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The Game Awards have become a sort of mini-E3 in December. At last year’s show, we saw announcements for Alan Wake 2, a new Wonder Woman game, Sonic Frontiers, the upcoming Star Wars game from Quantic Dream, and somewhere around three dozen gameplay trailers. Some awards were awarded, too. Game Awards creator and host Geoff Keighley has said that this year’s show, which airs on Thursday, is going to be shorter than the last one. The last one was over three hours long, though, so shorter doesn’t exactly mean short here. Keighley recently estimated (opens in new tab) a two-and-a-half hour runtime, which will include acceptance speeches, musical acts, and another bushel or two of trailers and announcements, some of which have already been teased.
The Game Awards will be streamed on Twitch (opens in new tab) and YouTube (opens in new tab) this Thursday starting at 7:30 pm Eastern. (Here’s when that is in your time zone (opens in new tab)). Below, we’ve collected all the relevant pre-show teases and rumors. If you miss anything, come back here for a recap after the show.
Confirmed reveals and guests
📺 There’ll be a Baldur’s Gate 3 reveal from Larian (opens in new tab).
📺 The first Star Wars Jedi: Survivor gameplay will be revealed. A March 16, 2023 release date will probably be announced, too, which we know because it leaked early via the Steam page.
📺 Tekken 8 will be there (opens in new tab).
📺 A new trailer for Destiny 2: Lightfall, the expansion coming in February, will be shown (opens in new tab).
📺 A new beast from upcoming fantasy hunting game Wild Hearts will be revealed (opens in new tab).
📺Publisher 505 Games teased a game reveal with a video (opens in new tab) featuring actor Michael Madsen. A QR code at the end of the video leads to visitrockaycity.com (opens in new tab), which currently features a nighttime cityscape, perhaps suggesting a GTA-like open world game.
❓Final Fantasy 16 producer Yoshi-P is giving a “very special live presentation.”
❓The developers of 2020 lockdown hit Among Us promise (opens in new tab) “huge” news.
🎤 Keighley says (opens in new tab) there’s a “good reason” that this year’s presenters include Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery director Rian Johnson and actors Daniel Craig and Jessica Henwick. (The good reason might just be that they were involved in a popular movie, but we’ll see.)
🎤 Hazelight Studios director and “Fuck the Oscars” guy Josef Fares, whose game It Takes Two won the Game of the Year honors in last year’s show, will present an award. Maybe he’ll stick it to the Nobel Prizes, which have had it coming for a while now.
🎤 Sierra On-Line founders Roberta and Ken Williams, who last we heard were remaking Colossal Cave after getting bored in lockdown, will present an award.
🎤 Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey from the upcoming HBO show based on The Last of Us will be presenters, as will Last of Us voice actors Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, who also have roles in the show. There’s not much left to announce as far as the show goes: It airs on January 15, and a new trailer (opens in new tab) was released a few days ago. Maybe we’ll see an extended clip.
Game Awards rumors and predictions
🤔 If Hideo Kojima doesn’t show up with an announcement, he’ll surely tease something cryptically, right? We know Death Stranding 2 is in the works, since Norman Reedus leaked it.
😈 Rumor has it that there’ll be a Diablo 4 announcement, probably a release date. We just had a hands-on preview of the game (it’s fun!), so that’d make sense.
💍 Elden Ring fans are hoping for a DLC announcement. Perhaps the timing of this week’s PvP update was chosen to bring the game back to mind in advance of that announcement?
🚀 After Starfield‘s delay to 2023 back in May, and after Bethesda let 11/11/22 (Starfield’s original release date) pass by without a word, fans are pretty thirsty to see something new from the long-awaited space RPG. It probably doesn’t qualify as a rumor as much as it does a desire, but the show wouldn’t be a terrible place to release a new trailer and a concrete release date. Then again, we’re talking about Microsoft and Bethesda, and they might want to make those sorts of announcements on their own time instead of cramming them into the middle of a show featuring dozens of other trailers. I’m personally not holding my breath, but I’ve been wrong about Starfield before.
🐲 It would be a reasonable time for BioWare to show up with Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. The studio put out a cinematic trailer earlier this week, and said in October (opens in new tab) that an alpha version of the game is now playable from start to finish. It’s shown up with teasers at The Game Awards twice before, so this is something of a habit for BioWare. The Dragon Age Netflix show releases on Friday, too, so it’s a very Dragon Agey week. Something about the next Mass Effect is possible, too, but BioWare hasn’t teased any involvement in the show at this time, so both games are longshots.
Award nominees
The award nominees are listed on the official Game Awards website (opens in new tab), where you can also cast your own votes in each category. The public vote is mixed with votes from a jury of influential gaming people and outlets, including PC Gamer, to determine the winners. (The one exception is the Players’ Voice award, which is entirely determined by fan vote, and has come down to a battle between Sonic Frontiers fans and Genshin Impact fans.)
The most important award is of course the Game of the Year award, which Elden Ring is the heavy favorite to win. Here are this year’s Game Awards GOTY nominees:
- A Plague Tale: Requiem (Asobo Studio/Focus Entertainment)
- Elden Ring (FromSoftware/Bandai Namco)
- God of War Ragnarök (Sony Santa Monica/SIE)
- Horizon Forbidden West (Guerrilla Games/SIE)
- Stray (BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna)
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Monolith Soft/Nintendo)
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