extent it did. Instead, Larian made the brilliant choice to craft hours of the same unique, high-budget, immersive cutscenes seen in most other WRPGs. After all, you can't have, as you put it, 'lucky bear marketing' if the cutscene for that was just some zoomed-out models and some text boxes.
I fully agree, but again that's the context of a few months ago. Right now, BG3 has practically all of the momentum behind it. Alan Wake 2 has stolen a small part of that, and TotK has its own small part as well (the rest with even smaller parts), but practically every comment I've seen regarding things has it placed as the 'automatic winner.' So whilst it's an underdog in the grand scheme of things - and the success story is truly inspiring all around - it is not the underdog now, which is what I was focusing on when rebuking the - honestly quite lazy - 'Niche-Man' jokes that poster got stuck with.
It's also why I referenced the 'developers are panicking' debacle, because in that case many people refused to see how big Larian actually is and how unique they are in the industry, and used that as a beating stick towards AAA developers and tiny indie devs alike, no matter how deserving. Same goes here; saying that BG3 is an 'underdog' at this moment, instead of within the overall narrative of its success, is intentionally obfuscating just how massive it is.
See this is a point I was going to make myself, but of course in a different way. Of the 4 non-Western games to have won either the Game Awards' GOTY, or the consensus GOTY, 3 of them are arguably the most 'Westernised' games that their respective developers have made. Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring were massive open world titles directly inspired by the open world templates laid out by the likes of Rockstar and Ubisoft. Death Stranding, whilst still heavily 'Kojima', is again an open world title that leans extremely heavily into the realistic style of Naughty Dog and Co. But, as you say, TotK is still a BotW sequel after all, so I didn't feel the point was as prescient.
However it still is very, very much true that non-Western games are at a big statistical disadvantage when it comes to winning GOTY awards. That can't really be argued with imo, because it's simply how things have turned out.
We're talking specifically about the style of Zelda that was introduced with BotW and obliterated the competition that year. There is no western bias among core gamers against that.
Certainly, at this point I expect Baldur's Gate to win. But the previous poster makes it out as if that was the expected outcome rather than a gigantic upset.
1. All aspects of BG3's gameplay are designed in a fundamentally different way. Combat, level design, encounter design, choice&consequence, builds, itemization, and the inventory system range from being more complex (as in not streamlined at all) to demonstrably deeper in BG3 than in either of these. Other than the effort on presentation, BG3 does away with many things fans of console-centric WRPGs take for granted. I mostly agree re: your thoughts on the cinematic dialogue, but note that everybody knew that the game would have such detailed cinematics since the first EA version was released, yet the idea of it being a GOTY contender was laughed off as late as in May and even June.
Most players were convinced they wouldn't be able to get over the TB combat and it took a 96 Metascore + the bear scene + the "devs are scared" narrative + good monetization practices for the game to do more or less well on the PS5 (Steam was easier bc PC players are way more into TB). Also, you emphasize the work on cutscenes as if it was a particularly Western thing when Japanese RPG devs are as likely to go that way, and fans of such games have been used to the cinematic spectacle since the days of FFX (or FFVIII, arguably). In fact, when was the last time a high-profile Japanese dev released a big budget story-centric game with no voice acting, top-down perspective, and the story being presented through huge boxes of text?
2. You're technically correct when framing it like that, but I don't see the point. Context is still relevant: it went from Niche Gate to being the strongest GOTY contender, it's basically the best possible underdog success scenario. The poster that got Nicheman'd acts like the PC community was ganging up on poor Japanese-made TOTK, yet BOTW, TW3, and ER proved that successfully going sandbox is the best way to reliably prevent third-action linear games from getting all the awards. Heck, even DA:I went sandbox, and that had at least a bit to do with its awards considering it's not very well regarded as a WRPG.
3. BG3 certainly did not get *any* inspiration from those open-world templates and the only thing that we've agreed upon as contributing to its success (cinematics) is not even a Western RPG staple outside of Bioware games. There might be a statistical disadvantage for Japanese games but if so the disadvantage for turn-based, top-down games is even bigger: 0/20 TGA+Spike GOTYs have been turn-based while a whopping 10/20 have been open-world titles, including BOTW which TOTK is a direct sequel to.
Two/three more GOTY awards for BG3:
3DJuegos Readers' Choice + 3DJuegos Critics' Choice: https://www.3djuegos.com/eventos/no...tos-galardonados-premios-3djuegos-lenovo-2023
Screen Rant: https://screenrant.com/best-video-games-last-20-years/
Wouldn't include Screen Rant just yet, though. They did a separate GOTY 2022 article last year and it had Pentiment, not Elden Ring as shown in this one, but they do mention BG3 as their GOTY 2023. Weird.
3DJuegos Readers' Choice + 3DJuegos Critics' Choice: https://www.3djuegos.com/eventos/no...tos-galardonados-premios-3djuegos-lenovo-2023
Best soundtrack
- Winner: Final Fantasy XVI
- Runner-up: Baldur's Gate 3
- Runner-up: Hi-Fi RUSH
Best plot/narrative
- Winner: Baldur's Gate 3
- Runner-up: Marvel's Spider-Man 2
- Runner-up: Octopath Traveler 2
Best graphics
- Winner: Alan Wake 2
- Runner-up: Lords of the Fallen (2023)
- Runner-up: Marvel's Spider-Man 2
Best Spanish voice acting
- Winner: Mario García (Hi-Fi RUSH)
- Runner-up: Lorenzo Beteta (Alan Wake 2)
- Runner-up: Roberto Encinas (Atomic Heart)
Best DLC/expansion
- Winner: Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
- Runner-up: Horizon: Forbidden West - Burning Shores
- Runner-up: Resident Evil 4 - Separate Ways
Best sleeper hit
- Winner: Hi-Fi RUSH
- Runner-up: Cocoon
- Runner-up: Lies of P
Best game made in Spain
- Winner: Blasphemous 2
- Runner-up: Laika: Aged Through Blood
- Runner-up: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
GOTY according to readers
- Winner: Baldur's Gate 3 (30,3%)
- Runner-up: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (20,3%)
- Runner-up: Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (12,6%)
GOTY and masterpieces according to the 3DJuegos team
- Winner: Baldur's Gate 3
- Masterpiece: Hi-Fi RUSH
- Masterpiece: Marvel's Spider-Man 2
- Masterpiece: Resident Evil 4: Remake
- Masterpiece: Super Mario Bros. Wonder
- Masterpiece: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Screen Rant: https://screenrant.com/best-video-games-last-20-years/
Wouldn't include Screen Rant just yet, though. They did a separate GOTY 2022 article last year and it had Pentiment, not Elden Ring as shown in this one, but they do mention BG3 as their GOTY 2023. Weird.
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Tbh I don't want to talk about this anymore. BG3 is going to win everything this year; neither me or that poster are going to change that.
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That's fine, I still think there is a chance TOTK grabs the same or a similar amount but we'll know soon enough I guess.
No wonder that person who made that Ocarina of Time thread thought GOTY didn't exist in 1998.
(just kidding)
That's one hell of an OP. Must've been quite a bit of work to collect all that past info. Thanks!
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I kinda want to hunt down some of them for the previous years. The problem is that it wouldn't be considered a fair tally because I assume a lot of outlets back them were strictly on Magazines or very early website and I'm sure a lot of those have been lost to time.
There's a Wikipedia page with a good amound of info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_the_Year_awards
But yeah, a lot of those gaming mags of the 80s and 90s are gone.
There are actually a few communities/sites that find and scan PDFs of old gaming magazines. They have huge archives. Could be an interesting exercise… I'd help out if you ever wanted to try!
3djuegos (ES) - Baldur's Gate 3
3djuegos (ES, Reader's Choice) - Baldur's Gate 3
www.3djuegos.com
3djuegos (ES, Reader's Choice) - Baldur's Gate 3
Estos son los mejores videojuegos del año. Todos los lanzamientos galardonados en los Premios 3DJuegos Lenovo 2023
Un año más, desde la redacción hemos querido rendir tributo a los mejores videojuegos de los últimos 12 meses en compañía de vosotros, los lectores, en un...
www.3djuegos.com
Overwatch over Uncharted 4 in 2016, and Sekiro over Death Stranding in 2019. So it is rare, but it can happen. Don't think it'll happen this year tbh.
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Kinda in 2019 (although that in general was a very balanced year as there was no huge standout game)
People were assuming the goty winner was going to be either Death Stranding or RE2, but Sekiro ended up winning. Im pretty sure Death Stranding ended up winning over RE2 in the aggregate by like one site (it says so on both the era thread and on gotypicks), so TGA was a surprise at the time.
If we want to talk about the dark horse of the nominees this year, Id argue its Alan Wake 2. It has already won 4 awards going by this thread including the golden joystick critic award.
2019 will pretty much never have a true consensus pick with how that years award tracking was handled, this was when the two previous GOTY tracking website had a whole beef about not announcing a winner so it was split between RE2/DS at the time but looking at the "big award ceremonies" these were the winners:
TGA - Sekiro
Golden Joystick - Resident Evil 2
BAFTA - Outer Wilds
New York Game Awards - Outer Wilds
NAVGTR - Sekiro
DICE Awards - Untitled Goose Game
GDA - Untitled Goose Game
SXSW Gaming Awards - Sekiro
Japan Game Awards - AC: New Horizons
The year also had significantly less GOTY awards (469) than 2020 (648) and 2018 (518).
I will keep imagining that Outer Wilds was meant to be nominated for the Game Awards instead of Outer Worlds and voters just got them confused 🫠
Thank you for actually getting what I meant instead of overreacting
Huh, didn't know about this. I just went with the one in the OP. Thanks!
Either way the year was definitely very varied, which is (maybe unfortunately, idk) quite a rare occurence. Even in the case where BG3 doesn't absolutely sweep, this year's probably going to be focused heavily on the BG3/TotK/AW2 trio.
Kinda going against your point there? TOTK is the sequel to that game. Mario and Zelda are on a different level than their other series in popularity. Zelda less so than Mario, but every year a 3D Zelda has released it has competed for GOTY (even SS lol). They're two of the most popular franchises in gaming and TOTK was definitely more hyped than BG3. BG3 (for the general populace) came out of nowhere and wowed people.
Already said I don't want to talk about this subject anymore, so I won't go any further than saying that - historically - this isn't true at all.
In 2011, Skyward Sword came in 5th place, with over 100 fewer awards than Skyrim.
In 2006, Twilight Princess came in 3rd, beaten handily by Oblivion with a 14-award lead.
(Both core-focused big-budget WRPGs...)
So whilst, yeah, they do win some GOTY awards - the 'big win' has only really happened in two instances: 1998, and 2017. 19 years apart.
For Mario, the only year it's truly competed is in 2007 with Mario Galaxy, and it still lost to Bioshock. Mario Galaxy 2, 3D World, and Odyssey all failed to get over 30 awards in years where GOTY awards were far, far more prevalent.
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Well of course it's competing for some GOTY awards, but we're (presumably, because it'd be redundant otherwise) talking about the 'big wins' here. A 100-award deficit isn't exactly what I'd call 'competitive', and it definitely isn't the kind of "different level popularity," that Stormblessed refer to the games as having.
I think your overall point (that there is an inherent bias for certain genres in GOTY voting, and perhaps against Japanese games) is accurate, but I think you're stretching things by including Zelda here. It's (now) an open world 3D action adventure game, which is absolutely a genre popular among western GOTY voters (though it admittedly lacks the storytelling emphasis prevalent elsewhere in the genre). It's also one of the most prestigious IPs in all of gaming. "Only" two consensus GOTYs for 3D Zelda is pretty substantial given that only seven of them have ever been made, and every single one of them has featured prominently on GOTY lists. Even Skyward Sword, a game that felt deeply antiquated in 2011, is regularly cited as the worst mainline Zelda game, and launched in a year with competition that included Skyrim and Dark Souls, still managed to earn GOTY from a number of major outlets. Further to this, TOTK is a direct sequel to a game that dominated GOTY voting, and has been more or less the default #1 on GOAT lists for years now.
I also think it's a reach to place BG3 in the same genre as Skyrim or The Witcher 3. Those games have about as much in common with TOTK as they do BG3.
Assuming BG3 wins the bulk of awards as expected, I think it has more to do with how phenomenally successful it's been than it does with genre bias, along with how much TOTK borrows from BOTW (and perhaps also how dated TOTK necessarily is in terms of presentation and performance).
The only bias I can see is a story bias not Nintendo specific. Nintendo does not focus on story in their games and if you look at GOTY winners most have a good story (Elden Ring less so story more so lore). If TOTK had a better told story I think it would have more of a chance, but it's just not a priority for them.
BG3 smells a lot like Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 to me. Part ot why I'm a big fan, lol
It's only a stretch if you think that I'm arguing for Zelda being at a massive disadantage. I'm not stupid, of course I realise that Zelda is a far bigger franchise than most (especially, as you say, now that it's moved to an open-world style). However, right now, it is not the biggest franchise of the year, and as such is not the guaranteed frontrunner that people assumed it would be 6 months ago. That's all that myself and the other poster - before being mocked with 'Niche-Man' replies - were, and are, saying. That, historically, games similar to BG3 are at more of a statistical advantage when it comes to winning these 'big awards' than others, including Zelda.
Same goes for, frankly, every other game on the nominee list. Spider-Man 2 is massive but it is unironically 'Niche-Man' when it comes to the awards season. Super Mario Wonder is a 2D platformer and competing directly against a much bigger sibling in the form of Zelda. Resident Evil 4 is a remake and a horror title; both of which rarely see much attention. Alan Wake 2 is definitely rising up the ranks but it's still a relatively small title for multiple reasons. Despite that, they are all still massive games... hence the GOTY nominations.
I've explained multiple times how similar they are. Yes, BG3 is 'technically' in a different genre but the fundamentals - especially in regards to why people like these titles - are very much the same. From the in-depth character growth, to the sense of exploration and discovery in its worlds, to the dark-ish fantasy settings, to the cinematic camera system for dialogue; the vast majority of the praise I see for BG3 relates to how it improves and expands on exactly those elements.
Essentially, pretending like they're not part of the same lineage just feels like trying to defend the game purely because of this perception that saying this:
and this:
share a few similarities is a 'bad thing.' If I were using these comparisons to actively criticise another game - see the many Starfield/BG3 comparisons in this and other threads - then nobody would care and it'd be generally agreed upon that they're part of the same genre/family of genres. But because I'm being perceived as negative here, it's the case that none of these games are in any way similar and that BG3 stands almost totally alone.
And I must reiterate, I am not being negative here. I'm really not. It's seriously amazing how Larian has married the previously niche CRPG genre with modern WRPG staples to produce something that's accessible whilst still keeping the 'heart' of what people love about CRPGs. Like Elden Ring and BotW before it, BG3 shows how, even if very few of the ingredients to your game are truly 'new', the way you use those ingredients is what truly matter.
It can be both. Remember, the context of this is a bunch of mocking 'Niche-Man' (ironically, Spider-Man 2 is an even bigger underdog than Nintendo in this year's race) replies to an innocuous post that simply stated that BG3 has more going for it than TotK in terms of genre, developer, and so on. That doesn't mean BG3 doesn't deserve its success; it just means that, yes, the game has more going for it at the moment than other titles do. There's no need to look at things in such a black-and-white manner. Something can deserve its success whilst still enjoying the benefits of being part of something that people generally enjoy.
Then you agree with me that TotK is at a disadvantage compared to BG3 because of its lesser story. That's literally all this is about.
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I agree with that (and think it is good cuz I love story in games), but in your replies to me at least story wasn't mentioned.
Yeah, true. I definitely agree that story is a fairly significant factor when it comes to winning awards. Though story isn't the only thing; it's just another factor in the great list of factors that can potentially determine these big GOTY winners. If story were the biggest thing, then Disco Elysium would've come higher than 5th in 2019 lol.
Hell, one of these factors is simply when a game releases. The best argument for why Zelda might actually have a big advantage this year is not 'because Nintendo' or even 'because Zelda', but because 8/9 Game Awards winners, and 13 of 19 consensus winners since 2003 (70%) released before August.
I think you perhaps misread the tone of my post, or the above may simply be the result of you responding more generally to a number of interlocutors rather than me specifically, but just to be clear - I don't think you're being negative here, nor do I dispute that there are similarities between BG3 and previous GOTY winners like Skyrim and The Witcher 3. But I do think you're ignoring that there are traits shared between those titles and open world Zelda, as well. Skyrim, in fact, is one of the few stated influences on BOTW. Some of the similarities you explicitly mention (sense of exploration and discovery, dark-ish fantasy setting) can likewise be applied to TOTK.
I just don't see how genre, however broadly defined, is a factor in whether TOTK or BG3 winds up being the consensus choice here. At the beginning of the year, TOTK was the presumptive GOTY favorite while BG3 was barely even on the radar, which lines up with BOTW dominating in 2017 while D:OS2 was a complete non-factor despite superlative reviews. Voters/media outlets/consumers were aware of the genre each game was in when those pre-release expectations were set.
As mentioned, I do think TOTK faces certain disadvantages here (targeting highly outdated hardware, heavily borrowing/reusing content and ideas from its predecessor, and its general disregard for storytelling). But I don't think the genre or franchise it's a part of are among them.
I see you having no faith in our lord and savior Pikwin 4 and weep.