VGX 2013 Recap

Last night was 2013 offering of Spike’s annual video game awards show and it appears they were ready for a change.  To start off with, what had been called the VGA’s (Video Game Awards) is not titled the VGX.  The VG part is pretty obvious and I guess the X is there to make it sound cooler and more catchy.

The show was hosted by Geoff Keighley who has made a career out of gaming journalism and Joel McHale who in hindsight probably wasn’t the best choice.  Though normally quite funny, he obviously doesn’t play many (if any) games, had absolutely nothing productive to say or ask during interviews, and made it a habit of mocking every game, studio and developer that was discussed.

Beyond the change in name, the entire format of the show has changed as well.  What used to be setup as a sort of generic awards show with a big audience and various presenters, now doesn’t feel like much of an awards show at all.  It’s probably for the better because people don’t really watch it for the awards – the highlights are always the new game trailers and announcements.  The format now involves a pair of hosts in a jazzed up little room with no audience.

It definitely fits the focus of having deeper conversations and even allows for some game demos, but it makes the awards part even more awkward.  So when the marquee Game of the Year award was given to Grand Theft Auto 5, the games producers walked up, gave a very Oscar-like acceptance speech, and was then applauded by the hosts and what sounded like the couple people manning the cameras.  Very awkward indeed.

Now for the good stuff.  Telltale Games, the studio behind the popular episodic Walking Dead game, has been busy.  First, they announced a partnership with Gearbox to work on a new Borderlands game.  The game will be made by Telltale with some creative help from Gearbox.  It will be a Walking Dead type game set in the Borderlands universe.  Later in the show they announced another collaboration, this time with HBO’s Game of Thrones series.  Again, it will be a Walking Dead type game set in the Game of Thrones universe.  This project looks like it is just getting off the ground so it will probably be awhile before it sees the light of day.

Crystal Dynamics was there to announce that this year’s Tomb Raider will be re-released on the Xbox One and PS4 in a reworked fashion labelled the Definitive Cut.  Other than using TressFX to make Lara’s hair look pretty cool, none of the trailers looked very different from the original game.

Nintendo is putting out a new Donkey Kong game, which doesn’t look terribly innovative.  Remedy discussed their upcoming Quantum Break some more and also announced a reverse tower defense game for mobile called Agents of Storm.  It was also announced that Elijah Wood would be voice acting one of the main character’s in Double Fine’s Kickstarter success Broken Age.

A short demo was shown highlighting the engine for Ubisoft’s upcoming The Division and it looked pretty impressive.  I know a lot of people are eagerly awaiting Watch Dogs, but The Division looks to be Ubisoft’s project to keep an eye on.  Techland’s Dying Light was demoed and looks like a pretty generic zombie game meets unrealistic parkour.  Sure it’s fun to smash zombies but it’s not like there aren’t a million other games that do that.

The announcements concluded with Vince Zampella of Respawn Entertainment highlighting newly announced Titan models for the upcoming Titanfall.  This is going to be a big one and I’m very curious how the game’s multiplayer story mode pans out.

However, the game the stole the show was something most had probably never heard of before:  No Man’s Sky.  Developed by Hello Games, a UK studio consisting of a whopping 4 people, it looks like a unique space exploration/combat game.  Billed as having persistent features with everyone playing in the same universe, the trailer showed quite a range of what’s possible.

Hello Games founder Sean Murray discussed about how “we wanted to make a game about exploration and we wanted to make a game that was real.”  He talked about how if you look up at the night sky to look at the stars, that each of those stars is an actual place that you can get into your spaceship and travel to and find planets orbiting that you can land on and explore.  It seems like an impossible feat for a four man studio, but hopefully they can capitalize on all the buzz they will get from their showing at Spike’s VGX.