Baldur's Gate 3, because it's one of the best games I've ever played, but also I haven't played more than a few minutes of the other games on the list. Alan Wake 2 is only a storefront that doesn't support my operating system; Spider-Man 2 is stuck on a console that I don't intend to buy so I won't play it for at least two years (and even then it seems way too similar to the last games); Resident Evil 4 is surely better than the last time I played it, but I'm not in a rush to play a revised version of that game; Super Mario Bros. Wonder I can say shocks me that people are rating it this highly; and even if I wasn't pissed off at Nintendo these days, Tears of the Kingdom still didn't build on Breath of the Wild the way I wanted it to.
My heart says BG3, but my head also says BG3, because if you look at Google trends, BG3 has held the conversation longer and with higher peaks. Still, the winner is realistically only one of these two games.
To be perfectly fair, Skyrim has a decade of sales and mods in its favor when it comes to Steam numbers, and whether or not Starfield has fallen short by any metric, the things that it does were more novel when Skyrim did a lot of the same stuff 12 years ago.
The performance category feels like they purposely limited it to one performance per game, otherwise we'd have seen multiple reps from Baldur's Gate 3. The performance for Astarion was great, but I could easily see the nod going to Karlach or the narrator as well. And no disrespect to Idris Elba, but what he had to work with in Phantom Liberty (enjoyable as it was) doesn't hold a candle to Karlach; I might even say that another actor in Phantom Liberty put on a better performance than Elba did, again just because she had better material to work with.
Also, this is the first time the fighting game category nominees didn't make me angry. Usually they omit some notable game that belongs in the category and include a game or two that clearly don't belong there.
I finished my second run of Baldur's Gate 3 with the Ghost Recon team. I made sure to finish up some major side quests I passed the first time around, and to avoid spoilers, let's just say that my team was so effective that I got the Interfectorem Draconis achievement in one turn. This was still only on balanced difficulty, but now that I've played through the entire game with this team, I'm confident it would work on tactician.
I also started and finished Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty this past weekend. BG3 really illustrates you how much more freedom that game gives you compared to most AAA RPGs. Cyberpunk definitely accounts for different builds in a variety of ways, but they're all predetermined options for you that the game explicitly allowed for, as opposed to BG3's more systemic approach that allows you to be more creative. So it reminded me how Cyberpunk is a pretty decent RPG, but in a world where we get basically no FPS campaigns anymore, it's just about all we've got on that front, and it does a better than decent job of scratching that itch. There was one mission I didn't care for, and of the two mandatory boss fights, they mostly entailed sprinting around the room in circles until the boss gives you an opportunity to return fire. Other than those complaints though, it was solid. The story was good, the missions were fun, the presentation was excellent; I'd recommend it if you want more Cyberpunk.
I picked up Dungeons of Aether as a second-screen game while podcasts are on. I expected this to be more of a roguelike, but it's not really. I can't say how much procedural generation there is, because I haven't failed a mission yet, but I'm more inclined to just call it a strategy game that uses dice. I'm totally fine with that; it's just not what I expected. The game is pretty fun so far.
The sci-fi games that didn't just jump off the weapons rack gave us assault rifles with chainsaws on the end of them. Ratchet & Clank has no connection to the military industrial complex and gave us the same handful of templates within only about 5 years of the franchise. There's just only so much you can do with a weapon that's essentially a gun. Maybe you get one really unique-feeling weapon every game, but you can't get an entire arsenal of that every game.
I don't think they did. The genre could do that all by itself regardless of Halo or CoD. It also feels like there can only be so many creative weapons. Ratchet & Clank reused the same handful of templates after only a handful of entries.
SteamOS has, in my experience, avoided a lot of problems that any desktop OS has with being a gaming-only device, Windows or Linux. Stuff like applying updates or needing to alt+tab to address notifications that are major pains in the ass to do with a controller.
Why did we single out just this award from the whole show? Not only are there plenty of others worth talking about, there's also all the ways that show hung on by a thread. Troy Baker basically apologized for each joke written for him to read, and he and Gary Whitta had to yell at a nearby table for talking loudly over award winners.
If it's not, then it'll never work, which is why Apple's endeavor is doomed too. There's such a massive back catalogue of games that we can't, won't, and shouldn't abandon that unless you've got x64 translation as good as Proton is for Windows translation, or better, switching to ARM will never work for the latest greatest games. I think that switch to ARM is nearly inevitable, but that translation needs to be excellent first.
It seems like a minor increment over the Steam Deck. Valve is targeting performance per watt, and what's available in a handheld right now isn't going to start running The Quarry at high settings and 60 FPS.
I think it's way beyond that business deal by now. They're not responsible for the layoffs at Sony, Microsoft, EA, or Epic, after all. Something ended the money party that everyone in the industry staffed up for, and that something might be inflation reducing consumer spending, the crypto crash, higher interest rates making borrowing money more expensive, something else entirely, or a little bit of all of that.