This year’s Game Awards took place Thursday as a socially-distant event, with hosts Geoff Keighley and Sydnee Goodman presiding over an evening of announcements, teasers, trailers, and occasionally, even the presentation of an award. World premieres came by the dozen, with Nintendo unveiling a new fighter for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, news of a return to Microsoft’s long-dormant Perfect Dark series, a Vin Diesel-fronted sequel to the popular dinosaur game Ark: Survival Evolved, and more.
Much like the Super Bowl, the real reason to watch the Game Awards has traditionally been to see the announcements and world premieres. This year, without live speeches or a studio audience, those announcements felt like they took up roughly three-fourths of the show.
The Game Awards news deluge began with what was maybe the most anticipated announcement of the evening, the debut of the next downloadable character for Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. To the surprise of the Smash community, the new fighter is Sephiroth, the villain of the classic PlayStation RPG Final Fantasy VII. A particular shot in the trailer, with Sephiroth briefly looking as if he’d impaled Nintendo mascot Mario on his trademark odachi sword, instantly went viral on social media.
This is unusual in that until now, third-party guests in Smash were typically limited to one unique character per franchise. (This doesn’t count “echo fighters” like Ryu and Ken, who play almost the same as one another.) Sephiroth is the second Final Fantasy VII character to hit the Smash roster after FFVII‘s protagonist Cloud Strife.
Another surprise came courtesy of Microsoft, which aired a world premiere trailer for a reboot of the long-dormant first-person shooter Perfect Dark. Planned as the first game from Santa Monica-based Microsoft studio The Initiative, the game was described in a subsequent Xbox Wire post by Initiative studio head Darrell Gallagher as “a secret agent thriller set in a near-future world.” The last game in the series, 2005’s Perfect Dark Zero, was a launch title for the Xbox 360 by the British developer Rare.
Other Pacific Northwest-related reveals at this year’s Game Awards included:
- Fullbright, the Portland, Ore.-based indie studio that created Gone Home and Tacoma, released the first trailer for its next game. Called Open Roads, it’s the story of a young woman (Kaitlyn Dever, Booksmart) who embarks on a long car trip with her mother (Keri Russell, The Rise of Skywalker) to get some answers about her late grandmother’s mysterious double life. Open Roads reportedly features interactive dialogue, in a first for the company, in addition to the slowly building narrative exploration that has been Fullbright’s stock in trade so far.
- Studio Wildcard, in Kirkland, Wash., released a cinematic trailer for what turned out to be Ark II, a sequel to its hit 2017 dinosaur-riding simulator/survival game. The trailer starred a motion-captured Vin Diesel, as a prehistoric (or possibly post-apocalyptic) tribesman defending his daughter from both hostile dinosaurs and enemy warriors. Nothing else about Ark II was actually shown, but Diesel has a surprisingly strong track record in video games; he starred in 2004’s Escape from Butcher Bay, an entry in his Riddick dark science-fiction series, which was famous in the 2000s for being a movie tie-in game that wasn’t a roaring trash fire.
- Diesel is also lending his voice to Ark: The Animated Series, a 2022 TV show set in the world of the series, alongside a weirdly high-powered cast that includes Gerard Butler, Elliot Page, Russell Crowe, and Michelle Yeoh.
- Midwinter, a Seattle-based studio made up of veterans from the Halo franchise, announced that it had officially begun a closed beta on PC for its debut title Scavengers. In a post-nuclear-winter future, small teams of players descend to the frozen backwoods of a depopulated Earth to search for much-needed supplies, competing with both each other and the hostile mutants that now control the surface.
- The Master Chief from Halo is joining the world of Fortnite as a purchasable character skin, allowing players to dress up in his trademark SPARTAN-II armor. The classic Halo multiplayer stage Blood Gulch, which is also known for being the setting for the landmark “machinima” series Red vs. Blue, will also be made available as a playable map in Fortnite’s Creative Mode as of 10 a.m. PT on Dec. 11. Fortnite‘s current weird streak of including every media property that isn’t nailed to the floor will continue even further on Dec. 16, with the addition of character costumes based on Daryl Dixon and Michonne from AMC’s The Walking Dead.
- Turtle Rock Studios, the California-based developers behind the original Left 4 Dead, showcased both a cinematic trailer and a sample of gameplay for its new spiritual sequel, Back 4 Blood. This is a sort of spiritual sequel to Left 4 Dead, which Turtle Rock published through Valve Software in 2008. It’s a four-player survival horror game that pits a team of survivors against armies of the undead, which includes more and bigger special zombies to threaten your crew. An alpha test begins for the game next week, and Turtle Rock has targeted a June of 2021 release date.
Other games that debuted on Thursday night included Evil Dead: The Game, a co-op horror/action game starring Bruce Campbell that pits up to four players against malevolent Deadites; a new horror game from the team behind the defunct Dead Space series, called The Callisto Protocol; and Evil West, which promises players the chance to punch mutants as a steampunk cowboy.
In a night that was heavy on violence, Sony released a gameplay trailer for a new, non-violent game of exploration from the indie developer Scavengers Studio. Called Season, the game is slated to premiere on the PlayStation 5 and PC. You play as a young woman who used to live in an isolated village, but after an unspecified calamity, sets out on her bicycle to document as much of the world as she can before it’s washed away.
However, the largest announcement at this year’s Game Awards, once it became reasonably obvious that TLOU2 was running away with all the actual trophies, was the final world premiere of the night. In a short animated trailer, Electronic Arts and BioWare promised a long-awaited new game in the core Mass Effect series. At time of writing, we don’t have so much as a title for it yet; the trailer simply ended with the phrase “Mass Effect will return.”
After the ambitious but flawed reboot Andromeda in 2017, the Mass Effect series — a landmark series of science fiction action-RPGs that were famous for strong writing and interactive narratives — was generally assumed by fans to be dead in the water. The new trailer appears to promise a return to the original trilogy’s continuity, with an appearance by series mainstay and alien love interest Liara, which is pretty much all the Mass Effect community wanted for Christmas this year.
It’s not an unmixed blessing, though. The new Mass Effect trailer is also coming one week after two high-profile departures from Mass Effect developer BioWare, including the original trilogy’s creative director (and ex-Microsoft employee) Casey Hudson. Whatever optimism a fan has at this point should probably be guarded and extremely conditional. BioWare also debuted the trailer for a new Dragon Age game, in much the same spirit of Mass Effect; no gameplay was shown, and all fans got was a glimpse of the popular character Zevran.
It felt a bit like the Game Awards ended up as the last port of call for a full year’s worth of gaming news, after most of the major events on the industry calendar were canceled due to COVID-19. The actual Awards themselves often came off like an afterthought this year, with many categories’ presentations coming down to Keighley quickly reading them off a list, presumably to make time to cram in even more hype for 2021’s gaming calendar.
While this year’s show lacked some of past years’ pageantry, it made up some of the difference with a star-studded performance. Presenters included actors Brie Larson, Tom Holland, Keanu Reeves, Tom Holland, and Gal Gadot; former Nintendo of America executive Reggie Fils-Aimé; voice actors Troy Baker and Nolan North; and film director Christopher Nolan, who introduced the presentation for Game of the Year.
This year’s Game Awards featured a handful of musical numbers, both during the pre-show and the main broadcast. The London Philharmonic Orchestra contributed a pre-recorded broadcast, in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Nintendo’s landmark 1985 game Super Mario Bros., where it performed a medley of famous pieces of stage music from throughout the history of the Mario franchise. The Philharmonic returned later in the night to play an accompanying piece to the Game of the Year award, made up of music from all of this year’s nominees.
Eddie Vedder, of all people, also made a surprise appearance, via video call from Seattle, to play an acoustic version of the Pearl Jam song “Better Days,” off the 2013 album Lightning Bolt. “Better Days” appears as part of the soundtrack for Sony’s stealth/action game The Last of Us Part II, as part of an emotional moment where the game’s protagonist Ellie and her foster father play a cover version of it together. Speaking after his performance, Vedder said, “I really appreciate how [the song] was used.”
In fact, this year’s Game Awards more or less belonged to The Last of Us Part II. A bloody revenge drama set largely in a post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest, TLOU2 swept just about every award it was up for, including Game of the Year, Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Audio Design, Best Performance (for Laura Bailey), the new category Innovation in Accessibility, and Best Action/Adventure Game.
Ghost of Tsushima, by comparison, only collected one award, for Best Art Direction. Developed in Bellevue, Wash. by Sony-owned studio Sucker Punch, Ghost was nominated for seven awards this year and lost six of them, all of which were to fellow first-party PlayStation 4 exclusive TLOU2.
InnerSloth’s 2020 success story Among Us got happier news, winning awards for Best Mobile Game and Best Multiplayer. The InnerSloth team accepted the awards via a Zoom call from their home base in Redmond, Wash., with artist Amy Liu delivering their acceptance speeches for the team. Recent hire Victoria Tran, InnerSloth’s Vancouver-based community director for Among Us, was also in on the call via a smartphone held up to the camera.
WE WON BEST MULTIPLAYER?? ???
Thank you everyone, we're literally in tears. You helped make this possible, and while awards aren't necessary… it's just really nice. Thank you for supporting the 4 of us.#TheGameAwards https://t.co/TaSxVgLiQa
— Among Us (@AmongUsGame) December 11, 2020
As promised a while back, Among Us also announced its newest map during the game. Called the Airship, it trades in the spacefaring aesthetic of the other available backgrounds for more of a 19th century zeppelin feel. It’s slated to be released early next year.
Other awards for the Pacific Northwest development scene were given to Valve Software’s Half-Life: Alyx, which picked up Best VR/AR Game; the Xbox Game Studios-published adventure game Tell Me Why, which took home the Games for Impact trophy; and the newest edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which won Best Sim/Strategy Game. Microsoft also announced via a short trailer that Flight Simulator will premiere on the Xbox Series X|S in the summer of 2021.
The Game Awards have been running since 2014, which bills itself as the “biggest night in video games.” Founded by Geoff Keighley to replace the defunct Spike Video Game Awards show, the Game Awards selects its nominees each year by assembling an international jury of global media and “influencer” outlets. The winners in each category are then chosen based upon a 90/10 split of votes from that jury, via confidential ballot, and votes submitted by fans.
