Lately, I’ve seen quite a few of those “Game of the year” awards coming out. This is like the Academy Awards for the video games industry. Now, I understand that many movies come out during the holiday season as that is when there are plenty of movie goers with cash and time on their hands. Isn’t a movie, sort of like instant gratification? You see the movie, it either sucks or it’s awesome, boom you leave with your opinion made and you either enjoyed the last 2 hours of your life or you wanted to jab yourself in the eye with a sharp stick.
Now no offense to Star Wars: The Old Republic, it is an amazing game and I had the honor to work on it but really? The game which is rich with history and story, takes more than 2 hours to play – unless you think it sucks and hate space type things of course. How is it a game that officially launched on December 21st can be the game of the year for 2011? While I am more than happy to congratulate all the amazing talent that shed their blood sweat and tears (oh there were tears!) to accomplishing launching such an immense undertaking, at the same time how can it be the game of the year for a year it wasn’t really a game open to the public for more than 10 days? I think this is unfair to other games out there who have spent the year doing updates, improving their game and basically kept their games up and running for the whole year.
This isn’t really about swtor, so no angry e-mails as it’s a new year and at the end of it I hope that many awards are bestowed upon the reception area of the BioWare Austin studio. I just think it’s impossible to give an award to a game that is just new and shiny. Game of the Year should include more than just “OMG it’s Star Wars, this thing rocks.” It should involve, uptime, playability, playerbase, updates, expansions and *gasp* even how the Community Team gives timely updates (Okay, I’m a bit biased there). Of course there is the game itself – but if you try to tell me that the pre-reviewer critics who got access to the game early were able to play through all the classes and determine based on many criteria that it is the best game of the year. Just because the expectations are that the game is going to blow everything else out of the virtual water, doesn’t make it the best game. Oh, I know this far too well.
Now at the end of 2012 (assuming the world isn’t doomed) my expectations are high that the game will be on top of all the lists.
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