Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Wins Best Action/Adventure Game At TGA 2023

I feel like I'm like one of two people who haven't played this or BOTW yet.

Haven’t played much of it but I’m glad it won something.

I feel bad for Spider Man 2. Did not win a single thing.

While Nintendo won best Family game, best action/adventure, and best sim/strategy. Xbox won most innovative and best racing (Forza) . And GOTY is Baldur's Gate 3.

Congratulations to all 3 games of Nintendo that won!

Pity Zelda didn’t win best game of the year, I myself am not a baldur’s gate 3 person (i don’t like tentacle stuff) and I do not see how Zelda could have improved itself to make sure it would win. But yeah, congratulations to Larian studios too!

Most of us didn't need the award to know this but glad it won it.

Quality game. Even though I had some issues with it, it's probably my personal GOTY.

That's not saying much since I spent half of the year playing only that, but still... I guess that does say something.

With the sheer quality of gaming content available this year I wasn't really expecting TOTK to take home anything despite it being my personal GOTY.

Still, it's a well deserved winning in the Action/Adventure category against its competition... all of which were also sequels hilariously.

Wasn’t there an award for best game mechanics? Something like that? I thought Tears of the Kingdom would have been a shoe-in for that award and in a dogfight for the others.

Congratulations to the devs!!! Still playing but phenomenal game. Well deserved!

Really glad TotK won something, it totally deserves it! I loved every minute of it and I’m glad I got to play such an amazing game. I’m also planning on playing the rest of the Zelda games I haven’t played because of it. Also to the Spider-Man 2 fans, congratulations as you’re now experiencing the same pain Xenoblade fans felt last year!

I'm not surprised Baldur's Gate 3 won GotY. I've not played the game yet (need a decent gaming PC first), but from what I have heard/read/understand, it deserves it.

I'm glad Nintendo grabbed a few categories. I was expecting TotK to grab more than one win though. And personally, picking Pikmin 4 over Fire Emblem: Engage seems like an odd choice to me.

I fully expected ToTK to take this award, so not much of a surprise. I think I was more so shocked aw2 snagged best direction from ToTK & bg3.

And well deserved

@anoyonmus @RubyCarbuncle
Spider-Man 2 found it self being in a "jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none" situation. The game is great as the sum of its part but individual aspects were outclassed by other games.

That actually brings me to a complaint about The Game Awards: they should have more awards for technical achievements. Stuff like Ultrahand in TOTK or the sheer speed at which you can swing or fast travel in Spidey 2 are absolutely amazing but the people who make all of that possible will never receive any recognition. Games are computer programs after all, with programmers and software engineers to put everything together.

It's not like having too many additional awards will overwhelm the show since Geoff will just speed run through most of the awards in 30 seconds each lmao.

İ am very happy that Tears of the Kingdom won a Award. İt was also possible too it could not won a award. İt was not like Breath of the wild. Breath of the wild was the game of year.

Tears of the Kingdom won only 1 award.

Great for Zelda, fantastic game and a well-deserved award, but all I really care about with tonight's awards was Pikmin 4 winning best strategy/sim game; little guys really moving up in the world and I'm living for it.

Zelda is the only game on that list or even the whole year can claim to be an adventure game

Not bad for a game that made me quit Switch as a platform.

Long live Breath of the Wild, I will always cherish those 1100 hours I have spent playing it.

Very well deserved.

Seeing Zelda win in at least one category during a very close competition was satisfactory for me.

Unfortunately, it had to take a game nearly 10 times ( Baldur's Gate 150 GB ) the size of TotK ( 16 GB ) and on outdated hardware to beat it for GOTY.

BotW won GOTY in 2017. TotK improved on BotW in nearly every aspect of the game. It does not deserve the backlash and the hate that it gets simply for being a true masterpiece of a game.

Oh, I just realized I haven't finished the game yet. Damn you Cobalt Core.

@Scarmucci TotK is basically an oversized DLC. BG3 is a full game, like BotW was. So when you think of it like that, it makes sense. Hardware and file size have very little to do with it.

I still play TotK almost every day. But it's too much copy paste - both within the game and compared to it's predecessor - to be eligible for GotY.

@Everythingnotsaved 100% this.

Oversized DLC is exactly right, i enjoyed it for a bit, but theres no way it should have taken 6 years to make this, they used 80% of the same assets they already had from BOTW.

I don't think it's a bad game but i can 100% see why it didn't win GOTY.

@Scarmucci your opinion here is very admirable, standing strong by your Zelda, its very cute and i commend you for it.

But if you are in any way involved with game development, you can see what Nintendo did here, they did exactly what Ubisoft does every time they make a "new" Assassins Creed game.

They use 80% of existing assets to make said game, so even though they add a few bits here and there to make it feel new, you're basically playing the same game from 2 years previous.

Only issue here is that Nintendo waited 6 years to drop DLC or "new game" as you call it. If you actually understand game development and how these tjings work, it's very easy to see why Nintendo won only 1 award, it didn't deserve anything.

@Reztobi I congratulate you on your game development expertise. I was surprised you did not mention that Tears is build on an entirely new game engine compared to Breath of the Wild. Some "DLC" to pull that off! That new game engine was needed obviously because of the new game mechanics to work in the first place. And if you think 80% of assets was the same, you were clearly not paying attention. Perhaps you should look at some comparison video's. There are plenty out there in the wild.

@Tober a new game engine?

Where did you dig that crock of bs from? Care to share your information? Who told you that TOTK was built using a different game engine?

😂.

Also thanks, its good to know my game development expertise being noticed.

Now run along and show me your evidence that TOTK was developed using a different game engine.

Same map
mostly same items
Mostly same NPCs
same enemies
Exactly the same gameplay with a few additions
Exactly the same graphics
Exactly the same art style.

But yes, its not 80% the same.

Its closer to 90%... thanks for bringing that to my attention.

@Reztobi Here you go:

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/05/the-new-zelda-title-apparently-has-a-game-engine-link-with-splatoon-3

https://gonintendo.com/contents/20211-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-uses-the-same-game-engine-as-splatoon-3

Google is your friend. The only other game using BotW game engine is Ring Fit Adventure by the way. But you can google that too.

As an expert game developer you are obviously aware that game engine has nothing to do with the game's art direction. Wind Waker and Twillight Princess use the same game engine as example.

It's all about memory allocation and TotK needed this new engine to make Ultrahand and it's nuts and bolts mechanics to work.

You might have also noticed new textures all over the place even for things like dirt roads. Let alone all the caves and such. And new animations like how Link now looks down when standing on an edge. Let alone that even familiar looking monsters all have new animations.

The idea of TotK was to invoke a Deja Vu for BotW players, but actually change things up a lot. It's all in the details. The only place where the map is looking 90% the same is opening the Purah Pad and look at the map that way.

Superb game. I must have put my soul into this for many, many, many hours. Loved it. So much I could go back to to clear up. Fair play and well done for the award

Congrats to Aonuma and the rest of the development team!

One of us should do a tribute to the Great Gonzo to be featured on "Top Gaming Plays.."

@Reztobi As someone already pointed out your theory on the game engine was incorrect. The programmers did a lot of hard work to clean up this code and also to create the feeling of a similar world but in a different point in time. Isn’t that what most games do, in particular Zelda games? They normally have more than one game set in a similar storyline or art style. You can argue the DLC point but that all comes down to preference and in reality there are three worlds now to explore and the Ultrahand physics are quite good considering how they were able to swap objects in and out of the screen and use the art style to trick the brain especially considering the age of the hardware.

lol people here are going back to “BotW dlc” just because it didn’t win GoTY. People never change.

@Reztobi You're reply was very patronizing, to say the least.

@Everythingnotsaved TotK is a direct sequel, so of course it was going to use resources of the original. But if you cannot recognize how much has changed from the BotW, then your bias against the game is showing and I feel sorry for you if you cannot enjoy it as much as, and even moreso than, the original.

As a huge fan of both Zelda and Larian games and playing a ton of both TotK and BG3 I have to say that they made the right choice. TotK is a great game but for me at least it had diminishing returns do to the similarities to BotW - don't get me wrong I love it's continuing the story. I am invested in knowing what happens but I am less eager to collect every armor, complete all the shrines and search for all those damn seeds again. Not that you need to do all those things to enjoy the game, however, the game actively encourages you and I don't know about you but I am an obsessive completionist in my Zelda games. So my TofK game started to feel like work like I was just making sure I was checking all the boxes. Still a great game and I love playing with the new mechanics, but I can't find it in me to go back to it and complete the game. BG3 on the other hand drew me despite a lot of bugs, and performance issues and it not saving my games for the first couple of days. The crazy amount of writing and the interesting characters wrapped in a world that like TofK encourages experimentation hooked me. Also like TofK your avatar is weirdly mute. Where TotK is all about exploration, and puzzle solving - BG3 is all larger-than-life characters, crunchy TBS combat, and making the least bad decisions and then save scuming if everything goes to pot. Different beasts but for my money Larian's Covid game has more heart and ultimately the better game. That being said, what a year 2023 has been for video game releases - I haven't touched StarField or the other dozens of great releases that have come out this year.

@Zidentia TotK was created by absolute coding geniuses. It’s one of the most stable yet largest worlds Nintendo has ever conceived and executed. The game should have won for best direction as well.

So I’m with you that anyone that says it’s just DLC frankly aren’t being genuine about it. There is a massive amount of new stuff in this go round of Zelda and I’d even claim there are actually 4 maps due to all the new cave systems created.

Congrats to Larian’s win, even if I don’t agree with it, though.

@FishyS Given how many people were sprooking how great Spider-Man 2 was and how it was going to slaughter every other game there it is pretty amusing it got nothing. lol

Completely undeserved but hey if people want to pay 70 dollars for Breath of the Wild DLC who am I to judge?