“The Game Awards” Awards: Picking the night’s best new game trailers

Thursday night’s annual presentation of The Game Awards was ostensibly about recognizing the greatest games that arrived out in the last calendar year, and titles like God of War: Ragnarok and Elden Ring ended the night as massive winners. But anyone who’s watched any of the yearly Geoff Keighley-led award displays in the earlier knows The Sport Awards are not really about the awards. They’re all about the many “Planet Premiere” trailers and announcements for game titles coming in the upcoming 12 months and past.

In that spirit, we existing Ars Technica’s first-ever “The Activity Awards” Awards. The beneath checklist contains our picks for the most fascinating, fascinating, complicated, or or else noteworthy trailers of the night, all offered with no the require to sit through around three hours of awards show padding. Finest of all, we get to make up the groups as we go, guaranteeing we can give a prize to any deserving trailer we want.

So, with out further ado, on to the awards:

Hades II

Best Sudden Sequel

Platforms: Laptop (w/ early entry), consoles
Prepared launch: TBD
Back links: Steam | Formal website

Supergiant Games’ shorter heritage has only showcased 4 game titles so considerably, and all of them have been fast classics, from 2011’s Bastion to 2020’s Hades. What none of them have been, even though, is sequels Supergiant tends to start out from scratch each time, crafting a new, strikingly authentic activity from the ground up. So when a trailer for a correct Hades sequel popped up at The Match Awards, it was very easily the night’s most pleasurable shock.

This time all-around (in accordance to an accompanying FAQ), you can expect to be controlling Melinoë, a princess of the underworld who’s seeking to end Chronos, the seemingly unstoppable Titan of Time itself. The settings and basic gameplay search awfully acquainted in this trailer, even for a sequel. Then all over again, when you might be building a followup to our preferred video game of 2020, possibly you really don’t need to have to adjust all that a lot.

Judas

Very best “Bioshock” Successor

Platforms: Personal computer, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Prepared release: “Coming Shortly”
Hyperlinks: Epic Online games Retailer | Formal site

Even with out the introductory text screaming that it is “from the creator of Bioshock,” it would be simple to clock Judas as a spiritual successor to Ken Levine’s well-known franchise. Almost everything about this trailer screams “BioShock in space,” from figures who can “load” flame powers into the again of their hand to the use of recontextualized people new music and aged-timey landscapes design and style to established the temper.

The trailer ends with a information of “Resolve what you broke,” and would not give a whole whole lot of context for what specifically that means. But the speedy cuts concerning gameplay scenes function sufficient heavily mechanized robots, destroyed room transports, and vaguely steampunk weaponry to pique our fascination. Now that we are approaching 10 years given that Bioshock Infinite, we’re eager to see what Ken Levine and his new staff at Ghost Story Game titles can pull off in this thoroughly new environment.

Dying Stranding 2 

The “Keep On Retaining On” Award

Platforms: PS5
Planned launch: TBD
One-way links: Official web site

Back in 2017, the trailer for the authentic Demise Stranding left us scratching our heads at what the hell we experienced just found. And when we finally acquired to participate in the sport in 2019, we cannot say our confusion was minimized by all that significantly.

The DS2 trailer starts off off a small more comprehensible, with a frightened mom determine cradling a little one as she attempts to escape a shadowy risk on some sort of motorized unicycle. Soon after she’s knocked down by a bullet, dropping the newborn on the floor, we minimize over to Dying Stranding protagonist Sam Porter Bridges, observing a large steel hover-fortress increase up from the black muck. “It really is time for you to hit the road and start a new journey,” we hear.

Would seem comparatively simple for Kojima, and irrespective of the utter perplexity of the first game, we nonetheless someway cannot hold out to see what wild ridiculousness he has in retail outlet for us this time about.