2011 Spike VGA winners recap
We run down the winners of the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards.
Between the trailer premiers, backstage carnival games, and, yes, tea-bagging it was easy to miss the actual Video Game Award winners during the telecast.
With the help of a couple pauses on the recorder, I put together this quick recap of all the winners, many of which only received a brief mention. Of course the show culminated in the Game of the Year award, which the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim took home. For all the rest, check out the list after the jump.
Game of the Year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Best Action Adventure Game: Batman: Arkham City
Best Xbox 360 Game: Batman: Arkham City
Best Adapted Videogame: Batman: Arkham City
Best PS3 Game: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Best Graphics: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Best Wii Game: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Best Motion Game: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Best Fighting Game: Mortal Kombat
Best Independent Game: Minecraft
Best Handheld/Mobile Game: Super Mario 3D Land
Best Song in a Game: Bastion
Best Original Score: Bastion
Best Downloadable Game: Bastion
Best Individual Sports Game: Fight Night Champion
Best PC Game: Portal 2
Best Multiplayer: Portal 2
Best DLC: Portal 2
Best Performance by a Human Male: Portal 2
Best Performance by a Human Female: Portal 2
Best Driving Game: Forza Motorsport 4
Best Shooter: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Character of the Year: The Joker
Best RPG: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Studio of the Year: Bethesda Game Studios
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Shacknews
replyGarnett Lee posted a new article, 2011 Spike VGA winners recap.
We run down the winners of the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards.-
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http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=27173191#item_27173191
A lot of Shackers seem to disagree. -
Haha someone takes the VGA's seriously.
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That it can still win Best Game despite its inherently buggy nature means the elements that make it great supersede its flaws. That's the sign of a truly remarkable gaming experience. Skyrim deserves every award it gets.
And besides, I'm calling bullshit on your comment. Skyrim doesn't feel "new", yet Deus Ex and Batman do? So you're just picking and choosing what elements of a game to compare? Your opinion doesn't make sense.-
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Other than Valve, who makes games that have polish everywhere?
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Didn't they have to patch in basic stuff like a tutorial level and bosses that weren't broken / terrible? (p.s. They did).
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Maybe, but CD Projekt is in Poland, so everything they make have polish everywhere.
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Don't most console games have day-0 patches, now? I guess I could maybe see Blizzard, but not if you include WoW which is almost always buggy on every new patch drop.
Indie devs are incredibly hit and miss, and depend on how you define polish. The mechanic they're focusing on will certainly be polished. That's not the same thing as Valve, though. Valve polishes everything.-
no 0-day patches are not that common. also I believe some of them occur due to cert-process shenanigans.
also it's funny you keep bringing up valve because I actually don't find valve games to be THAT much more polished than a lot of games. They certainly iterate a whole lot, and think about mechanics a whole ton more than other games in a way that reflects positively on their own games, but despite that (perhaps even because of that?) some some bugs/imperfections still slip through.-
Did... Did you play portal 2?
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Do you play games?
Valve time is a thing. It's an actual thing.-
yes I did. Source engine has been a pretty buggy engine, though admittedly portal 2 was probably one of their most polished releases. People also complained that it was rather dated engine-wise and this game had probably the fewest new/experimental features of any Valve game (excepting MAYBE HL:ep 2, I think). So, it is a good example of how there are trade offs.
Valve time isn't just for stability/bugs they also do it for gameplay balance and they scrutinize design aspects of their games on a level that I'd guess most developers don't bother with. It's also kind of hurt their reputation a bit, people often complain about how valve seems continually unable to release a game on time, and that has a real effect on people's expectations and interest (even though the game that comes out is almost always good).
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True, but the bugs I'm referring to are the "hey, this update is all about this new raid... aaaaaaand it's totally fucking broken."
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You're full of it. I can't remember the last time that happened. That's the exception, not the norm. They have the patch test servers up for months for a reason.
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I'm gonna repost this every time you allude to it being just a few bugs: http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Bugs_(Skyrim)
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Now in convenient image format: http://chattypics.com/files/BugsSkyrimTheElderScrollsWiki_a8x53308jd.png
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i wasn't saying the game wasn't buggy or that it was just a few bugs (it's just a few bugs) just that most of them are innocuous. which is true. i'd guess there's certainly a large variety of even game-breaking bugs due to the complexity of the game, but they don't seem to be very common. also: most of them will probably get fixed in due time.
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Did you actually read the list of bugs (here's a link! http://chattypics.com/files/BugsSkyrimTheElderScrollsWiki_a8x53308jd.png )
The first 50 are game-breaking-you're-totally-fucked-if-you-hit-them-time-to-restart bugs.
Including some that will prevent you from ever making forward progress even if you start a new character.
That's before we get into the 100+ moderate bugs that are listed, or the minor bugs.
Or all of the ones that no one has bothered to write up.-
Whoops I missed the divider for moderate-to-minor bugs (so there are ~the same number of moderate as there are "major" bugs).
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no offense but you're being kinda obtuse. the bugs that break quest lines are really not that common. that is not a list of "IF YOU DO THIS THING THIS WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY HAPPEN" because that just isn't true. Many/most people will probably go through those quest lines without a hitch -- and don't get me wrong, it sucks and should be fixed for the people it does happen to, but it's not really game breaking even then.
plus, not all those bugs are verified, and it's impossible to tell how common they are. it could be as little as one or two people that are having the problem, out of the tons and tons of people that read the wiki, which itself is a fraction of the people that play the game.
my argument has never been that the game doesn't have bugs. that is in fact the opposite of what I'm arguing.-
I agree. Pretty sure most of that list is bullshit. The game is very clean. I think I encountered two bugs in my 70 hour playthrough.
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Flaws in a game are the nature of its creation. Look at Star Wars for example. According to George Lucas it was unfinished and flawed in many ways, which is why he/they have ruined (altered) all of the new ones. Lucky for games however, the more they are altered and fixed and better they become, more often than not.
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So more games with poorly thought out (and easily exploitable) game mechanics, boring and derivative combat, the worst voice acting of any game on recent record...
Really? Really?
I mean it's kinda fun, sorta. I guess. I'm having a good time punching dragons to death.-
it's also probably the most massive game world out there with a quest structure that is pretty much approachable in any way you can think of. That was their goal at all costs, and I think a little bit of bugginess or imbalance is okay as long as there is a generally playable game that does not have serious game-breaking bugs. most of the bugs in Skyrim are of a pretty innocuous nature.
some of my favorite games have had buggy as fuck first releases.
I'm sorry if you're mad because your horse can clime up sheer slopes and there are mechanics you can exploit that make the game real easy and there are a bunch of awkward/phoned-in sounding lines. I'm sorry the game is not fun after 60+ hours and you've become a demigod that can slay giants by tapping them (hint: start a new character and try something else when you get to that point). The game is fucking huge and that's always been the thing that's made TES games unique. If you don't like the (necessary) sacrifices and corners they had to cut to achieve that, that's fine, but a lot of other people seem to be okay with it, and it's hardly an awful thing that games like this get praised once in a while.-
I think anyone could look past a little bugginess. That's not really what we're talking about, right?
http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Bugs_(Skyrim)
By the way, I'm about 4 hours into the game, level 6, and punch dragons to death in ~5-6 hits.
Obviously, different strokes for different folks.-
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I actually am having a reasonably fun time with it--I just don't get the huge boner that some folks have for it and I don't get why it's totally cool to continue to apologize for the hundreds of reported bugs that they have.
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Developers and publishers need to be held to a higher standard. Remember, not everyone who has a console or gaming PC has internet, so any patches that are released they won't get and are essentially stuck with a broken game.
David Jaffe spoke of this at GDC this year, saying he wants developers to limit themselves to 3 or 4 patches in total for any release. What this generation has grown into are games that aren't fully functional until a few weeks after their release, and even the patches sometimes only introduce new problems.
It's a possible slippery slope the industry could find itself in. Publishers would rush projects because they can always fall onto the "we can patch it later" argument. What we could end up seeing are more games coming out in shorter periods of time, but the quality in the games are much worse from the start, so it's only right that developers and members of the media not support this because publishers will see the success Skyrim had and try to replicate it, bugs included.-
it really is not a slippery slope. There are enough developers/publishers that still like to polish their games because polished games look and play good, and are attractive to players. And there is truth to that. Look at the COD games, those games are hella polished -- easily the most polished games in the industry right now. They're also put out every year, and tend to include rather incremental changes rather than big and dramatic ones. There's also the "make it massive, huge, complex and get it out sometime this century and just squash the major/game-breaking bugs and crash bugs" approach which is equally valid.
My point is we've been too much in this "polish at all costs" approach for a while now (I think MS cert has had something to do with this trend), has actually worked to the detriment of many games, where features or ideas have been cut out because developers didn't know how to make them totally stable or work 100% of the time. We should be allowing and encouraging experimentation, not demanding that developers get it totally right the first time every time (which, I mean, doesn't happen anyway even with polish). There should be a diverse ecosystem of games and one of those variances should be tolerance for bugs.
also I've said polished so many times the word feels like it's starting to lose all meaning.-
I think there is a way to be creative AND have a high quality game all at the same time, without any bugs to it. Look at the other nominees in the category. All of them were able to use the current tech out there and deliver great games without having many bugs in them.
But there are limits to what the tech and the engines provide when it comes to creating these games, and perhaps the engine running Skyrim needs to be reworked or scrapped for something more powerful.
It's almost like working in film. Depending on what equipment you have, the set you're on, and the cast... you can only do the best with what you have and you work within that frame. Perhaps Bethesda was overachieving, trying to create a world too grandiose for either the tech or the engine. It's nice in thought what they are doing, but the game is held back by practicality.-
No, there really isn't, actually. You cannot have big bold leaps in game development in a timely fashion without putting at least some stuff out there before it's done. As long as you guys are still stuck on film comparisons, the same is true of film as well. Tons of really great and ground-breaking films have glaring and sometimes even crippling flaws... bad editing, poor sound, bad pacing, composition lighting etc. etc.
It's also worth noting that sometimes bugs result in happy accidents. Sometimes when you create a system, it has strange and wonderful unintended consequences that. Games need to have flaws. I'm not even arguing that they are made great because of them (that would be extreme), but there has to be some allowance for glaring imperfections. The focus on polish, I think, at its worst comes from people being unable to come to terms with ways to criticize or evaluate games in any other way.-
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But the ultimate thing you have to consider is that the consumer is spending $60 on said product. With that kind of investment, there is expectations on the user end that what they are purchasing is a finished product. Any product you buy that is damaged in some way or isn't fully functional either gets returned and replaced or the customer is given a discount for their troubles.
It's an understood business model that has gone on through a long, long time... Customer agrees to spend X money on product, where the developer agrees to sell the intended product. With video games, developers patch games as opposed to allowing someone to return the game. The burden then becomes whether or not they can actually patch the game to get it working properly and in a timely fashion, and that is something that isn't totally reliable.
Bottom line, developers owe it to the consumers to get it right the first time. If they want to intentionally ship out a game that is filled with bugs, make it a beta and ask the gamers for feedback to see whether or not those bugs make the game better... not force them to spend money on a potentially broken game.-
And in film, absolutely everything is intentional. Producers spend months of pre-production getting things right before they shoot so that way no time and film are wasted in the process.
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Not everyone has Internet? This is your greatest worry about perception of games? A lack of patches?
Stupid thread. -
Everyone playing Skyrim on PC has internet, that much is for sure.
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Holding yourself to a higher standard doesn't start at limiting the amount of patches you release.
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I think that is exactly it, Oblivion wasn't really a main stream game. Skyrim got a lot of hype and got people to play that had never touched an elder scrolls game before.
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What? Oblivion brought RPGs into the mainstream, it was huge with the casual crowd, especially on the 360 which was lacking in substantial releases at the time. I'm sure the popularity of that game made Skyrim even bigger than it otherwise would have been.
Now I've played a lot of Morrowind, put over 200 hours into Oblivion (PC+360 combined) and Skyrim is deserving of all the hype and praise. It's the best game Bethesda has ever done and fucking incredible if you love exploring interesting game worlds. Not going to say it isn't flawed, but what game is perfect these days? There's a lot I would change about it and probably will whenever they release the mod tools.
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Skyrim is hands down the best game I've ever played. Giving it GOTY isn't a question at all in my mind.
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People love sandbox games no matter how buggy they are. Games like these are so massive that it would be impossible to ship without a boatload of bugs.
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Nothing else comes close in terms of the amount of time I've put into a game this year. Yeah it's buggy though honestly I haven't encountered all that many in the course of a 100+ hours.
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meh... who the fuck cares, its Spike TV.
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And best graphics. Graphics could also go to Witcher 2. But it's Spike, so whatever.
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Yeah, BF3 is amazing, but "spike tv" is meaningless anyway.
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Makes sense to me. BF3 is good, great even, but Portal 2's multiplayer is fresh, new and incredibly engrossing, even though you can only really play it once. BF3's replay value doesn't beat how good Portal 2's co-op campaign really is.
They're very close though, to be honest.
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2012 Spike Video Game Awards already?
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Best Nolan North voice performance (should've been a real award, but sadly isn't): Portal 2.
One word: SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!! -
While its difficult to take the entire thing seriously, two facts:
- that the awards were basically cleaned up by Skyrim, Batman: AC, and Portal 2
- Bastion won three awards
make me think that at least somewhere in that judging group, they get "it".
And then they give CODMW3 best Shooter. huh. -
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Agreed, neither of the characters were human!
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Surely if Skyrim is GOTY it gets to win lots of other categories by default.
Best Action Adventure, Best Xbox 360 Game, Best PS3 Game, Best PC game.
Also best performance by a human male. I USED TO BE AN ADVENTURER LIKE YOU ONCE.
Also doubles as best character of the year.
And how can a PS3 exclusive win best graphics over pc games? Don't lie.-
Skyrim isn't an action adventure, it's an RPG and it won that category.
Skyrim is amazing overall (!) but it has crappy graphics and 0 mod support on consoles, hence no console win.
Skyrim has far too many issues to be the best PC game, though it does come close. Portal 2 is simply by far the most polished choice.
The choices can live side by side easily once you look at what the titles are really meant for, none of them means you automatically win another except possibly the goty and genre ones.
Uncharted 3 did have very good graphics, though admittedly i'm wondering why BF3 didn't win that one.
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