The Game Awards are over — congratulations to Team Asobi for Astro Bot taking home the Game of the Year award. Our review of Astro Bot earlier this year called it “one of the best games Sony has ever made,” and it seems the industry and game-playing public agree.
As always, the long, long stream was a hybrid award ceremony, advertising reel and game announcement marathon.
There were countless announcements interspersed throughout the awards, including all-new games like Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet from Naughty Dog, The Witcher 4 from CD Projekt RED and Split Fiction from It Takes Two studio Hazelight. It was also a show of revivals, with long-dormant franchises like Okami, Onimusha, Ninja Gaiden and Virtua Fighter returning.
You can view all of the winners at the Game Awards’ official site. And if you missed it, you can watch a the Video Game Orchestra’s GOTY medley; it’s always a highlight of the show and watching them fit Astro Bot and Balatro in this year was a vibe — praise the keytar!
Here are our top announcements from the show, in no particular order — you can watch all the trailers below, or click on one of the headlines to get the full story.
Well, let’s be honest: I don’t think any of us expected to see CD Projekt Red preview The Witcher 4 any time soon, and yet the studio did just that, sharing a lengthy cinematic trailer for the upcoming sequel at the Game Awards. Even if there’s no gameplay footage to be found, fans of the series will love what they see.
Naughty Dog is pivoting from post-apocalyptic fungal drama to interstellar sci-fi bounty hunting with its newest game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The studio revealed its new title with a cinematic trailer at The Game Awards on Thursday. Intergalactic takes place thousands of years in the future and it stars bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun, played by Chilling Adventures of Sabrina actor Tati Gabrielle. Jordan finds herself stranded on the planet Sempiria, which has been cut off from the rest of the universe for more than 600 years. She’s on a mission to escape Sempiria, but it looks like some vicious robots are going to get in her way.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is just barely in the rearview mirror and FromSoftware already has a new game in the wings. The first trailer for Elden Ring Nightreign, a standalone co-op action game, at The Game Awards 2024.
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio delivered a meaty one-two punch at The Game Awards. First came the news that the Like A Dragon studio is behind a revival of the Virtua Fighter series. Not only that, but the forever-busy studio (which, you may recall, has a Like A Dragon spinoff coming in February) is also making a Like A Dragon-style game set in the 1910s.
There were several major surprise announcements during this year’s edition of The Game Awards, but perhaps none was quite as out of the blue as word of a sequel to Okami. Not only that, the original game’s director, Hideki Kamiya, is at the helm.
It’s only been a short few months since Gearbox announced Borderlands 4, the next game in its long-running looter shooter franchise. Back in August, all we had was a cryptic teaser, but at today’s Game Awards, we got a proper look at the new game.
We told you back in 2021 that The Outer Worlds 2 was a thing that existed, and now, more than three years later, we have evidence in support of this claim: a gameplay trailer.
2K’s consistently sporadic Mafia series will return in 2025. Mafia: The Old Country is set in Sicily in the 1900s, and will explore the origins of organized crime. Developer Hangar 13 announced that a new Mafia title was in development back in 2022, but gave few details beyond that. The game’s first trailer is a melodramatic affair complete with a patriarch monologuing over candlelight, horses galloping across the plains and opera music as a backing track. This is drama, people.
