This year’s The Game Awards broke quite a few trends and proceeded to disappoint a lot of different sections of fans. Quite unsurprisingly, Baldur’s Gate 3 walked away with 6 Awards including Game of the Year and Best Performance for Neil Newbon, while Alan Wake 2 walked away with 3 Awards including Best Narrative and Best Direction. What surprised gamers however, is the fact that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Starfield, which were two of the most anticipated and popular titles for PS and XBox respectively walked home empty handed. This is the second shocker big of the event as one section of fans was distraught when the best selling game of 2023 – Hogwarts Legacy wasn’t even nominated for any of the categories. So, here, let us try to analyse why Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 wasn’t considered worthy enough for any win.
Analysing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Snub At The Game Awards 2023
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was dubbed as a solid contender for Game of the Year award and as one of the best superhero games ever made in history of gaming. Boasting a Metacritic score of 90%, OpenCritic score of 98%, and a user score of 9.1, it garnered insanely positive reviews from critics and fans alike. That aside, it became fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game using the first 24 hours as the metric as it sold over 2.5 Million copies within a day of its release. Expectedly, it went on to be nominated for 7 Game Awards but unfortunately, ended up winning none of them. So, let us take a look into all these 7 nominations.
Starting with the big one aka – The Game of the Year Award, which was awarded to Balder’s Gate 3. Keeping your fandom aside for a moment, did you really think SM2 could have won it? Game of the Year Award is usually given to a game which does something ground-breaking or exceptional in any area of gaming, hence pushing the industry to new heights. As amazing as it was, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was essentially the same as Marvel’s Spider-Man (2018) with a few additional gimmicks. On the other hand, Baldur’s Gate 3 took, tabletop RPG system to new heights. Therefore, it was snubbed for the same reason God of War: Ragnarok was last year.
Moving on to Best Game Direction and Best Narrative, these are the two areas where Spider-Man 2 truly excelled. It delivered a great narrative with a heartfelt storyline, great character development, and masterful adaptation of the source material. However, unfortunately, its competition was Alan Wake 2 which did all this even better! Also, one has to factor in originality as what we saw in SM2, is something we’ve seen a lot over the years in films, games, comics, and what not. But Alan Wake 2 presented a highly original tale and anyone who has played it would certainly agree that it deserved to win these 2 Awards, maybe even GOTY.
Let us now talk about the Best Performance Award, Yuri Lowenthal did a really great job as Peter Parker in all phases. From his fall to the dark side to his redemption, Lowenthal made Peter’s journey all the more memorable. However, once again, Neil Newbon as Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3 was really tough competition. If you have any doubts about Astarion, check out this clip and decide for yourself. As for Best Audio Design, SM2 was never a strong contender to begin with and even if Hi-Fi Rush lost, everyone’s next choice would be Alan Wake 2. As for Innovation in Accessibility, SM2 is a great accessibility showcase by Insomniac Games but again, it doesn’t quite bode well against its competitors.
Finally, let us talk about two categories where its loss actually hurts, aka Best Action-Adventure Game and Player’s Voice. For Action-Adventure category, SM2 and Legend of Zelda were the only two worthy contenders and though it is understandable why Zelda won, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was equally worthy of the title. The game is nothing, if not a great adventure packed with non-stop action but was snubbed because it doesn’t take you places other than NYC. As for Player’s Voice which is basically equivalent to Popular Choice, we have no idea how SM2 lost in that category. Given how disappointed players are that it won nothing, they should have probably voted more than being disappointed later. Among the three most popular games – Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, SM2, none of them managed to win even popularity award.
So, yeah, if you just take a brief look at the awards, it would feel Spider-Man 2 was snubbed. However, when you star analysing, you’ll probably understand why it didn’t win anything among the 7 categories it was nominated for. As good as it was, when put against category wise competition, it lacks a few gimmicks too short. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is now available to play exclusively on PS5.
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