Candidate for most innovative game of 2012? Star Wars: The Old Republic, the game that only claimed to have one innovative feature—full voice overs—but actually didn’t innovate that. Credit for the first fully-voiced online game must go to DC Universe Online. And then there’s this convenient little chart outlining their oh-so-innovative character and combat designs. Wonderful!
Candidate for best online technology? Star Wars: The Old Republic again! A game that gimped itself with a bad engine, claimed the “low, medium, high” graphics options were a bug, that there were only supposed to have two settings, but had HD textures in beta has the best online technology! Never mind either that they claimed HD textures with large numbers of players in the same zone are technologically impossible — they’re the best!
Also nominated for best new online game in 2012, despite having lost most of its launch subscribers by now, and being declared “not one of our top 5 games” by EA, despite costing around 200 million and taking 6 years to develop.
It’s also up for Best Visual Arts and Best Game Design. Well, its graphics are derivative of WoW’s 2004 graphics, and its game design is derivative of every failed MMO that tried to copy WoW. Part of me hopes these nominations are jokes, but Glitch happens to be up in these two categories as well. Glitch has actually earned that nod.
At least they didn’t nominate SW:TOR for best community relations, then I would know it is just a joke.
However, I was not surprised to note that two EAware employees are on the GDCO Awards Advisory Board.
Everquest 2 had a lot of voiceovers, even conversational voices of npcs you walked past. While not fully voiced, they still had 130 hours of voice + 1700 actors. ~ this was released in 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everquest_2#Voices
As someone on Massively said, that whole series of awards makes perfect sense if you view them as hipster irony rather than serious award nominations.