Fair enough. The actual definition of “RPG” has always been pretty contentious. It seems like any game with a progression system is called an RPG these days. I’ve never considered Souls-like games to be RPGs but apparently a lot of people do.

I guess the key difference here is that the BAFTAs are an actual awards show whereas TGA is a marketing show with a few awards thrown in between the trailers for upcoming games.

Yeah, there are ton of great games that are ignored because TGA’s categories are overly broad. When you have excessively broad categories, the games with the most marketing and biggest budgets will always be nominated over the smaller, more obscure titles regardless of actual quality.

I know this is a gaming site, so the articles are always going to be specific to games.

How are Cities Skylines 2 and CoH3 nominees when they are both widely regarded as disappointing sequels..? I’d replace those with Jagged Alliance 3, Aliens: Dark Descent, Age of Wonders 4, Stranded: Alien Dawn, etc.

Yeah, that’s why the indie categories should just be removed. TGA should replace those categories with more genre categories (puzzle, stealth, platformer, etc). For example, off the top of my head, five puzzle nominees would be Talos Principle 2, Cocoon, Viewfinder, Trine 5 and Chants of Sennaar. They could even merge…

They really need to get rid of the indie categories and just allow indie games to be nominated in any category. For one, most of the games they have listed in the indie categories aren’t even indie. They had publishers. Secondly, indie doesn’t always mean low budget and/or production values. BG3 is an indie game. It…

None of these layoffs affected actual developers. It was just marketing and biz dev, I believe.

It’s not a slow year for RPGs at all. Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty, Colony Ship, WH40K: Rogue Trader, Sea of Stars, FF16, Diablo 4, Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn, Wartales, Persona 5 Tactica, Star Ocean: The Second Story R, For the King 2, etc.

I think he’s suggesting that TotK felt more like an expansion pack than a sequel.

I feel like the exclusion of that game is entirely political. The game was a critical and commercial AAA success so for it to be completely absent from any of the award categories seems rather dubious. It’s much more likely that the TGA board just wanted to avoid any potential controversy.

Honestly, I’m surprised the Crown Channel even lasted this long. It was dead on arrival. The other affected department was “Game Growth,” whatever that means. I assume marketing? Biz dev maybe? Either way, it doesn’t seem like any of the game development teams were impacted by these layoffs. It still sucks for…

I think the non-procedural quests are generally pretty solid. However, exploration has always been the strongest part of BGS’ games so the fact that they basically ruined it in Starfield is a huge downside.

*quickly glances at the games featured in the various award categories*

That’s part of the issue. The other issue is that there’s just nothing interesting to find. BGS made a handful of unique POIs, then copied and pasted them across thousands of planets. Once you realize this, the appeal of exploration goes out the window because you know you’re just going to “discover” things you’ve…

These award shows are marketing shows and most indie games have relatively little marketing compared to AAA games. If you’re looking for obscure gems to gain the recognition they deserve, The Game Awards isn’t going to provide that.

Once again, it’s not free if you have to pay for access. You can’t access these games without an active Netflix subscription and that costs money.

Developing a three hour campaign with AAA production values takes way more than 6 months, even if you’re reusing a lot of existing code and assets.

Those chuds spend a lot of money, though. The devs would love it if they could work on new IP but at the end of the day, Activision is a business and CoD is best for their business. That’s why MS won’t change anything related to CoD. They won’t risk hurting their cash cow.

Think he means that a lot games aspire to be slightly interactive movies, which is mostly true of walking sims. They don’t provide players with any meaningful agency so you’re basically just performing perfunctory interactions in order to advance the narrative.