The Game Awards

Shadow Drop Paladin and Game Awards

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Yesterday was Geoff Keighley show of madness known as The Game Awards, and I was motivated to watch because there was a Path of Exile II mtx to be farmed as a twitch drop. I stuck around and watched the entire thing because if I was already a few hours into it… I might as well see the end. Prior to the show we had seen rumors swirling around Diablo IV and the fact that the Paladin was going to be previewed… which is why they had such a god awful league start time of starting up after the show finished airing. What I did not expect was the fact that they shadow dropped the entire Paladin class, pending you were willing to preorder the next expansion. The only sad thing about this… is that because they so hamfistedly planned their league start to stomp right on top of the much more exciting Path of Exile II league start… that I am not sure how many people are actually going to care about this. Blizzard has always had this way of trying to piss on the news from other studios to steal their thunder… but I hate to tell them that they are no longer the massive juggernaut that they once were. Path of Exile 1 and 2… and hell even Last Epoch are doing way more exciting things than Diablo IV is… so they will always be relegated to third or fourth fiddle when it comes to the ARPG community.

I of course fell for the madness and pre-purchased the expansion so I could poke my head in and try out the Paladin. So far I would say this class feels way more akin to the Diablo III Crusader than it does the Diablo II Paladin. The naming is largely just semantics and determins which of the holy orders the character comes from in lore more than anything. I am not shocked they went back to the Paladin as the name, but I am happy that they seem to be following the pattern set forth by the Crusader. That was probably my favorite character from Diablo III, and it makes me wonder if there is going to be an equivalent to Thorns Invoker in this game, which was my single favorite build. Right now I am leaning into the lunge attack that acts as a gap closer and the orbiting hammer throw that shatters into more hammers when it hits things. So far it seems plenty strong but I will be curious to see what endgame builds end up looking like on this class. However I am probably only going to play this over lunch, because once POE2 drops I am going to be focused on that.

Now you are going to get a bunch of trailers and me talking about them. The thing that I am absolutely the most hype about is Control Resonant. The only downside there is that it does not appear like we are playing as Jesse Faden this time. Instead we are going to be playing as her brother. Something has gone horribly wrong at The Oldest House and Jesse appears to be missing. So now we get to go on an adventure to save reality…. and I am so fucking here for this. I love Remedy games, and quite possibly… they are the studio that I now look forward to the most when they drop something new. They are a surreal feast of visuals and the storytelling and lore goes so deep that it feeds my hunger in those departments too. All of the Remedy games are connected… even though they cannot officially be so due to the weird history of how they released titles for various studios. If you ever want to deep dive into this madness… I highly suggest you play everything they have ever released.

In things that I absolutely did not expect… we are getting a sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic games featuring one of the folks from that era Casey Hudson. I have so much hope pinned on this nonsense, and the thing that bolsters me is the fact that it is not coming from Electronic Arts. I realize this is probably five years out at this point… but I can have hope… please god leave me with some shreds of hope. Knights of the Old Republic will always be one of my favorite games to have ever existed, and it is my favorite Star Wars era. I want to be positive about something for once.

Pivoting from the remants of Bioware… to a spiritual successor to Bioware… we got another trailer for Exodus. The disappointing thing about this is that we now know this is not coming until 2027. This game looks amazing and feels like they are leaning hard into the Mass Effect formula. Please god let this be good, because I also need this. Bioware is in shambles, and I have very little faith that Mass Effect 4 is going to be any good. I am okay with starting fresh with a new franchise and new characters to care about…. but what I really want is that good good ship of fools gameplay that Mass Effect provided. Give me a ship, and an interesting crew, and a bunch of cool missions to go on. Let me romance weird aliens and line the halls of my ship with all manner of miscreants. I am probably going to be there on day one if they manage to pull off even half of the joy that was Mass Effect 2.

So something you need to know… is that I fucking love Ma Dong-seok. I have loved him since Train to Busan, and if you have never seen that film… stop what you are doing and go watch it now. Wierd Yakuza adjascent game featuring Ma Dong-seok as the main character? Sign me the hell up. That is all honestly.

Another game that I did not know anything about going into the show was No Law. Mostly I am here for the cyberpunk dystopia. It seems to be some sort of a shooter, and depending on how that plays out I am here for it. Mostly I am just into the visuals of this game. I am hoping it ends up being fun, and not chock full of weird microtransactions and AI Slop since it is coming out from Krafton.

There is a “somehow sebulba has returned” meme floating around and it is delightful. A game that I did not know that I needed was what feels like a spiritual successor to Star Wars Pod Racer on the Nintendo 64. What is cool though is it seems like it is not just pod racers, but also featuring a bunch of speeders. I love a good big dumb racing game, and I am hoping this provides. If nothing else the visuals look really cool.

For the most disturbing game trailer, that goes to Larian for their next Divinity game. They are supposedly taking everything that they have learned making Baldur’s Gate III and then bringing that home to their own Divinity setting. So expect a rich isolemtric CRPG with a truly staggering number of choices. Maybe this will prompt me to actually go back and play Original Sin 1 and 2 so I can get caught up on the lore of this setting. I played Divinity 1 and 2 and loved them, but never could seem to get into Original Sin. If you needed a trailer where children revel while a man is burned alive… while also simultaneously a bunch of random people are fornicating in the front row… you might need to get your head checked. Regardless it was certainly memorable. I loved Baldur’s Gate 3, and I have loved various other Larian games in the past so I am hoping this brings me back into the fold.

Another thing that I did not expect is that we are getting a Total War game set in the Warhammer 40k universe. This is especially confusing because we are just about to get another Dawn of War game, which is also an RTS. It seems like these two games would cannibalize audience from each other. It could simply be that Dawn of War 3 is much closer to release and this is much further out, and we won’t be seeing the Total War game for a few years. Either way I am interested. I’ve heard the Total War Warhammer Fanatasy games were great, though I have never played them.

The last game that I am going to highlight is Highguard, which is a really quirky looking competitive shooter. It sort of reminds me of a bunch of other games that I have played in the past mutated into a single experience. I am not entirely against competitive shooters, but I want the playing field to be level if possible and for there to be other objectives that we are focused on rather than just racking up kills. My favorite competitive shooters were the Enemy Terrritory series with both Wolfenstein and Quake games set in it. This sort of feels like a spiritual successor to that where you seem to be focused on holding objectives and setting up attacks like the siege tower that is built that the group is obviously escorting across the map. I am really interested to see how this plays it. It screams hero shooter to me, and that is ultimately going to determine how much I like it… because if you keep having to buy the latest and greatest hero it is going to limit my joy for the long term.

If you missed the show they released a 4k 60fps version this morning, but be warned it is a 3 hour and 35 minute long commitment. These shows always overstay their welcome, and while I had fun for the first hour or so… I was mostly just wanting to hit the fast foward button from that point on. You truly are better off just checking the YouTube page the next morning and cherry picking the trailers that you want to watch. The award portion of the show always feels like an afterthought, and there is generally one game that wins everything… for example I am pretty sure that Expedition 33 won every award it was up for. I like that there exists something like this, that is now the focal point of the gaming year…. especially with E3 long dead and gone… but in truth I would rather have an event like this once a quarter… that is half as long than have this one big dumb stupidly long event at the end of the year.

Did you watch The Game Awards? What games were you excited about that I did not cover? Drop me a line below.

Game Releases of 2023

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One of the things that I often do at the beginning of a year is to try and project out some of the things that I think I might be interested in on the upcoming release radar. I’ve not done that at all this year because I have been overwhelmingly obsessed with the current Path of Exile league. I thought it might be interesting to peer into the future and talk about some of the games I am interested in that have release dates for the common year, or at least look likely to release in one form or another. The further into the list, we get the more likely these things are to be bumped because they don’t have firm dates associated with them. There are going to be some big titles missing from the list that you might feel is important, because this is a deeply personal outing. For example the new Zelda game, I will likely ignore it until the emulators can run it and I can disable weapon durability because that construct ruined the first game for me.

Atomic Heart – February 21

Atomic Heart is one of those games that I have been amped for since I first saw it in a trailer presentation. It looks like a soviet block spin on the Fallout games, with weird robotics and psychic phenomena. I am largely on board for all of this. I fully expect it to have some jank but also I’ve played and loved Bethesda games so I am mostly used to that. I’ve played the Metro games and they were for the most part a giant mess, and I still enjoyed them. I have high hopes but also they have been tempered by past experience with games wanting to be the Russian Fallout.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor – March 17

Jedi Fallen Order was one of my favorite games when it came out. It proved to me the possibility of what a “soulslike” game could be if it had a difficulty slider. If you want the Dark Souls experience you play it on hard, and if you want just a fun narrative romp you play it on easy. I played the game happily on easy and enjoyed the hell out of the experience. I am looking forward to another outing as Cal Kestis, and I really hope that at some point this character is going to intersect with some of the Disney live shows because it seems too damned good not to use given that Cameron Monaghan is right there ready to go.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores – April 19

I am throwing this out here because it has a fixed date, but I have to be honest… I am not sure if I will play this when it releases. I never actually finished Forbidden West, and in large part, it is because I don’t really play consoles that often. I would far rather do what I did with Zero Dawn, and play the expansion whenever the PC release comes out because playing this game with a mouse and keyboard is so much more enjoyable than playing it with a controller. We will see if I stick to my guns on this one, and while I enjoyed HFW it is nowhere near as compelling as the first game for me. Everything about how Aloy moved and controlled was so much better, but the story was just less interesting and didn’t really push me forward as fastly. Don’t get me wrong I loved all of the world-building and I look forward to playing this on PC whenever it releases there.

Redfall – May 2

We got new gameplay yesterday in the Microsoft presentation, and I have to say I am probably more interested now than I was before. It feels like this is going to be interesting as a completely single-player game, and also really interesting as more of a co-op Left 4 Dead type experience. I am going to have to sort out ways to be online at the same time as the rest of AggroChat folks to be able to experience this together. It honestly reminded me a bit of how State of Decay 2 feels, where you have bases that you operate out of and then go out into dangerous areas to collect resources and complete missions.

Diablo IV – June 6

I am throwing this on the list because I am very interested, but also very conflicted about it. Blizzard continues to not exactly be an exemplar for things that I want to engage with right now. I was hoping that by now we would be further along in the Microsoft acquisition and that Bobby Kotick would be on his way out the door. I want to play this, but I am not sure if I can play this. What is there looks interesting so far and I am very interested to see how a “post Path of Exile” Diablo game operates. I was burnt so heavily on Diablo Immortal as was pretty much everyone else, and my confidence levels are lower than they normally would be.

Final Fantasy XVI – June 22

I am exceptionally bummed that this is a PlayStation Exclusive. I would far rather play this on the PC full stop and it is dumb that I can’t. That said there is no way in hell that I am not going to play a mainline PC game that was crafted by the same team that gave me the FFXIV story experience. ARR to Endwalker was the best Final Fantasy experience I have ever had, and as a result, I am completely going to “day one” this game and probably “no life” it. I am in fact an acolyte of Yoshi P, and am willing to sign up for any nonsense that he is involved with. I mean it looks fucking gorgeous so there is also that. I am going to have to drag my PS5 back upstairs so that I can have undivided access to it.

Arc Raiders – TBA 2023

We’ve not seen a lot about this game since the Game Awards in 2021, but recently it has apparently been confirmed to be a 2023 release coming to Playstation, Xbox, and PC including Gamepass. I mean I love me some looter shooter action, so you know I am going to check this out regardless of how non sequitur using a Robyn song about masturbation is for the trailer. I loved the 1970s gritty science fiction vibe about it that a lot of games have been adopting. We still don’t know a ton about how the gameplay is going to unfold but this is firmly in my wheelhouse so I will be watching as a proper release date is assigned.

Hellboy Web of Wyrd – TBA 2023

I love Hellboy and I love the art style of Mike Mignola so I am completely onboard with a game that features a reasonable adaptation of both. We have no release date for this but it is supposedly coming during the calendar year. I kind of expect this to be a shorter very narrative-focused game. It has a Steam page that appears to be active, so here is hoping that it comes out on PC at the same time as everywhere else. This does not exactly seem like the sort of game that Sony would pay for exclusivity to.

Nightingale – TBA 2023 ???

We got an updated trailer for Nightingale at The Game Awards, and it gives me hope that maybe we will see it this year. This is probably the title that I consider to be the most likely to slide to 2024 however given that we’ve not really seen anything resembling public testing. If this was active, I figure by now someone would have broken NDA and leaked some footage of it. Because we have not seen that, it makes me think that it might still be “in progress” to a point of not really being ready to ship soon. I was deeply suspicious of this game until it was confirmed to be a purely PVE experience. I am going to play it when it comes out because I am here for the victorian gaslight-type setting.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – TBA 2023

This is another one that I question if we are actually going to see this year. CDPR has had a less-than-spotless record lately with being able to release things in the timeframe that they originally expect. We’ve heard that this is a bigger DLC than all of the DLC for Witcher 3 combined, and I know for certain when it lands I will be starting over Cyberpunk from scratch in order to be able to play my way through this seamlessly with the rest of the content. I love Cyberpunk 2077 and I cannot imagine that I won’t also love this expansion content.

Alan Wake 2 – TBA 2023

This game was announced at the 2021 Game Awards and so far we have not gotten much more information on it than this original trailer. At the end of this trailer, it shows a 2023 release date, but given the radio silence so far… I am not sure if that is going to be a realistic date given that everything takes slightly longer than anyone originally expects. When this game drops… I will stop whatever I am doing and play it. Last year’s journey into the “Remedyverse” has turned me into a dedicated fan of their particular style of narrative fiction. I am excited as hell to see what a Remedy game looks like post-Control which for me at least was their magnum opus. I am hoping to see even more blending of the settings and maybe have Jesse Faden play a role in this game.

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn – TBA 2023

I am throwing this game on the list because it looks interesting, and I know for certain it will be a Game Pass title when it finally comes out. That lowers the bar of entry enough to make me want to give it a spin. It looks like a souls-like, and I don’t exactly have a great track record with those. I don’t go in for frustration gaming. If I am playing a game for the story, I want to see the story play out without a lot of false steps. If I am playing a game for the mechanics, then that is a totally different type of experience for me. I’ve never really managed to bridge the gap in a souls game to where I actually care about the mechanics and I mostly have played them because I am curious about the world. Flintlock looks really cool but I am also throwing it a bit of side-eye, but will check it out for free when it launches on GamePass.

There are a bunch of titles that I opted not to include. Destiny 2 for example has a brand-new expansion landing on February 28th for example. However, I’ve grown away from that game because I hated the content vaulting removing a bunch of things I loved, and have never really reached a point of forgiveness. I’m also deeply interested in Death Stranding 2, but somehow doubt we will see it released this year. These are the games that I am looking forward to the most, but given my track record, there are going to be a bunch of things that spring up along the way that catches my attention.

What games are you looking forward to the most this year?

Should We Care About the Awards?

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Yesterday Keza MacDonald wrote a piece for her Pushing Buttons column in The Guardian posing the question if there should be more of a focus on The Awards portion of the Video Game awards rather than the extreme focus on trailers. Last week I wrote about how much fun I had watching the show with a few friends while hanging out on Discord and I can tell you… it wasn’t the oppressively long Christopher Judge speech that excited us, it was all of the shiny new trailers. Granted at the time it felt like that speech lasted about twenty minutes, but it seems like in truth it was somewhere in the neighborhood of nine, but it did absolutely destroy the momentum of an otherwise delightful evening. So when posed the question if the show should focus more on the awards I have to tell you a very clear and resounding no.

Award shows are generally awful. The viewership has been in a freefall for decades, and I think more than anything this is due to the impact of the internet. When you can just find out the winners the day after the show… why watch the show? I remember as a kid watching these not necessarily because I wanted to… but because there was a significant lack of other things to watch at the same time when confronted with my rural existence and having only three channels. As an adult, however, I cannot tell you the last time I watched part of one of these award shows. That said I make a point of setting aside time every year to watch The Game Awards live broadcast, because it effectively sets the tone for the next year’s game announcements.

The other problem with Awards shows is that they are generally lagging behind the trends, yet still trying desperately to act like cool kids and pander to them. I remember the exact moment I stopped caring about Awards shows… the year was 1989 and the Grammy’s added a new category for “Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance”. I tuned in largely to watch Metallica who was going to be doing a live performance of One. We all assumed they would win because the And Justice for All album was such a powerhouse. They even managed to get good presenters, Lita Ford and Alice Cooper. Then I remember my jaw hitting the floor when the award went to Jethro Tull… some fucked up jazz fusion holdout from the 70s. I’ve since as an adult listened to Tull and it is “fine” but not really my jam, but I remember holding a grudge against the band and the Grammys for years as a result of this.

I think it is telling that the highlight of the Oscars is generally the live musical performances of songs from films. For years they have leaned hard on trying to make the entire proceedings more entertaining and not just a sequence of reading cards and playing brief clips of films. Whether or not the Oscars are a success is generally entirely dependent upon whoever they got to run the show, which is generally speaking a comedian. Basically, I think there is a disconnect between being a serious awards show and also being something that is fun for the audience to watch at home. As much as we might appreciate the effort that goes into creating the things we love… it is so much better to consume the Monday after by reading a quick synopsis rather than listening to yet another “trying to thank everyone” speech.

So while I love Christopher Judge as Kratos… and loved the hell out of him as Teal’c before that… I have no interest in listening to him ponder the success of his role when I could be watching trailers instead. That probably sounds harsh but it is the truth. I want him to be recognized for the effort that he has done, but also my spending $70 on a video game is already doing that. I think the harsh truth is that the Awards are for the Industry, but the broadcast is for the people. Give the people what they want, and at least in the case of the Game Awards… it is more video game trailers. We have long joked about how the entire show is just a bunch of trailers with occasional brief intermissions to hand out some awards, and that is honestly a good thing. In a world without E3 as a cogent thing… The Game Awards have sprung forth to fill that gap and give us our Christmas Wishbook experience of pondering the shiny things that are just beyond the horizon.

At least that is my take on this. I am sure there will be many others. If you have a particular stance, feel free to drop me a line below.

The Game Awards 2022

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I spent my night like so many gamers did while trying to maintain a connection to the Game Awards stream on both Steam.tv and Twitch.tv so I could earn potential rewards in both locations. I think everyone was out chasing the possibility of winning a Steam Deck, and it seems as though maybe Valve had some technical difficulties with this giveaway because about 20 minutes into the show they finally seemed to start announcing the winners. I did not win a Steam Deck which is probably a good thing because I already have one… but I promise it would have gone to a good home if I did end up with a second one. Here is hoping someone out there that I know actually managed to snag one.

We all know we tune into “The Game Awards” for the cavalcade of trailers because the rewards themselves are largely inconsequential. They will feature some esports people you have never heard of and a bunch of games that you didn’t play… with a single AAA game winning almost every single award. This year I thought it was going to be all about Elden Ring but it seems that God of War Ragnarok was the main character of the evening. What was significantly different this year however is how I commented about what I was seeing. Normally speaking on a game show like this I would have Twitter open and keep a running sequence of commentary going along with all of my other friends doing the same thing. Since I am no longer on Twitter however a few of us opted for something different.

I spent a delightful evening hanging out with Arkenor, Scopique, and Tipa as we attempted to all stay in synch while hanging out on voice chat while watching the show. It did not work as planned. The original goal was to have everyone tune in to discord which would in theory rebroadcast the same stream at the same time to all of us so we would be able to comment on the same things. What ended up happening instead is that the rebroadcast was wigging out for a few people, which lead some of us to be watching YouTube, others on Twitch, and myself trying to keep tabs on the Steam version of the broadcast. This caused some hilariously out-of-sequence comment moments, but in spite of all of that, it was a heck of a lot of fun. This is definitely the most enjoyable way to watch a big corporate games presentation.

There were way too many things covered to talk about in a blog post, so here are some of my rapid-fire comments about the things that really stood out to me on a personal level.

Dead Cells Return to Castlevania

You had me at Castlevania. I enjoy Dead Cells but have not played it anywhere near as much as I should. Once this DLC drops I will do my best to remedy this failure. I have so many fond memories of the Belmonts, and Alucard, and count Symphony of the Night as my one true favorite game of all time. There was no way I was not going t o play this.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

This looks really interesting. It gives me deep Witcher vibes as maybe a more spiritualist/druidic take on that franchise. The trailer definitely piqued my interest enough to wishlist this. My hope is it feels like the big open-world witcher nonsense that I love so much. It definitely seems like the sort of game I would go in for.

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd

Scopique and I were talking about this during the show, but we did not realize that we had apparently not gotten a Hellboy game before now. This is apparently not true and that there were two games previously… one in 2000 and one in 2004 but I remember the existence of neither. What impressed me about this game particularly is how closely it seemed to replicate the unique art stylings of Mike Mignola. I love Hellboy and more particularly I love the Hellboy comics. I will be watching this game closely.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor

I don’t have this problem when I am playing the game but in person… I cannot see Cameron Monaghan as anything other than his character from Shameless which is a hilarious show if you have never watched it. I loved Jedi Fallen Order so this is absolutely going to be a “day one drop everything else” type game for me. I will be picking it up on the PC and I will be ignoring again the warnings against playing with a keyboard and mouse because that control scheme greatly improved my enjoyment of the first title. I will also be playing this on a low difficulty because at that point it no longer feels like a “soulslike”.

Judas

Bioshock in Outer Space? Yes please, sign me the fuck up. Like if you had told me nothing else about this game but that elevator pitch you would have had me on board with it. I loved the Bioshock games and played the first two multiple times. There was something about Infinite that made me less interested in the replay. Regardless I am extremely interested in this game.

Dune Awakening

Okay, I love the Dune franchise and have been wanting to have a Dune-based MMORPG since I first started playing these games in the 2000s. There were a few rumored projects that went nowhere and now we have Funcom carrying this banner forward. Funcom is both the company behind Secret World that I loved and Conan that I had no interest in. I am hoping this does not end up being a forced PVP murder box and has a way in which I can play it in a purely PVE-focused nature. I am not super optimistic however because I am almost certain that faction lines will be drawn crossed the Great Houses of the Landsraad.

Hades II

I have to be honest, this reveals somewhat shocked me. When I saw Supergiant scroll across the screen I remember commenting to my friends that I wondered what genre they would be tackling this time. Basically, up until this point, each time Supergiant released a game it would dive into a new style of gameplay. Bastion was mostly a Zelda-like beat-em-up, Transistor was a strategic dungeon crawler, Pyre was a story-driven “sportsball” game, and Hades was maybe the purest version of the rogue-lite I had seen in a while. I guess Hades was just too popular not to warrant a direct sequel. I am on board for more Hades world from a different perspective, but also I am kinda hoping that the studio has gotten big enough to have folks also be working on another quirky venture into a new genre.

Death Stranding 2

This was my highlight of the evening without a doubt. I loved Death Stranding and I played it at a very specific moment in life, during the lockdowns of the pandemic… and as a result, the storyline felt deeply poignant. I want to know more about this world and it seems like we are going to get that. I became way the heck too attached to BB, which I know is a bit weird. I am just hoping we get a simultaneous release on PC and Console because I have no interest in trying to play this with a controller. It was excellent with a mouse and keyboard and I want more of that.

Reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton

The highlight of the night however was at the very end of the show, when a kid seemingly snuck up on stage along with the confused developers of FROM Software. This gave The Game Awards their “Soy Bomb” moment, so I guess they have officially arrived on the world’s stage. Essentially after the devs gave their comments, the kid sneaks up to the microphone and in a faux broken English accent he dedicates the award to his “reformed orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton”. According to Geoff Keighley, he was arrested… which I guess is a bit sad because it added a moment of true levity to an otherwise stuffy occasion. There is another twitter thread indicating he did something similar on Info Wars with a Free Taiwan message, but I have not been able to find a clip of whatever that was. The same thread also indicates that he had planned this ahead of time.

Did you watch The Game Awards? What were your highlights? Drop me a line below.