Elden Ring Has Won The Most Coveted Gaming Award
FromSoftware’s Elden Ring might not end the year as the best-selling gaming title of 2022 — it was surpassed by the video game with the highest-grossing opening — but it will end the year as the best game of 2022, having been crowned Game of the Year. The best 2022 gaming title was up against Stray, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Horizon Forbidden West, and the highly anticipated sequel to 2018’s God of War soft-reboot.
The news about Elden Ring being the new GOTY (Game of the Year) spread like wildfire through media outlets and social media — as seen from PlayStation’s Twitter account. To be entirely honest, it’s a well-deserved victory since many fans hold the game in very high regard, believing that the title defines what the Game of the Year should be. Admittedly, FromSoftware’s role-playing game amazed players with its scope, visuals, and satisfying gameplay, despite its steep learning curve and very detailed mechanics.
To be fair, both Elden Ring and its creators deserved an award; its developers have done something really genius, as they took the formulas used in their previous games and expanded upon them while leaving out the most-used game-ruining ingredient — microtransactions. It was a massive success that even enticed those gamers who previously tried and abandoned Souls-like games due to their notorious difficulty. Not only that, but it managed to stay popular all throughout the entire year and make headlines along the way, despite other high-profile, concurrent releases.
It managed to create a whole new community of gamers who had devoted weeks and months of their lives studying how to play more effectively and how to perform no-hit runs, and it even nearly immortalized some gamers who became living legends among the said community. Besides winning the main award, Elden Ring also won awards for best game direction, best art direction, and best action/adventure game. Yet, there are those who believe that Elden Ring’s victory was at the expense of another competitor — 2022’s God of War Ragnarok.
However, the moment calls for honesty, and we can say with certainty that Elden Ring had at least a marginal advantage over the recently-released God of War Ragnarok. The Game Awards are voted by the players themselves. While no one can exclude any behind-the-scene lobbying and various machination, we can say with certainty that the jury’s decision is a legitimate one. Compared to God of War Ragnarok, Elden Ring is a multi-platform release, while the former is an exclusive, and PC and Xbox gamers are known for almost never voting on PS exclusives.
So, there’s an argument to be made that the game would’ve won if it wasn’t a PS exclusive, considering that the higher number of players would’ve voted for God of War. It would seem that Sony’s pride continues to work against the company, which was previously overshadowed by Xbox in its domestic market. Regardless, Christopher Judge, the voice actor who reprised the role of Kratos in God of War, received an award for best performer in gaming thanks to the layers of complexity he brought to the role.
With that said, God of War took home five awards — more than any other game — coming second only to Elden Ring. All the gaming community has to do now is wait for Elden Ring GOTY Edition of the game.
