AAA Games That Couldn’t Be Nominated at The Game Awards

The Game Awards event is of great interest to both computer gamers and console gamers. Consisting of 25 main categories, where the most successful productions of the year are nominated in more than one category, The most important vote of this event; as you would expect Game of the Year Award vote.

In this event, which has been going on for 10 years, players can vote separately for each category. Since we have seen the most successful productions of recent years this year, the TGA 2023 event Much more interesting than previous years’ events We can say that it is, but that is not our topic.

Starfield, Diablo IV, COD: MW 3 Big budget AAA games like; by most players “This year, the winner of the game of the year award has been determined” Comments were made as follows. Although these games are considered GOTY among gamers, they were not even nominated at TGA!

It took 5 years to build, spent half a billion dollars, and has been awaited for years; Space Skyrim: Starfield from Bethesda Softworks, acquired by Microsoft

Starfield, a huge production that was introduced at the annual E3 video game conference in 2018 and attracted the attention of players; in 2021 With Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda Softworks He met with us in the past months, accelerating the development process together.

What Sony has been doing on PlayStation consoles for years “exclusive” In response to the special games released under the label Microsoft released Starfield as an Xbox and PC exclusive game.

Even though Starfield was developed for 5 years with an incredible budget of 415 million dollars, it was released with serious performance and gameplay problems. As if all this were not enough, for years; “space Skyrim”, “you will be able to fight with your spaceships as you wish”, “there will be hundreds of planets and they will all be different from each other” and Bethesda, which promises very ambitious gameplay mechanics; exceeded the expectations of the players and as a result, Not being able to keep even half of the promises made It released Starfield, which was repetitive and had gameplay mechanics similar to those of Fallout and Skyrim.

Unfortunately, the budget of a giant brand like Microsoft and the experience of a leading company in the game industry like Bethesda were not enough to save Starfield and the game was destroyed. It wasn’t even nominated for the “Game of the Year Award” at The Game Awards.

After the great success of Diablo 2 23 years ago and the great failure of Diablo 3 11 years ago; Here comes one of Blizzard’s most anticipated productions: Diablo IV

The Diablo series is undoubtedly a game that can be considered the ancestor of the isometric RPG genre. Diablo 2, the legendary game of the series, is one of the productions that most players have still played for almost a quarter of a century.

Diablo 3 is as unsuccessful as Diablo 2 is. Fans of the series will enjoy Diablo 2’s dark story and atmosphere appropriate to its concept. The colorful world of Diablo 3 He destroyed the game with.

After 12 years of waiting The resulting work did not please the players at all. After years, Diablo 3 became one of the games that managed to recover with the innovations added to the game.

At the BlizzCon event 4 years ago, Diablo IV, which some players have never expected and some players have been waiting for years, It was announced surprisingly.

This announcement, which made a big impact, remained on the agenda until the game was released. A year before the release of Diablo IV, Blizzard; for mobile devices and computer Diablo Immortal He released a free game called.

by players “Pay2Win” called “The one who invests the most money in the game will be the most powerful” This game, which was played with the principle, of course left the players very disappointed. Diablo Immortal on Metacritic Lowest player score among AAA games It was one of the games that had.

So why did we tell these? What does the above story have to do with Diablo IV not being nominated for the GOTY vote? Namely, Diablo IV, which was released 1 year after Diablo Immortal was released; both in terms of graphics and gameplay mechanics It was very similar to Diablo Immortal.

The story is shallow and the technical problems in the game cannot be ignored, It drove players crazy who had been waiting for a new Diablo game for 11 years.

Players who bought the game go to Metacritic and watch Diablo IV. They were raining 0 points. This being the case, Diablo IV; Although it received an average score of 86 from the authorities on Metacritic, it received 2.2 points from the players.

Unfortunately, when all these come together, Diablo IV was a game that could not even be nominated for the “Game of the Year Award”.

The Call of Duty game that does not even have a special icon on the Battle.net client: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

It was released as a sequel to CoD: MW 2, which was released last year, but instead of being a sequel, it is almost a sequel. “extra package” which is CoD MW 3; seriously upset the fans of the series. With a Metacritic player score of 1.7 It became one of the most unsuccessful games of 2023.

It has an exorbitant price tag of 1999 TL CoD: MW 3 is such a game that Blizzard; There was no need to add a special icon for this game in the Battle.net client.

The game’s launch screen is very similar to CoD: MW 2’s interface, only painted red instead of green a sloppy interface welcomes us.

CoD: MW 3 has a story mode that can be completed in approximately 4-5 hours; simplicity of tasks, It offers a very far from serious gameplay with absurd “weapon found” style animations when you find a weapon, which creates the feeling that the player is playing an online looter shooter game. in the previous game “No Russian” The weight of your mission in this game “No Russian” There is nothing in his duty, it was put there just for the sake of it; It’s obvious that the game was rushed.

So many mistakes and simplicity, definitely It doesn’t suit the Call of Duty brand. The TGA juries must have realized this because they did not even consider the game worthy of the “Game of the Year Award” nomination.

So, which game among the games deemed worthy of the game of the year award for 2023 has the highest chance of winning the GOTY award?

It’s obvious that we’ve had a busy year for the gaming world. Since this is the case, none of the games we mentioned above were nominated for GOTY. When we look at last year, Even a simple and short game like Stray Starfield, which was one of the game of the year candidates but spent half a billion dollars to produce; Even though it was one of the games expected to be GOTY, it wasn’t even nominated.

Do not get it wrong, We’re not saying Stray was a bad game. However, it was a game that could not compete with this year’s games. Let’s come to our main topic, the battle of the titans. Games that received very high Metacritic scores, both from players and authorities, became GOTY candidates of the year, as expected.

Among these candidates, there are 3 games that we see as the strongest; these are; Baldur’s Gate 3 with 96 points, Alan Wake II with 94 points, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the last game of the legendary game series Zelda, with 96 points.

The Zelda series is considered the most important game in the gaming world and has the highest Metacritic score of all time. Tears of the Kingdom, the last game of the series, achieved serious success with a Metascore of 96, it is on the list. We can say that it is the game with the highest chance of winning the GOTY award.

Another game that has a chance of winning GOTY at least as high as Zelda is Baldur’s Gate 3. Among the turn-based RPG games released to date, We can say that it is the most successful, most comprehensive and best storytelling game.

This game contains more than 2 million words and has so many dialogues that you won’t want it. It is obvious how much effort was spent on its construction. It has nothing to do with our content, but we can’t help but mention it; Despite its word count exceeding millions, Baldur’s Gate 3 Surprisingly, it comes with high-quality Turkish language support.

Alan Wake II does not appeal to everyone, but provides an excellent experience to those it appeals to. as one of the most loved and successful horror games of the year. With a Metacritic score of 94, the probability of winning GOTY is slightly lower than other games due to its genre.

Although this is the case at The Game Awards, it would not surprise us at all if Alan Wake II or Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 receive GOTY, but it is not out of the question to see even an unexpected game receive the game of the year award.

On December 7, the game of the year will be announced; The Game Awards, the world’s largest gaming event, will host such popular and anticipated games as GOTY. We examined why he didn’t even nominate.

If you ask us, we think that a game like Starfield should have been at least a candidate for the GOTY award no matter what, but as can be seen, The juries did not think like us.

In addition to why these 3 valuable games were not nominated for the GOTY award, we have stated our own opinions about which game is most likely to be the game of the year, and what you would like to add in the comments section to this content. “I think this game will win the game of the year award” We look forward to you sharing your favorite games with us!