All the Announcements from The Game Awards 2017

Jeremy Ray
Games Game Trailers
Games Game Trailers Nintendo PlayStation

The Game Awards has become a bigger and bigger event over the years, but no one was expecting the announcements to come this thick & fast. It was a big year for showing new content.

First up was a trailer for a new game based on the book (and movie I guess, ugh) World War Z. The amount of mindless brain-eaters it manages to fit on-screen at once is impressive:

They look like very simple AI routines running on each zombie, but the sheer number seems overwhelming. In a good way.

The folks from Owlchemy Labs came on stage to show their new VR project. As creators of Job Simulator, they’re one of the few teams that’ve successfully cracked VR — and in the same vein, their new game is Vacation Simulator.

According to the developers, hands are the most underrated tool in VR. “We really leaned into that with this game.”

Staying on the VR train, Accounting+ is the new game from Crows Crows Crows and Squanchtendo, and is described as being “like Accounting, but PLUS.” It’s out December 19th on Oculus, PSVR, and Vive.

Next up was the new game from the creators of Firewatch. In the Valleys of Gods is an exploration/archaeology game in beautiful, ancient environments.

The trailer shows you setting up some kind of surveying equipment, which is probably the premise that compels you to get from Point A to Point B. But this game looks like it’s much more about the journey than the destination.

Then came a big one. We knew there was another round of DLC on the way for Breath of the Wild, but Nintendo chose to show a trailer for The Champion’s Ballad and reveal some new details — right before letting everyone know it was available RIGHT NOW.

Next up was a surprise from From Software. We saw about 13 seconds of bone and metal before the phrase “Shadows Die Twice.” But when I really jumped in my chair was when the From Software logo came up.

And in the words of Geoff Keighley, “That’s all you get!”

We just put up a speculation piece on what this came could be. Check it out here.

The Bandai Namco folks took the stage, and they spoke about fighting games for a bit. Obviously BN has Dragonball FighterZ on the way, but they had something else to announce: A brand new SoulCalibur game.

The trailer makes it seem like we could see some new systems around blocking or parries, and perhaps super moves as well. There’s a lot of good stuff in the fighting genre at the moment, but any new SoulCalibur is a welcome addition.

We saw a sneak peek of frozen survival game Fade to Silence in the below trailer:

It was time for Nintendo America’s Reggie Fils-Aime to take the stage, and publicly proclaim how happy he was to be working with Platinum Games. As well he should be.

He announced that Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 will be available on the Switch in February, before chanelling Steve Jobs and saying there’s “one more thing.”

That thing was Bayonetta 3:

The game will also be a Switch exclusive. You can see why Fils-Aime is so happy.

It was time for what many people in the audience were waiting for. Hideo Kojima stepped out with Norman Reedus to show a very long, and absolutely bonkers trailer for Death Stranding. Watch the full thing below.

The trailer shows otherworldly enemies that require technology for humans to detect. It seems like the line between their dimension and ours is blurry, and they’re capable of detecting a human’s breath as well as physically harming them. So much so, that it’s better to end oneself before being fully captured.

Then it gets into some stuff that defies interpretation, or even description. I mean, there’s a baby in Norman Reedus’ mouth. Just watch it.

As we just learned from the Playstation Experience show, a lot of that stuff — such as going into his mouth and seeing the baby — is actually playable content.

Witchfire is the new game from the creators of What Remains of Edith Finch, as well as Painkiller and Bulletstorm. That should raise a few eyebrows — Edith Finch was a game in which you largely just walk around and experience exposition. The latter two are about as “dudebro” as you can possibly get.

The result?

This is looking like an action FPS with psychological horror elements. Very cool.

Josef Fares stepped up and introduced his new game about co-op criminality, which you can experience in its entirety with a friend.

The game is out on March 23rd.

You can also watch Josef Fares rant about how passionate he is about gaming, and how The Game Awards is ten times better than the Oscars. But not in those words.

The PUBG team came out for a while and talked about the new desert map, as well as how all of its battle royale maps will be available without additional payment.

Next up was Media Molecule, whose new game is Dreams.

GTFO is being made by the team behind Payday 2, and it looks like it includes a very Payday style of co-op, albeit with a horror vibe.

A new trailer was shown for Metro Exodus, which was more of a reminder/flavour trailer. The one we saw back at E3 2017 had quite a lot of gameplay in it, so that’s still the one to watch if you’re interested in the game.

Hey, we’ll take it.

That’s a wrap on the announcements from The Game Awards. We’ll have more information on all of these games as it becomes available!

Jeremy Ray
Decade-long games critic and esports aficionado. Started in competitive Counter-Strike, then moved into broadcast, online, print and interpretative pantomime. You merely adopted the lag. I was born in it.