Well see. Rachet and returnal are locks regardless of their ratings.
Look at death stranding and tsushima.
How many xbox games got nominated since it’s inception? Halo 3 I think.
I see Ratchet and Psychonauts 2 being locks, and would put Returnal where you put Psychonauts 2.
Xbox literally had 5 studios in the xbox one generation - 343’s Halo was a decade long disaster, Mojang with Minecraft let’s face it is not winning GOTY in anything, Lionhead shutting down after a failed WIP online Fable game, Coalition with Gears doing alright being more Gears, Rare with Sea of Thieves launching as a disaster and Forza (Playground as a second party) being a racing game making it even less of a contendor in these conversations even if the Horizon games have been rated consistently high, and Turn10 with racing sims, yeah I will steal a million dollars and transfer to you right now if that is even possible to win GOTY.
But if you count XGS+Bethesda now, the studios under this umbrella have not just had nominations in the past but have won GOTYs as well. Bethesda was winning back to back before 76. Starfield could be return to that form for all we know. Obsidian had Outer Worlds nominated in 2019 while on an indie budget, imagine TOW2 now with MS money, that’s ignoring other projects they’re also doing like Avowed. Hellblade 2 will be that award zeitgeist game everyone and their sad dad will pay attention to, there’s sooo many other games in the pipeline, so yeah, it’s not at all definitive that xbox will never get a GOTY this gen.
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Microsoft hasn’t had any exclusives that are top tier game of the year level since Xbox 360. I mean come on. For those who’ll say Forza Horizon, as excellent as that series is, it’s just a racing/sports game and no racing/sports should ever win overall game of the year in my opinion. Category absolutely but not overall. I can see Forza Horizon 5 winning Xbox platform game of the year. That would make sense since it’s going to be their highest rated exclusive of the year and I don’t believe that a multi-platform game should ever win platform game of the year as that makes zero sense to me.
My guess for the top 6 games will be -
- Hitman 3
- Returnal
- Resident Evil VIII: Village
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
- Psychonauts 2
- Deathloop
I can see it going to any single one of them.
For Microsoft and Xbox, the next game of the year contender for them will be next year with Starfield barring a delay or technical issues. If it’s a superb game and highly polished, Starfield will be the favorite to win 2022 GOTY at TGA and overall.
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I just beat Fallout New Vegas again a few minutes ago on steam, sided with Caesar for the fun of it.
I much preferred The Outer Worlds over Fallout 4. I’m really looking forward to Starfield next year and I think it’ll be the game that will be a huge refresher from Bethesda Game Studios. I’ll be honest, unlike a lot of the reception I’ve been seeing on this site I believe that Bethesda/Xbox haven’t been advertising Starfield enough. I would’ve loved to see some early gameplay with a disclaimer at the bottom or whatever.
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Returnal will win more goty awards than psyhonauts. I’m willing to have bet on that.
hard disagree. You’re already predisposed to exclude certain genres from the GOTY “prestige” which isn’t justified. FH5 can indeed be nominated for Game of the Year in my eyes. There is a difference between saying FH5 won’t be nominated because it’s a racing game and saying FH5 shouldn’t be nominated because it’s a racing game, former is rather reasonable, the latter isn’t.
There are few games from the 2000s as memorable and impactful to me and several other people as the Black Box Era NFS games, but they don’t count apparently cuz no idea why.
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Gears 5 should have had some mentions. Was better than any shooter Sony have ever put out.
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I don’t know about Gears 5 but I liked Hivebusters. Gears as a franchise of course inspired a lot of Naughty Dog cover shooter design, that much is palpable.
edit: your point was winning GOTY, not nominations, but my point stands.
I am. I would never include sports/racing games, online MP/co-op focused games and probably a few other genres because pound for pound, they’re not the best overall game of the year. If Madden was a 90+ every year, do you think it should get nominated and win? I don’t. No freaking way.
Sports/racing games are great and all that but they do the same thing every game. Where’s the story, characters, combat, etc.? Why am I always in a car or on the field catching a ball? See my point?
I simply expect game of the year to offer me much more than a sports/racing game does. Also, I look at it this way, if a game like Forza Horizon 5 for example was to win over Halo Infinite. I’m sorry but that’s embarrassing to me because how does a game like Halo Infinite lose to a racing/sports game? Just no.
In 2022, imagine GT 7 beating out Starfield, Horizon 2 or perhaps God of War or BOTW 2. That would be beyond horrible in my opinion.
Of course, while it will win a few game of the year awards overall, Forza Horizon 5 isn’t going to even be nominated for The Game Awards. But to each their own.
Overwatch won in 2016, over cinematic action adventures like UC4 too that is.
Rest of your post I’m sorry but it is waaay too riddled with such a restrictive view of gaming, I don’t know where to start. Very little reasoning and just a whole lot of incredulity “like how could X win over Y, I can’t even imagine, that’d be embarrassing”.
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Overwatch was groundbreaking for a multplayer game
But hitman and doom were robbed hard. Very hard.
Uncharted 4 still won majority awards as predictable and laughable as thst was.
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Overwatch won at TGA but Uncharted 4 was the overall game of the year. It wasn’t Overwatch. This is why I don’t go by TGA. It’s just ONE award and it’s more centered around hype, money, holiday sales and marketing than anything else. When you have hollywood stars and bands, yeah, the games are NOT the focus regardless of what anyone says. Plus, half the awards including major ones like RPG of the year, are usually done in like 2 seconds or were done off-screen.
Thankfully, I see TGA as just what I said and it’s nothing more than a single award. I haven’t taken TGA seriously in years because once I learned there’s literally hundreds of game of the year awards so why would I go based on just one award show?
No apologies needed. It’s just that im 43 and I look at all of this differently. Take 1996 for example. Imagine a Madden game being rated like 98 and beating out Super Mario 64 which was revolutionary at the time and is STILL the 3D platformer in which all games that followed it are judged. If you can’t beat out a 25 year old platformer, you’re obviously not up to par.
Gears 5 was lucky to have any mentions beyond technical achievements. The campaign was a buggy mess, the story 2 games in makes no sense, the open world segments are irrelevant time wasters and aside from Laura Bailey as Kait I cant fathom any reason it should had been given a nomination. Maybe for the weirdest trailer reveals surely.
??!
I played it with GPU before official release or any patch. I remember one thing which was at one area where we had to get on an elevator after fighting a boss, my group stopped following me after killing the boss in there. When I reached the elevator by myself it loaded a cutscene and they were back and everything worked no problem after that. That’s it. I finished the game again later and didn’t face anything buggy.
MP games, racing games can just be as influential. Mario Kart was very influential in arcade racing design, which proliferated into other games and genres and continues to till this day. Halo 2 literally defined console multiplayer and matchmaking. “But Halo has campaign” Halo is embedded in culture and remembered largely for its lan parties, couch co-op, etc more than the few hours of campaign people got with those games, no matter how good they were. You could not separate if you tried the social aspect of Halo MP from its industry defining success and being some of the highest rated, highest earning, highest award winning games in gaming history.
98 rated Madden might not have been as influential as Mario 64, but the difference is I wouldn’t be principally against it like you are being, that’s the gist of the whole argument. Using Madden here is also a strawman, cuz you’re excluding a lot more games/genres than just yearly sports ones.
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I’m mostly with you. I think the whole “The Game Awards hates Xbox” thing is ridiculous. But game critics definitely have their favorite genres. And it just so happened last gen that Sony made a lot of that genre. It’s not about the console, it’s about the type of game.
I actually meant Gears 4. 5 now is incredible. 5 is still better than anything Sony put out in 2019.