What games do you think we'll see announced at The Game Awards?

[vanguard333]

7 hours ago, King Marth 64 said:

I'm surprised that we didn't get a single Nintendo announcement on this years Game Awards except for the trailer of Super Nintendo World.

I'm not; Nintendo already announced a lot of 2024 releases back in October, and I think, if Nintendo is going to make any announcements soon, it will be in one of their Nintendo directs. Plus, I don't think Nintendo has anything huge to announce right now, so soon after Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Wonder.

Also, the only Nintendo announcement I remember from The Game Awards last year was Fire Emblem Engage DLC, and none of Nintendo's recent big releases are going to have DLC; the Zelda team has confirmed that there are no plans for Tears of the Kingdom DLC (which makes a lot of sense as Tears of the Kingdom was born from the team having too many ideas for Breath of the Wild DLC).

 

8 hours ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

I reckon Wilds is close enough to World 2 that I'm counting it.

I think it's too soon to tell; all we really saw in this trailer was a mount that can glide, a desert with some new wildlife, and a sandstorm with lightning strikes. That said, the mount makes me think they're probably going to combine aspects of World and Rise for this game; but that's just me speculating as someone who has only played Rise.

[Fabulously Olivier]

Overall, I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with new announcements.

 

Monster Hunter Wilds is going to be awesome. MH usually is.

 

Metaphor looks better every time I see it.

 

Golden Axe and Streets of Rage reboots are a welcome surprise. Shining Force would have completed that for me, but maybe someday.

 

Visions of Mana is yet another big JRPG in what looks to be the biggest JRPG year of all time. And it looks way better than Trials of Mana Remake.

 

There's a few third person shooters that I'd be very cautiously optimistic about. Mecha Break, The First Descendent, Exodus. Emphasis on cautious. I wasn't especially impressed with The First Descendant's beta due to the lack of ambient music, or dynamic enemy spawns. Those don't sound like hard things to fix though.

Edited December 8, 2023 by Fabulously Olivier

[Integrity]

9 hours ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

I reckon Wilds is close enough to World 2 that I'm counting it.

we'll see! not much to go off but i like the Vibe of the trailer, and monster hunter always seems to cycle between a game i dig and a game i don't. i'm optimistic

[vanguard333]

I know this thread is specifically about the games that were announced at the Game Awards, but I would like to take just one moment to have a laugh at the Game Awards:

1. Alan Wake 2 is the guy who showed up late to the party; so late that no reasonable judge had time to determine if was any good or not, and it still walked away from the party with three prizes.

2. Best Ongoing Game award went to a dead game that just received its last embalming (Cyberpunk 2077).

3. Cyberpunk 2077 and Destiny 2 receiving "Best Community support" nominations is a bit like Ganondorf being nominated for "most benevolent King of Hyrule".

...And that's really all the jokes I can make, as no other awards were weird/obvious corporate catering; they were just extremely predictable. That said; I know there was a lot of star power this year for video game performances, but how did Matthew Mercer as Ganondorf not even get nominated?

 

Anyway, back to the games:

Visions of Mana looks neat; I always cringe whenever a video game character slams their sword into the ground, but that's a small nitpick. I like that the art style of the Trials remake is largely retained while having the graphics be all new; it looks nice.

Monster Hunter Wilds... It looks neat; I like the idea of a mount that can glide, though I'll probably miss wirebugs. I think I would have to see more of the game first before deciding whether or not I'm interested in it; my first Monster Hunter game was Rise, and part of that was from Rise having been the right game at the right time for me specifically.

Plus, I liked a lot of the things that are unique to Rise: I liked using endemic life, I liked temporarily controlling monsters, I liked the palamutes and the wirebugs, I liked The Rampage (though it was a bit too tailored for multiplayer), and I liked followers; as someone who played the game single-player, I liked bringing NPCs along for the hunt that found the right balance of being useful without doing the work for the player. With this game, all we know so far is that there's a palamute-like creature and dust storms.

[Fabulously Olivier]

11 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

I know this thread is specifically about the games that were announced at the Game Awards, but I would like to take just one moment to have a laugh at the Game Awards:

1. Alan Wake 2 is the guy who showed up late to the party; so late that no reasonable judge had time to determine if was any good or not, and it still walked away from the party with three prizes.

2. Best Ongoing Game award went to a dead game that just received its last embalming (Cyberpunk 2077).

3. Cyberpunk 2077 and Destiny 2 receiving "Best Community support" nominations is a bit like Ganondorf being nominated for "most benevolent King of Hyrule".

...And that's really all the jokes I can make, as no other awards were weird/obvious corporate catering; they were just extremely predictable. That said; I know there was a lot of star power this year for video game performances, but how did Matthew Mercer as Ganondorf not even get nominated?

 

Anyway, back to the games:

Visions of Mana looks neat; I always cringe whenever a video game character slams their sword into the ground, but that's a small nitpick. I like that the art style of the Trials remake is largely retained while having the graphics be all new; it looks nice.

Monster Hunter Wilds... It looks neat; I like the idea of a mount that can glide, though I'll probably miss wirebugs. I think I would have to see more of the game first before deciding whether or not I'm interested in it; my first Monster Hunter game was Rise, and part of that was from Rise having been the right game at the right time for me specifically.

Plus, I liked a lot of the things that are unique to Rise: I liked using endemic life, I liked temporarily controlling monsters, I liked the palamutes and the wirebugs, I liked The Rampage (though it was a bit too tailored for multiplayer), and I liked followers; as someone who played the game single-player, I liked bringing NPCs along for the hunt that found the right balance of being useful without doing the work for the player. With this game, all we know so far is that there's a palamute-like creature and dust storms.

It's not like Alan Wake 2 was a big open world RPG. It was 20 hours. Plenty of time to get played, especially with review codes.

[lenticular]

There ended up being way more that I'm interested in than I was expecting. Of course, given that my expectation was literally zero, that isn't saying all that much, but I'm still pleasantly surprised. Sequels for Pony Island and World of Goo are both pretty exciting. And the remake of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as well. I might pick that up if it isn't overpriced, just as an excuse to play it again. Lost Records: Blooms and Rage is definitely up my alley. And Harmonium: The Musical did have my interest until I saw "coming to Gamepass and Netflix Gaming" at which point my interest largely went away.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Holding out some optimism for the Sega announcements. "Can we please reinvent something that's not Sonic" is a 10+ year old request. We'd be well within our rights to say too little too late. But Sega's back catalog didn't become any less impressive as the years went on. You're never too late for some budget revisits. Or at least, I'm hoping for some less than premium price points. I wasn't expecting them to slap a sixty dollar price tag on the latest Sonic game. And the only one whose visuals stood out to me was Shinobi. 3D Streets of Rage on top of 3D Golden Axe is a bold turn.

[vanguard333]

1 hour ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

It's not like Alan Wake 2 was a big open world RPG. It was 20 hours. Plenty of time to get played, especially with review codes.

Fair enough, and I just double-checked the release date and realized it released earlier in the year than I thought it did (October 27; I misremembered it as releasing sometime in November). I do stand by the other two remarks: Cyberpunk 2077 is not an ongoing game; it is a zombie game that ate its last piece of brain before being put to rest, and it is definitely not worthy of being nominated for any "best community support" awards; neither is Destiny 2.

[Integrity]

On 12/8/2023 at 12:26 PM, vanguard333 said:

and I liked followers; as someone who played the game single-player, I liked bringing NPCs along for the hunt that found the right balance of being useful without doing the work for the player.

i'm mixed on the rise additions (really hope wirebugs don't come back) but i strongly hope that followers come back for every game in the future. rise was such an unfathomable step forward in making monster hunter fun to play alone, despite all my gripes about it, that i'll even find myself recommending it to people as a starting point even though i didn't like it all that much, they make that much of an impact

[vanguard333]

22 minutes ago, Integrity said:

I'm mixed on the rise additions (really hope wirebugs don't come back) but I strongly hope that followers come back for every game in the future. rise was such an unfathomable step forward in making monster hunter fun to play alone, despite all my gripes about it, that I'll even find myself recommending it to people as a starting point even though I didn't like it all that much, they make that much of an impact

That's cool; as someone whose starting point for the series was Rise and who played it single-player, I agree that the game's a great starting point for those wishing to play monster hunter alone. One thing I hope the next game adds in this regard is that I hope it includes a way to pause the game when playing alone; one thing I really don't like about games that try to be simultaneously single-player and multi-player is that they never seem to provide a way to pause the game when playing solo.

I'm curious, why do you hope wirebugs don't come back? I would be fine with them not coming back as they're something that mainly made sense for Rise but wouldn't necessarily make sense in other games (much like the Rampage), but, much like the Rampage, I really liked it; I thought it added a lot to traversal.

[Integrity]

my problems with the wirebugs were really twofold

 

first, and the big one, is that monster hunter has always* had fairly slow, grounded combat despite the big attacks and stupid flashy armor. one of the levers that they used to balance weapon types was mobility, and wirebugs both added a shitload of previously-missing mobility to every single weapon and, at the same time, added a bunch of animation-combining (hammer or greatsword move+charge skills) or straight up animation-canceling stuff that filled the role that the devs intended of making a more arcadey monster hunter, but isn't what i want in the games. you can't ignore them with a reasonable penalty (like the clutch claw in world) either, because it's deep in the game design - for instance, if you get knocked on your ass by a monster and don't wirebug out of it, the delay before you get back up is several seconds longer than it was in world, because it both punishes you for getting hit and for greeding your wirebugs.

(* generations absolutely did not, it was a lot more like rise, and it remains my most disliked monster hunter game, uncoincidentally)

 

second, to a lesser extent, is that as opposed to previous attempts to add extra elements to the combat (skills/arts in generations, the clutch claw in world), wirebugs are Basically Just Magic. generations' skills were often-silly things but just stuff your guy did with their body. the clutch claw/slinger felt like an element of your kit with a simple mechanism and everything it was able to do was based on operating that simple mechanism. wirebugs are, mechanically, literally just spell charges that can accomplish literally anything from a mechanical standpoint - fortify your body, fortify your weapon, make your bullets go slower, move you in three dimensions, puppeteer a monster, the list goes on. monster hunter has always been a silly franchise, but it's always been very physically silly; Plausibly Preposterous, if you will. wirebugs are a firm step out of that framework.

 

also, on the topic of traversal, that's a much more philosophical reason i didn't like wirebugs. the combination of bugs and palamutes (though i'll never bemoan a dog) made traversal completely frictionless, since with basic practice your vertical movement became essentially unlimited. to compensate for that, they had to make monster fleeing much faster, because the player was far more able to keep up and keep chipping damage on. there's no real incentive to learn maps, because you can kind of just go anywhere whenever you please, and combined with reusing the really lackluster old maps in the wake of the really cool and interesting maps in world, it zeroed the mastery loop of the game pretty much entirely into the combat + learning monster tells (rise's monster design is a whole nother beef i have for another day) at the cost of so much more that monster hunter had shown it could be.

[vanguard333]

@Integrity I see. Being brand new to the series, I'm a sword-&-shield main, so the mobility and the wirebug techniques made sense to me (using the sword as a flail via a wirebug and using the wirebug to propel the player upwards in a shield bash). I can see how the way they're used in combat for other weapon types would be more nonsensical. And yeah; getting knocked to the ground without a wirebug can be annoying.

I quite enjoyed exploring and learning the maps, but I am brand new to the series. Incidentally, as a brand new player who is neither a fan of combos nor combat that involves learning the opponents' tells (though I guess the latter makes a lot of sense as the player inevitably fights the monsters more than once), I mainly relied on the sword-&-shield's ability to use items without sheathing the weapon, and on learning monsters' weaknesses: learning to throw flash bombs when Rathalos is airborne, learning to break the wing-spikes of a Barioth so it slides around, using the surrounding environment when possible, etc.

 

I decided to watch the trailer for the game "Rise of the Ronin" that was announced at The Game Awards; I am probably not going to get the game for many reasons, but I am surprised by the time period they chose to set the game in: the Boshin war between the Shogunate and Emperor Meiji's forces in the late 1860s. The end of that war marked the end of the samurai class (making it rather weird that the game is called "Rise of the Ronin" when ronin were masterless samurai).

Other than that, I don't know too much about that time period other than that the shogunate lost and then the Meiji restoration rapidly modernized Japan, so I can't say how accurate the game looks.

 

Incidentally, why did several announcements have "rise" or "fall" in their titles? Rise of the Ronin, The Rise of the Golden Idol, the two Final Fantasy 16 DLC episodes: "The Rising Tide" and "Echoes of the Fallen", etc. Shortly before the Game Awards, I saw a video that pointed out how often "Rise" and "fall" have been appearing in game titles, and I might only be noticing it because of that video, but it's still a bit weird.

Edited December 10, 2023 by vanguard333

[Fabulously Olivier]

58 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

@Integrity I see. Being brand new to the series, I'm a sword-&-shield main, so the mobility and the wirebug techniques made sense to me (using the sword as a flail via a wirebug and using the wirebug to propel the player upwards in a shield bash). I can see how the way they're used in combat for other weapon types would be more nonsensical. And yeah; getting knocked to the ground without a wirebug can be annoying.

I quite enjoyed exploring and learning the maps, but I am brand new to the series. Incidentally, as a brand new player who is neither a fan of combos nor combat that involves learning the opponents' tells (though I guess the latter makes a lot of sense as the player inevitably fights the monsters more than once), I mainly relied on the sword-&-shield's ability to use items without sheathing the weapon, and on learning monsters' weaknesses: learning to throw flash bombs when Rathalos is airborne, learning to break the wing-spikes of a Barioth so it slides around, using the surrounding environment when possible, etc.

 

I decided to watch the trailer for the game "Rise of the Ronin" that was announced at The Game Awards; I am probably not going to get the game for many reasons, but I am surprised by the time period they chose to set the game in: the Boshin war between the Shogunate and Emperor Meiji's forces in the late 1860s. The end of that war marked the end of the samurai class (making it rather weird that the game is called "Rise of the Ronin" when ronin were masterless samurai).

Other than that, I don't know too much about that time period other than that the shogunate lost and then the Meiji restoration rapidly modernized Japan, so I can't say how accurate the game looks.

 

Incidentally, why did several announcements have "rise" or "fall" in their titles? Rise of the Ronin, The Rise of the Golden Idol, the two Final Fantasy 16 DLC episodes: "The Rising Tide" and "Echoes of the Fallen", etc. Shortly before the Game Awards, I saw a video that pointed out how often "Rise" and "fall" have been appearing in game titles, and I might only be noticing it because of that video, but it's still a bit weird.

Yeah "Fall" is one devs should probably stop using as it is associated with a lot of shitty games/commercial flops. Redfall, Godfall, Firefall, Babylon's Fall. Just to name a few.

 

I for one think Rise of the Ronin looks cool, but the chances of me picking it up are slim to none since Team Ninja games are just bound to be excessively difficult Souls-like trash.