It Takes Two (Hazelight Studios/Electronic Arts).Deathloop (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks).The six games in question are Deathloop, with nine nominations in all (including two in the Best Performance category) Ratchet & Clank : Rift Apart, with six It Takes Two and Psychonauts 2, with five each Resident Evil Village, with four and Metroid Dread, with two.
Each of the Game of the Year nominees is up for multiple awards.
Oh yeah! It’s an awards show! The full list of nominees follows. Image: Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks What are The Game Awards 2021 nominees? Deathloop is nominated for nine awards, including Game of the Year. Also, the return to an in-person event (last year’s show was a virtual broadcast because of the pandemic) means The Game Awards Orchestra, conducted by Lorne Balfe, will provide musical accompaniments and interludes throughout. Musical guests include Sting and Imagine Dragons. Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime is back on the stage, along with Shang-Chi star Simu Liu. Reeves returns this year alongside The Matrix comrade Carrie-Anne Moss. Last year’s show featured A-listers like Brie Larson, Ralph Macchio, Gal Gadot, Keanu Reeves, and The Swedish Chef, for example. The Game Awards are also known for roping in celebrities and other pop culture figures to hand out hardware and plug whatever they’re working on at the moment. In his podcast, Keighley said viewers should see a more normal slate of announcements this year. A lot of the announcements last year were for content updates to existing games. To give a sense of the scale of announcements that The Game Awards get, last year’s show featured Back 4 Blood’s debut trailer and teased the next Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, although the lineup was thinned somewhat by the dent that the COVID-19 pandemic put in development plans all year long. The first two trailers on deck are “surprises that will make people excited,” he said, and others will involve games that are three to four years from launching. Those ~90 minutes of game hype will include at least two current-console-generation games that will get a lot of attention, according to Keighley. Keighley said in a podcast earlier this week that he expects that “more than half” of the show will consist of new game announcements. What will be shown?Īlthough it’s ostensibly an end-of-year awards show, more fans tune in to The Game Awards for E3-style game announcements and trailers than for red-carpet interviews and onstage acceptance speeches. Fans can catch the show through its official website, the usual streaming options YouTube and Twitch, and social media venues such as Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter. The Game Awards 2021 broadcast begins at 8 p.m. Here is everything a fan needs to know to get ready for next week’s showcase. Fans, insiders, and industry luminaries alike now look to a Thursday in December with the kind of anticipation usually found at a major midyear expo. Christmas in July? How about E3 in December? That’s what The Game Awards have become under Geoff Keighley since the host of Spike TV’s former year-end roundup started his own production in 2014.