The Game Awards is culling lessons learned from the reaction to No Man's Sky, stating this year's Game Awards will rely more on gameplay instead of CGI.
Many players were rapt up in impatient anticipation when Hello Games first pushed out a series of hype-induced fanfare for No Man's Sky. When the game was finally released, the enthusiasm dwindled, failing to deliver on its earned hype.
Learning From No Man's Sky
The annual gaming awards show host and producer Geoff Keighley has thought exceedingly about how developers are often trapped in a vortex of dialogue touting an unreleased game in uproarious acclaim, a state of being wherein developers find it difficult to live up to hype-building constructed majorly by fans.
The release of No Man's Sky was met with outright disappointment and mordant critique, vacuuming the long-sustained gusto leading up to the simulator game's release. While that issue in and of itself requires its own post-evaluation, a nugget of truth has been unearthed from the No Man's Sky maelstrom.
"There is a good moral of that story and it's part of what I'm trying to address this year; to have developers be more transparent about the state of their game," Keighley told Polygon, talking about course-correcting The Game Awards 2016.
"[W]hen [No Man's Sky] was announced, everyone in their mind's eye came up with an idealized notion of what it was going to be," Keighley said.
Keighley likened it to Suicide Squad, a film that banked on pre-release hype but ended up collecting negative reviews when released.
The Game Awards 2016
This year's Game Awards will be held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles this Dec. 1. People may stream the live event in a number of channels. Additionally, the event will be streamed on virtual reality platforms, and for the first time, in China.
The Game Awards honors the best games to come out before Nov. 24, created two years ago by Keighley himself post-hosting gigs at VGX Awards on SpikeTV. No Man's Sky was teased during the 2013 VGX Show and was the predominant scene-stealer during the first ever Game Awards.
Nominees for 2016 were announced Tuesday, with id Software and Bethesda's Doom, PlayDead's Inside, Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch, Respawn and Electronic Arts' Titanfall 2 and Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End in the running for game of the year.
This time, the Game Awards will showcase "a little more context about what's there," in Keighley's own words. Some presentations will be showcased closely akin to a "Let's Play" format, meaning gameplay performance will be shown primarily, and there's going to be less idealizing of titles to avoid a No Man's Sky situation.
