Destructoid Checkpoint: Well, that was certainly an awards show

Waiting until after the Game Awards to write this was risky, as a few underwhelming announcements could have resulted in a pretty dour newsletter. I didn’t even stay up to watch the show. As a proud member of Team Eurotrash, it’s not really in a timeslot I care to experience while awake. But I woke up this morning and watched the VOD, and my little gamer eyes were bright with joy. 

It’s already creeping up to the end of the current console generation, so I expect most shows revolving around game announcements to be reasonably muted right now. I actually got a lot of stuff I love from this, though, and some that is at least interesting, so you can consider me a happy chap right now.

More Control

I really, really enjoyed Control, preferring it to Remedy’s other (granted, very good) games. As a huge fan of New Weird literature, I found it to be pretty loyal to the often “disquieting without being terrifying” nature of the genre. In Control Resonant, it looks like we will be going beyond the confines of The Old House, and I cannot wait to see what happens when the threads of reality as we know it start falling apart in the big, wide world. 

Twomb Raider

I am absolutely the only person on the internet who will make that joke, but two new Tomb Raiders is nothing to scoff at. Legacy of Atlantis looks to remake the original Lara Croft adventure, so if you kinda miss the days when it was more puzzles and dinosaur fights, you are in luck.

Catalyst seems to be a little more in line with the new games, but is definitely drawing inspiration from what fans would consider to be classic Lara: Super British, super confident, and apparently not at all conflicted about getting that treasure. 

In the grim darkness of the far future, there are only screaming GPUs

I’ve been playing Warhammer and other Games Workshop titles since the late 80s, and in that time, we have gotten some absolutely banger video games of their IPs. The big “what if” has always been about Total War and Warhammer 40,000, especially since the team at Creative Assembly took a crack at the fantasy side of things. 

The trailer hints at some of the bigger problems that the developers need to solve, such as the sheer scale. We get a look at a star map, as this is not a scale of war that can be confined to a single planet. Some of Warhammer 40,000’s great moments involve entire galaxies being plunged into a bloodbath on a scale that is honestly hard to fathom. 

On the flip side, the very nature of Warhammer 40,000 as a tabletop game means that being able to zoom in on the terrifying kinetics of one-to-one combat is also super important. I am eager to see what this ends up looking like in the finished game.

I’m the lord of the fallen, and I can’t get up

We all need guilty pleasures in life, and one of mine is anything that comes within three hundred miles of being a Souls-like. When looking at art, it’s always fun to see just what other people take from the thing you like, and what they absorb into their own work, and deem important.

The last Lords of the Fallen launched in a pretty abysmal state for me. The gothic horror vibes were on point, no doubt about it, but much of the game was buggy or lackluster, and the developers didn’t really seem to understand the various convoluted elements that make FromSoftware titles so engaging. Kurt Cobain wrote “In Bloom” about people who miss the point, and Lords of the Fallen was a huge example of what that looks like in video games. 

Now, to be fair to them, they’ve released plenty of updates in an effort to fix things within the game, and I am very curious to see if they can nail it in Lords of the Fallen 2. 

Given the appalling use of Ghost in the trailer, I’m not so sure how high I should let my hopes get.

Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic

Dragged out into the light of day in an almost zygotic state, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic is the most Star Wars project of all time. We have a trailer from a studio that didn’t appear to have existed half a year ago, and a director who worked on Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. 

As such, this trailer feels like the original Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, which was just a fishing expedition for talent. “This is what we are working on. Get in touch.” I’m not sure if that’s the best example, given the very rocky launch for Cyberpunk 2077, but it ended up being one of my favorite games of all time in the end, so who knows?

Highguard

I think we all expect The Game Awards to end with a big moment, but this year was a bit of a flop, and I am not alone in thinking that. Highguard is billed as being from the creators of Apex Legends and Titanfall, and appears to be an odd combination of hero-shooter, arena shooter, Valorant, and MOBA. 

I’m curious to see what will make this game stand out from the seemingly endless crowd of similar shooters that fell away into obscurity over the last few years. Hero shooters feel like a pretty played-out genre at this point. 

It was an especially funny choice when the hype-merchants were eager to get people to believe that Half-Life 3, Bloodborne on PC, or whatever your own personal white whale is, was going to fill that spot. 

All in, I’d argue that the Game Awards was not a bad show when watched at 11 am this morning after the gym, but I am certainly glad I didn’t stay up for it.