| Chazore said: Of course it was going to be TLOU II. I don't think Ori stood a chance in all honesty, as it barely won much here compared to TLOU. |
As memory serves, Ori won two or three awards, which would at least tie TLOU2's two.
Look, for as much as I've said in support of indie games here, honestly IMO Ori and the Will of the Wisps was the lazy, safe choice among this year's more prominent independently-developed titles in that it's a rare indie sequel, so a familiar franchise rather than an original title like 95% of indie games are. It came in with the advantages of being a sequel, and also more specifically one that has enjoyed first-party backing (Xbox Game Studios). Don't get me wrong, I liked Will of the Wisps! It's a fine game! But it just factually isn't as daring or fully as pertinent to...like life in 2020 as The Last of Us Part II felt to me. It was essentially a cosmetic expansion of what the first game offered. That's what most sequels are, be it in literature, films, or games or whatever, to which end I find few of them to truly be as compelling as the original entry. The Last of Us Part II is a rare exception to this rule that legitimately earned the right to such a lofty comparison.
I like lots of indie games. I like the creative, uncompromising spirit of that kind of games development. I think it's that spirit that made gaming such a compelling medium back in the old days when I first started playing, and it's still that spirit that I'm drawn to today. In fact, the immense majority of my top 50 favorites list for this year was composed of them and I've already got more I plan to add for next year's list in mind. But just because a game comes from a smaller developer doesn't automatically make it the best game there was this year. Many games published by Sony have been favorites of both critics and gamers alike in recent years in no small part because of the kind of creative freedom that Sony has chosen to allow their developers even while supplying them with the sort of budgets necessary to fully realize their grandest visions. That doesn't exactly happen often in this or any medium. The Last of Us Part II is exactly the sort of game that couldn't exist any other way and personally I think that deserves to be rewarded.
In fact, I would defend not only TLOU2's themes, storyline, and (for the most part anyway) characterization, but also its willingness to stick with a traditional approach to action-adventure design in a AAA landscape that really does seem to be gravitating toward making everything one genre known commonly as open world games. Much in contrast to its themes, Naughty Dog opted for a conservative approach to gameplay where you essentially traverse from one end of a given level to the other (sometimes overcoming many challenges along the way and other times instead more strictly for narrative purposes instead) and defeat the occasional boss every so often, with cinema scenes connecting stages rather than an overworld. And you know what, sometimes that's just as bold a thing to do, really: daring to stand still even as the rest of the world around you changes. They chose that approach because it sets the best pace for the game's story arcs, conceding to modernity in offering players more freedom to explore in a way that just makes the game feel more real than the original, but while retaining just the right amount of linearity to keep the plot moving and retain that key sense of tension that it really can't do without. And no, they didn't give you dialogue trees and the accompanying awkward, unnatural pauses that wouldn't occur in real human exchanges and superficial dialogue "choices" just for the sake of doing so even when a clear conversational direction is obviously more effective, natural, and believable. They made the design choices that were right for the story they wanted to tell. (Well, for the most part anyway. Nothing is truly perfect, but overwhelmingly I would say.)
What I'd ideally like to see from you is an actual case for why, in your view, Ori deserved to win over TLOU2 rather than just an endless, directionless trashing of the community choice.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 19 January 2021
