There was one major criticism of the Game Awards nominations
The Game Awards aren’t known for their shock and surprise, and the 2024 nominees showed that – a fairly complete list in which most of the year’s top-rated and best-loved games got some love.
The Game Awards voting jury snubbed BioWare’s latest game in a series of key categories in which it was expected to compete. It resulted in only one nomination, namely for Innovation in Accessibility, which was decided by a professional jury.
True, the reception is The Veil Guard is mixed – and with a Metacritic rating of 82, a nomination for Game of the Year seemed out of reach (even if that’s one point higher than Black Myth: Wukongwho made the cut).
More telling, however, is The Veil Guard scored no nominations for Best Story or Best Performance, two areas where BioWare games tend to excel, and are less reliant on reviews. It also missed out on the award for best role-playing game. This year this was an exceptionally strong category: Three out of five nominees (Metaphor: ReFantazio, Final Fantasy 7 RebirthAnd Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree) also earned nominations for Game of the Year, and the other two (Dragon dogma 2 And Like a dragon: infinite wealth) are unconventionally excellent. Yet not joining this company is certainly not the result that BioWare or publisher EA wanted after ten years of development.
Were there any more curse words? Maybe a few small ones. It was a surprise not to see the beloved EA Sports College Football 25 scoring a nomination in the Sport/Racing Game category, although this may be due to the broad international composition of the jury. Missing from the Sim/Strategy Games category are two games with passionate fans and high review scores: Satisfactory And Tactical Breach Wizards – both of which may be the place of the Age of mythology remake for example. But this was a strong category this year. Personally, I would have liked to see it The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom nominated for his fantastic music.
As always, the intensely competitive indie categories can’t please everyone. But with 15 nominated games in Independent Game, Debut Indie Game and Games for Impact, you’ll have to dig deep, like Arco or 1000x resistance before you find something to get angry about.
Other surprises? I don’t think anyone saw four nominations coming Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2a game that has all but disappeared from discourse since its release in May. Four nominations — including Game of the Year — for DLC, in the form of Shadow of the Erdtreehas no precedent. Black Myth: Wukong breaking into Game of the Year despite its relatively weak critical reputation is certainly remarkable, as are the five nominations for one-man-band card game Balatro.
Ultimately, though, there’s not much in this batch of nominees to ruffle feathers – outside of BioWare’s offices, that is.