Cyberpunk winning best ongoing game is such a joke. Yes, I enjoyed the DLC but if any game with DLC and updates can be part of that category then that category has no meaning at all.
I'm convinced they had Cyberpunk win it because they don't have a "Best DLC/Expansion" category (yet) and felt like Cyberpunk deserved to win something for the way 2.0 and Phantom Liberty revitalised it.
It has nothing to do with DLC. I think it deserved the award. Instead of just letting the game die that it shouldn't have released in the first place. They fixed it.
I think we might have different expectations here. I think if a company sells a broken game, they should fix it without praise. The consumers paid for it. Specially should they not get an award for that. There should be a category for “most stable release” instead.
I think the reason it gets praised is because it's very rare that poor games get as much time and investment into fixing in this day and age. Most companies will just move on to the next game or even use AI to write their apology letters and then abandon the game entirely.
Yeah, what actually happened here is they put out a broken, unfinished game 3 years ago, have spent the last 3 years on damage control and fixing it (which means it never changed overall price on the store like a 3 year old game should) and now they want you to buy an Xpac and the ultimate edition so they can sell it again, still for full price. It's not worth an award, it's scummy.
Awarded to a game for outstanding development of ongoing content that evolves the player experience over time.
Its best ongoing game, not best live service game. I think things like Stardew Valley or No Man’s Sky fit into this just like Cyberpunk did because devs should be praised for when they go above and beyond. I’d argue CDPR owed that to their fans but still, they mostly pulled it off.
Yes, Cyberpunk, sorry I didn’t clarify. And I agree with the 2024 take too.
As someone who is industry adjacent and has worked with people who work on games that are actively updated and improved for years…idk the Cyberpunk win doesn’t sit right with me. I have all the sympathy for the devs at CDPR and what they went through during the initial launch of the game, but this win just shows upper management at dev companies that they can get rewarded for releasing unfinished projects and finishing them later.
It’s also funny that they won against FFXIV, an actual good example of a game that was nuked to the ground and rebuilt with continuous support because of it’s initial failure.
There's a huge indie scene with loads of ongoing games that would be far more deserving of the award than Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk literally stopped major developments with 2.0, the rest you're going to get are easy to include content and QoL. Compare that to Dwarf Fortress that has 20+ years of development and is only 50% done with the final vision. You could probably also stick Terraria there because despite the devs saying multiple times that they're done they're still updating the game. I'm sure there's more but those two were just at the top of my head.
The only merit CP77 has to be on that list is fixing a broken game. Do you think CP77 would've won the award if it had release in the 2.0 state and gotten 3 years of additional development? Would it even make it into the nominees list? I don't think so.
Friends Per Second podcast had an interesting discussion around it. The term Indie isn’t well defined. Maybe never was. Most people probably see DtD as indie even though it had a publisher. A new category could be “independent” which actually has games that were published independently.
Also, fixing your fucked it game isn't ongoing either. CP2077 in this category is a disgrace. They shipped a buggy game, released DLC and actually finished the game and then won an award for it. Bullshit.