Let me give you a simple answer - it’s a Chinese game. TGA wouldn’t allow it to win the trophy.
兄弟我尊重你的想法，但我觉得你意识形态太重了，太过于陷入中国–西方对抗这种叙事语境了，很多人只是个游戏玩家并不关心或者不在意不想看到这些东西，我觉得你应该试着去理解和尊重，在这个社区里的人都是喜欢黑神话的玩家。我们应该庆祝我们获得的奖项，而不是过于去对这些东西去争论。让我们享受游戏吧！
>The games nominated this year are all exceptional, but I honestly have no idea what the criteria for Game of the Year were this time.
The game of the year is voted by game critics, game media outlets etc. Wukong is my game of the year and I honestly didn’t think it would had won because I think its artistic value is top notch but its gameplay elements definitely felt unpolished.
The reason why Wukong was so good to me is because of the story, the chinese dialogue writing for it that is like poetry would be lost through the English translation. The animated cutscene had so much impact, the love song between Pigsy and Spider, the weird Yellowbrow as a soft-shell turtle scene, the way each animated short has a take away lesson from it is very reminiscent of those Buddhist childrens cartoon shorts you would watch, the epic tale of the past bull king and wukong, the animated shorts was done so well and all evokes a strong emotion each time.
The game is a homage to Journey to the west, seeing the characters you know appear again, having it be very similar to the original story but with a twist difference to keep it fun (Like how you knew LingJi would had help you but he appears differently in the game than in the story), having the original Journey to the West Opening theme be the final boss theme and the final cutscene theme was peak.
But all of it is built for the people who knew Journey to the west, and most critics in the west probably don’t even know Journey to the West outside of the media reference like Wukong in League. It is just what it is, it’s neither the critics nor the developers fault, but simply a difference in what they wanted the game to appeal to.
>During the development of this game, many colleagues were less optimistic than I was. Having experienced too many interim versions, they inevitably felt the game had too many flaws and doubted it could launch on time.
Yeah it’s pretty obvious the game had a lot of stuff that they wanted to do in the begining, like how there was a transformation to a fly part of the game that is never used again.
I think they probably wanted to incorporate Wukong’s transformation ability more, like maybe allow you to transform into a mouse to squeeze into small cracks for a hidden area or turning into a fish to swim in some lakes to find a treasure etc would had been cool, but that was probably out of their scope at the time.
>Finally, I hope the story of Black Myth can give some courage to those still lost and wandering in the dark and allow them to see a glimmer of light, so they can move forward with a calm heart.
Glad to see them being positive, they already showed that they are listening to player’s feedback like including a map and are aware of the invisible wall problem, so their next game with their new massive earnings from Wukong will probably improve on a lot of those aspect (Wish they have smoother combat like input buffering or more varied combo, or leaning heavier into either a light combat (being able to dodge mid combo) or heavy commitement combat (can’t cancel combo but everything is slower but attack punches heavier and harder etc).
Though even with the gameplay improvement I wonder if it will still fail to move a global audience since it’s building off on a lot of existing Chinese centered themes and expects you to already know the JTTW lore, it’s like showing a movie sequel to someone who hasn’t watch the original before, and it’s a sequel that fanservices the original a lot too. I feel that another game that is just as good but with a story that starts from the ground up would likely be the next winner, since Wukong was done so artistically well, imagine that but for a fresh story instead.
It’s such a shame that a lot of Reddit and a good portion of the west have so much hatred for the game, makes it hard to like and talk about the game fondly without being accused of being a Chinese bot or something.
Honestly I don’t feel the sourness in section one sounds like him. No matter if TGA was completely fair, they got two great awards, and I don’t think Feng Ji should have felt entitled to all of them. He always sounded humble to me.
Great points!
Kinda sad that he did not address Baldur’s Gate 3 review bombing.
In fact, this is just a joke in Chinese context, and the meaning got misunderstood due to translation.
Such a brilliant mind with a beautiful statement to articulate he’s feelings and GS’s journey. Hope this sparks shift in Chinese game developers to pursue more high quality gaming experience to the global audience.
I read another article about the same post of Fengji on 80lv, I think this might be better. Link: Game Science CEO’s Long Letter after Black Myth: Wukong Lost GOTY
“As the first-ever Chinese AAA action RPG title to make it to the stage of TGA, Black Myth: Wukong carried a lot of anticipation from Chinese players and its developers, Game Science. Its loss in the GOTY category has prompted CEO Feng Ji, also known as Yocar, to release a heartfelt statement spanning seven sessions on Chinese social media Weibo. In this statement, he includes some content he had prepared for his acceptance speech, which was written two years ago but never got the chance to be delivered — a fact that he admitted in a joking and self-ironic way with the usage of dog head emoji.”
I am a native chinese speaker and I think this is a very good translation (as at 3:00am GMT 18th Dec 2024).
Yeah Feng Ji “came here for nothing” as in not only Wukong didn’t win GOTY but he also struggled to grasp the criteria of winning, when they came to the TGA being all (rightfully) confident and hopeful for the GOTY award. Another suitable translation that I found goes something like “what a bummer” by u/Beginning_Neat_5970.
I think he most likely did NOT want to imply that Astrobot was undeserving; he just had full confidence in the game he and his teams made. To me it also conveyed the slight confusion, say, where Astrobot is 7/7 while Wukong is 9/10 in their respective genre and scale, so it is almost like comparing clementine to orange which is not always straightforward, hence the confusion and possibly slight discontent here, especially when it takes more challenges to produce a sweet & flavoursome orange than it is to produce a sweetest clementine (just an example; not actual agriculture).
齐天大圣到此一游！以后一定会好好的再来！
Man. Some of you are delusional…
This was an amazing game yes, but it still had it’s issues which prevented it from winning GOTY. It still won players choice GOTY.
I truly respect feng ji for this, and the rest of the game science workers there as well, I’m hoping they will release more news in the future!
Probably gonna get down voted cause this is specifically a bmw subrreddit, but after playing all the nominated games this year astrobot definitely deserved it. And if that didn’t win ff7 or metaphor would have. Bmw is a good game, but it wasn’t perfect. It was impressive for the devs to do well on their first game, and I hope they learn how it could have been better listening to feedback on this game. I was surprised it won cause I didn’t think it would due to popularity. Was thinking ff7 was going to have that advantage. So seeing it win was nice.
I always thought that the opponent was ff7, but I didn’t expect this result to be disgusting.
Congratulations to TGA and Geoff, you did lost all your fking credibility.
A game who plagiarism all idea from Nintendo can won the goty, this is an absolute overdraft on the credibility of TGA and Geoff.
Truth is many are ignorant to other country’s and are to quick to shoot it down because they don’t like that country eg Japan China ext they look at it as a hole and not as other people passionate about games as we do so because it comes frm china ext they automatically hate it the game was a hit and should have won hands down all categories it was in shoulda been voted on for the game and not country of origin I personally am looking forward to see what’s next for them
This just goes to show that the GoTY award is about as meaningless as the Academy Awards and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It’s just funny how yesterday everyone was scolding fans who spoke out against how TGA did dirty to BMW, called everyone who defended BMW ridiculous and delusional.
And now CEO of GS basically said the same thing: TGA was dirty af. And now suddenly it’s ok to defend BMW?
BMW ofc was undeniably worthy of GOTY by every metric and criterion, it was only ripped off the title cuz its a Chinese game.
Happy to see FJ thought the same. This GOTY is basically a Joke of the year, Astro Bot was not even a proper game. It’s like a mini game at most