Do you want to get the latest gaming industry news straight to your inbox? Sign up for our daily and weekly newsletters here. The year isn’t over yet, but The Game Awards showed us last night that there are some awesome games coming in 2024. It was a successful event with a big presence from […]
The year isn’t over yet, but The Game Awards showed us last night that there are some awesome games coming in 2024.
It was a successful event with a big presence from the game industry’s who’s who at the Peacock Theater at LA Live in downtown Los Angeles. It was cool to see the performance of Poets of the Fall singing a musical routine of Old Gods of Asgard with the actors from the game and creative director Sam Lake dancing away amid pyrotechnics. Geoff Keighley’s awards show lived up to the reputation of being the biggest celebration of gaming, or the Oscars of gaming.
Wizard of the Coast and Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 took home Game of the Year, edging out Super Mario Bros Wonder, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Alan Wake 2 (my personal favorite) and Resident Evil 4. It was an excellent year for top-rated games that sadly all could have sold better than they actually did, given the world’s economic funk.
The biggest surprise and most ambitious game of the night was Hello Games’ Light No Fire, a fantasy multiplayer game set on a virtual world the size of the Earth. Built with just a dozen people, Light No Fire has been in the works for five years. They showed how you could move through that world as if it were expansively built out, and how you could regenerate it whenever you logged into it.
CEO Sean Murray said on stage the team uses the same kind of procedural generation technology that it used in its previous game, No Man’s Sky. While players viewed No Man’s Sky’s galaxy of planets as overhyped at first, the company pour so much energy into the updates that it earned a lot of player respect.
It did so at the same time that it was creating the new Light No Fire tech, which has tons of biomes just like our planet. Murray said the project was code-named Everest, as they wanted to show what it be like to have a huge mountain in a virtual world. They wound up building something so much bigger. This kind of technology has a ton of promise, and it surprises me that such a small company came up with it. What I liked about Hello Games’ effort was what it said about using technical ingenuity to solve huge challenges. Indeed, this kind of technical feat is what will keep games from melting the polar ice caps (I hope). This is the most ambitious virtual world I’ve seen since Brendan Greene talked about Artemis and Jensen Huang of Nvidia talked about making Earth’s digital twin.
LightSpeed LA, a division of Tencent’s LightSpeed Studios, showed up with a cinematic for an ambitious game called Last Sentinel. It depicted the city of Tokyo 70 years after a catastrophic flooding event that left the city in need of a seawall to keep the floodwaters out.
