As far as I’m concerned, this is the clear winner and my first 10/10 game this decade.
Not saying they are bad games but 6 sequels, one of them a remake, and not a single new game. That pretty much summarizes the state of the current gaming industry.
Oh the marketing show
We’ve got some great contenders this year!
- Alan Wake 2
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- Resident Evil 4
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Who are you voting for (or would vote for) and why?
Baldur’s Gate 3, because it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played, but also I haven’t played more than a few minutes of the other games on the list. Alan Wake 2 is only a storefront that doesn’t support my operating system; Spider-Man 2 is stuck on a console that I don’t intend to buy so I won’t play it for at least two years (and even then it seems way too similar to the last games); Resident Evil 4 is surely better than the last time I played it, but I’m not in a rush to play a revised version of that game; Super Mario Bros. Wonder I can say shocks me that people are rating it this highly; and even if I wasn’t pissed off at Nintendo these days, Tears of the Kingdom still didn’t build on Breath of the Wild the way I wanted it to.
ToTK.
BG3 was amazing and is the best RPG of the year hands down. A really outstanding game that deserves all the praise and I’d certainly feel it deserved GotY if it won.
But ToTK was really just beyond expectations with its game design. The open ended puzzle design, the sheer number of “wait, I can actually do that?” The way it continued the BotW reinventing LoZ (NES) trend by reinventing LttP’s dark world…
It’s one of the toughest years I can recall, as BG3 was also beyond expectations and had incredibly nuanced design. But I feel like in a lot of ways it was still more structured by being guided by tabletop, whereas ToTK really just broke the mold all over again for Nintendo.
It might be my favorite Zelda title of all time.
Zelda vs BG3 IMO
My heart says BG3, but my head also says BG3, because if you look at Google trends, BG3 has held the conversation longer and with higher peaks. Still, the winner is realistically only one of these two games.
I think realistically, TotK is going to win the popularity aspect by a longshot. Even though BG3 is, IMO an objectively more impressive feat, and most of the novelty in TotK was already in BotW.
The awards are voted on by journalists, not fans, so the games favored to win are the ones that woo the most outlets, not the ones that sell the most copies. They’re correlated, but if a staff of game reviewers is holding the game that sold a third as many copies in higher esteem, it can still win in this show.
