The only award I think it didn’t deserve was Best RPG.
But, on the other hand, it should have gotten Best Sound Design over BF6; so it still would have gotten 9 awards.
Truly a masterpiece of a game. To those haters saying “But not even BG3 got that many awards!” it’s not a fair comparison. BG3 is a slightly better game IMO, but Expedition 33 is a work of art on top of being an amazing game and appeals to a much wider audience. Which isn’t to say games like BG3 aren’t beautiful, but I think anyone would agree that E33 is on a whole other level.
I’ll see you Best RPG and raise you a Best Independent and Best Debut Indie.
They have a publisher that funded them with hedge fund money and outsourced aspects of the production to entirely different companies. I’m not making a comment on the quality of the game, but how is that indie?
In your opinion what game deserved the best rpg of 2025?
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
I love E33 but the RPG mechanics are pretty barebones.
The parry mechanic completely ruined the combat for me, I still can’t motivate myself to finish the game because of it.
The French are really something else! Their ability to convey emotion is peerless in the planet.
I love when they block all the roads with tractors and spray manure into government buildings to protest the government being shitty at governing.
It conveys the emotions I feel so much better than I ever could (I don’t own large quantities of manure, not the means to propel them at high speeds).
Pure civilizacional gold!
A bit overhyped I think. Yes, I haven’t played it through yet. Yes, it is indeed a good game (even though I don’t like JRPGs). The soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. Bit I don’t think it’s better than BG3 and I’m sad, that KCD2 didn’t win anything because in most, if not all, categories it was paired up with COE33.
Which is funny because it didn’t win best sound track at the biting awards.
I agree it’s a wonderful game and it deserves recognition, but I also agree it’s not as good as BG3. The thing is, that doesn’t detract from any of it’s awards this year because it was only competing with the games that came out in 2025, not the ones that came out in 2023.
Had BG3 and Clair Obscura come out at the same time, I think the split in awards would have been very different.
In my honest opinion as someone that had played and enjoyed both games, they both deserved the awards in their own ways. I think Kingdom Come is definitely a better RPG in general, but at the same time E33 is an amazing game that is an RPG. It’s semantics at this point and I think it’s more of a lack of categories. RPG is such a loose term these days that I feel like it should be sub-divided into a few more. Lumping games together and comparing games that are vastly different based solely on a loose term like RPG is disingenuous.
Couldn’t agree more. E33 isn’t a RPG in the classical sense but has certain RPG elements. Don’t get me wrong, it is, as far is I’ve played, a great game in it’s own right, but imo it didn’t deserve to win in the RPG category and maybe not even storytelling.
That’s because Clair Obscur is directly influenced by the JRPG genre which is why it feels almost like not a RPG compared to something that is a western RPG like KC:D2.
But I agree, the term RPG is way overloaded and it needs a more stricter set of rules to define what a RPG is. But it’s been that way for almost a decade at this point and I no longer care to split hairs about it, I just laugh when Monster Hunter gets nominated as an RPG because in my mind I would never consider it a RPG.
But it’s been that way for almost a decade at this point and I no longer care to split hairs about it,
Haha, us old farts have been arguing about what constitutes an RPG at least since the days of the first Diablo.
KCD got absolutely shafted. Not getting best RPG sucks but the leads not even being nominated for best performance is just straight up bullshit.
I’m so happy for them, the emotions this game brought to me were absolutely unique, its approach on grief was so beautiful. And can’t forget the music that I keep humming for the last months…
Renoir’s battle theme is the best song I have ever heard in a video game before. For a while, my YouTube algorithm was taken over of streamer reactions to hearing that song for the first time in game, because universally people were just stunned like “holy shit this is amazing”.
Why do they look like stereotypes?
Because it was a joke.
Aaaaah this game was amazing, can’t wait to download it again to play the new update
If we could just keep this trend of having the game awards completely snuff the big studios, that’d be great.
does seem weird to me to just give all the awards to one game, but then critic-awards shows always have been kind of a joke
“We’ve picked one game and we’re giving every award to that game because it’s the best game at everything and have you played the game yet? You should it’s so good it’s just the best at everything.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Interactive
Kepler Interactive was founded in September 2021 at the initiative of former Ubisoft employee and French entrepreneur Alexis Garavayan, who had previously co-founded the video game investment fund Kowloon Nights. Self-described as a “super developer” publishing group, Kepler was born out of an alliance between seven independent studios to “pool their resources and knowledge”:
Hedge Fund ass publisher. Come on, guys. The Gaming Awards have always just been sponsored content and you’re getting hoodwinked because you don’t recognize the sponsor this time around.
Are you trying to say that any game that gets funding of any kind is automatically not worthy of winning?
I’m perfectly fine with people making money in exchange for an excellent product, and Expedition 33 is a fucking masterpiece.
I won’t say E33 didn’t deserve to win an award, it definitely did. But I will absolutely say with certainty it did not deserve to be nominated in so many categories and proceed to win basically every category.
Having an award show give awards to only one nominee feels bad for everyone except the show runners, that one nominee, and their fans. Lots of games deserved to be there that simply weren’t, and lots of nominees deserved to win but didn’t simply because E33 won this year’s popularity contest.
For example, Best Performance should not have been allowed to have 50% of the nominees be from the same game (E33, in this case).
I get where you’re coming from, but awards shows shouldn’t be participation trophies. The panels should give the awards for each category to the games they think were the best in that category.
And games aren’t made by a single person. If they decided that E33 shouldn’t win Best Music because it also won Best Art Direction, that’s unfair to the composers and musicians who worked on E33.
Are you trying to say that any game that gets funding of any kind is automatically not worthy of winning?
??? How did you get here?
But it was the best at pretty much everything.
Other than best RPG, that should’ve gone to kingdome come deliverance 2 imo, but like e33 winning that isn’t unreasonable.
Indie title should have honestly gone to Silksong, and the Making a Difference award probably had worthier games.
Silk Song had x33 beat by almost triple the max player count. the fact that it didn’t get the inde title and they gave it to X33 is criminal. Silk Song beat it on price and player count and arguably story.
If you had ever seen the Game Awards before, this isn’t exactly surprising.
It was not only good, but weird and unique. It was always going to sweep the show because that’s exactly the kind of game the judges of it have favored every single year.
That’s why the good, but ultimately derivative games didn’t win as much.
I am sad now that I’m not into this dark fantasy stuff.
Which is weird, since that game wasn’t even marketed. I literally hadn’t even heard of it till it started winning shit left and right
That’s one area where you can see it is indie despite the large development cost.
They were published by Kepler Interactive and for some markets Bandai Namco. Neither of which have Ubisoft or EA’s marketing budget which normally makes up something like half of the development budget of a game.
They did have some marketing. I know a lot of French streamers were paid to play the game on launch. But yeah not “in your face for 6 months in front of every YouTube video and inside every happy meal box” like a new assassin’s creed or something.
Like I had heard whispers of it, but that’s abojt it.
It wasn’t the only game to have that problem. I was barely aware Death Stranding 2 existed let alone that it was out.
I had heard of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (because the fans wouldn’t shut up about how right leaning and “non-woke” the game was) but did not think it deserved a mention.
To be honest the only game even nominated I had played was Donkey Kong Banaza… (I was obviously VERY aware Hades 2 and Silksong existed. I just haven’t had time to play them. Though I would have been offended if they weren’t nominated. Especially Silksong)
Weird, I mostly saw people complaining about kcd2 being ‘too woke’ because minorities exist
There’s stupid people on both sides of the political spectrum.
I don’t think it had a big marketing strategy, but it definitely marketed itself through word of mouth because it definitely deserved all the praise (and now awards) it got.
One could even say it’s quite the obscure game to win awards like this…?
yes
That’s Clair
Absolutely deserved. Good on em!
Baguette supremacy.
E33 was the surprise of the year for me. It came from nowhere.
I’m not saying E33 didn’t deserve to win anything, but I don’t believe it deserved to dominate like that. No single game should be allowed to do this, ever.
I mean, of the 6 nominees for Best Performance, 3 of them (50%) were from E33. That shouldn’t be allowed, IMO. Pick the single best performance from one game, then you can have more variety to pick from. Also, the winner of Best Indie Game should automatically be disqualified from also winning Best Indie Debut game.
In my opinion: KCD2 snubbed for Best RPG, Silksong snubbed for best Action Adventure, and Half-Life 3 snubbed for Most Anticipated Game (is it disqualified – no professionals allowed?).
I don’t see the point of limiting the nominees to just one-per-game, for best performance. There’s still only one winner, and if that game legitimately had that many fantastic performances, more power to 'em.
I’ll second the idea of keeping Best Indie and Best Debut Indie separate. I’ll go further and say E33 just isn’t an Indie game, it’s pretty solidly AA.
Why shouldnt the best actor be for the best performance regardless of which game it appears in?
To me, it’s an indicator that the rest of the industry bankrupted its talent and innovation. There’s been some great indie games, but nothing overwhelmingly amazing, certainly not in the AAA space.
I have the most issue with the performance win, that the nominations are for the English voice acting and this is not even an English game. The original acting is French, I played it with French voice + English subtitle. To me the English voice acting is just part of the localization. This is such an English-centric award and snub for non-English performances.
If anything the motion capture actors are more “worthy”.
Original language is always better in my opinion. Filtering it into English has to leave out or change something.
I think for other people though they see the English voice actors as more professional or higher paid or more famous, whatever it is.
Hopefully their next game continues with that quality. The old RPG giants are mostly floundering are mere shells of what they used to be. Most of the old talent already sold out or retired.
The industry needs new talent to take over.
And get rid of its predators… I’m always so sad to see my friends working in the game industry so exploited, fired without a thought, all to benefit greedy executives who never played a single game in their lives…
executives who never played a single game in their lives…
Makes me think of Gaben who is a Dota2 nerd.
