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With E3 truly being a thing of the past in the post-pandemic world, Geoff Kieghley’s The Game Awards are now the year’s biggest source of video game announcements, taking up the mantle left behind by the show that gave us such memorable moments as “my body is ready.”
Keighley’s Summer Game Fest also typically features a few surprises, as does Germany’s Gamescom, but it’s clear that the awards show is where the big guns come out. Despite its name, it’s almost better known as a trailer festival at this point, as joked about by Muppets Statler and Waldorf (yes, really) during this year’s event.
With that in mind, here are the biggest reveals from last night’s show, including two different returns to fantasy favorites and a new sci-fi game from the creators of The Last of Us.
The Witcher IV puts Ciri in the lead role
Can you believe it’s been a little over nine years since The Witcher 3 came out? In the time since then, the title has gotten two hefty expansions and served as partial inspiration for a Netflix show, but it’s finally time for it to get a proper sequel.
Simply titled The Witcher IV, the game’s reveal was the first big announcement of the show, and while gameplay wasn’t yet shown, it came with two big revelations.
The first was a change in protagonist. Geralt and his Fabio hair are taking a break this time around, with his adopted daughter and apprentice Ciri instead taking up the dual blades to hunt down the monsters of the Continent.
The second actually had little to do with the game itself, and was instead more of a teaser for tech nerds. At the start of the game’s trailer, a small note at the bottom of the screen said that it was “pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU,” which confirms that game developers already have their hands on Nvidia’s next generation of graphics cards. Eager PC builders will likely hear about them soon, possibly as early as next month’s CES.
Elden Ring Nightreign is a co-op spin-off
After an almost 60-hour base game and a 30-40 hour expansion, Elden Ring isn’t done yet. In a surprising move for developer FromSoftware, the next title in the series will be a co-op, session-based game rather than an RPG set in a persistent world.
You wouldn’t know that from the trailer, which mostly focuses on small groups of players grouping up to fight big bosses, Monster Hunter style (it looks sick, tbh). However, outlets such as IGN (which is owned by the same parent company as Lifehacker) have already conducted interviews and gone hands-on with preview builds, which is where these details are coming from.
According to the developers, the game is built for three players but will have a solo mode, and will take place in a condensed version of the Limgrave map from the first game. Over the course of three in-game days, players will be tasked with surviving and preparing to take on a major boss at the end of the session.
Rather than customizing their own characters, players will also instead choose between eight presets here, although I presume the same character can look very different by the end of different sessions.
As a big fan of FromSoftware games, but not a huge enjoyer of their usually somewhat clunky multiplayer systems, I’m cautiously optimistic that Nightreign might finally be the game that convinces me to try playing with friends.
A new game from the people behind Shadow of the Colossus
It’s been eight years since the last game directed by legendary developer Fumito Ueda, the chief creative mind behind classics including Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. With the studio behind those titles, Japan Studio, having since been shut down and merged with Astro Bot developer Team Asobi (more on them later), it was unclear whether we’d ever see another title in the same vein as those games again.
Luckily, it seems like Ueda and a bunch of Japan Studio veterans are back with a new game currently codenamed “Project Robot.”
The trailer from last night’s award show was fairly light on details, but the vibes we all remember from Ueda’s previous games were all there, as the crowd silently watched a small figure in cryptic garb climb up a lumbering giant robot to escape an oncoming catastrophe.
Like our protagonist at the end of the trailer, a release date is still up in the air, but one surprising detail: Epic Games (yes, the Fortnite people) is helping to produce.
Okami is back
Towards the end of the awards show, Geoff Keighley pumped up the audience for what seemed like his favorite announcement of the night, going as far as to seemingly tear up a little and bring in a real-life drummer to set the tone before the trailer played.
When the host talked about impossibilities coming true and said “if you truly love video games like I do, this moment is for all of us,” I was expecting Half-Life 3 to pop up on my screen. Instead, I was surprised with an Okami sequel.
I’m not disappointed! A cult classic game for the PS2 and Wii, Okami combined a beautiful art style, Japanese folklore, innovative calligraphy mechanics, and a Legend of Zelda-style approach to gameplay to create a truly impressive blend of mechanics and vision that hasn’t really been captured since.
Part of the reason for that? Shortly after its release in 2006, director Hideki Kamiya left Capcom to help found Platinum Games, with his studio Clover shutting down just a few months later. The game had been a critical success, but it seems Capcom wasn’t happy with sales.
Now, it seems like the publisher is ready to give Kamiya a second chance, not only announcing an Okami sequel (no official title as of yet) with him at the helm, but in fact giving him a new studio under the name of Clovers (never change, Kamiya).
The news follows the success of Devil May Cry 5, a sequel to another Kamiya classic, which probably helped change Capcom’s tune. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other cult hits like Viewtiful Joe or God Hand get their time in the sun next.
A new Naughty Dog sci-fi game
In the final trailer of the night, The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog revealed its next big game, and finally, it has nothing to do with zombies. Instead, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is a space adventure following a bounty hunter as she tries to be the first person in over 600 years to leave the planet Sempiria’s orbit.
Actual gameplay was light (a running theme for the evening), although the reveal trailer did show our heroine arming herself with a gun and facing down a hulking robot with a not-lightsaber. In what’s proven to be a controversial decision on my Bluesky feed, the trailer also played up the ‘80s nostalgia and its brand partnerships a lot, which definitely gave it some Guardians of the Galaxy vibes.
Still, the announcement’s overall lighter tone should prove to be a fun break from the grim nature of The Last of Us series, and will perhaps take Naughty Dog closer to its Jak & Daxter roots.
And the winner is…
Finally, you can’t have The Game Awards without declaring the game of the year. This year’s winner had to face some stacked competition, with the nominee list including Balatro, Black Myth: Wukong, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Astro Bot, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
In the end, though, Team Asobi’s Astro Bot pulled through. The win is the first time a platformer has taken home the game of the year award, with Astro Bot doing what even Mario could not (to be fair, he was going up against the likes of Link and Geralt when he was nominated).
It’s an impressive achievement for the character’s first full-fledged game, though—and as if to celebrate, the title is about $10 off across most storefronts right now.
