Weekend Reading: The 2011 VGAs and the Celebration of Sequels

Last weekend most of us got to enjoy the 2011 Spike TV Video Game Awards, the industry’s closest version to the Oscars, in terms of a blockbuster celebration of the interactive entertainment genre.

Sadly, just like the last few editions, sequels have once again dominated the main stage, with a huge variety of new iterations in established franchises being announced or receiving awards.

First up, let’s take a look at the winners, seeing as how the VGAs are still an award show. The Game of the Year was Skyrim, which is the fifth installment in Bethesda’s long running The Elder Scrolls series. Besides it, all major categories were won by sequels, prequels or established franchises, with just a couple of exceptions, like Bastion, in the Best Downloadable Game, and Minecraft, in the Best Indie section.

In terms of new game announcements, we were once again treated with a flood of sequels and new installments in already long running franchises. These included Command & Conquer: Generals 2, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, or Tekken Tag Tournament 2.

Alongside these reveals, lots of new trailers were published for the likes of Mass Effect 3, Hitman Absolution, Rainbow Six: Patriots, Diablo III, or BioShock Infinite.

Thankfully, this sequel monotony was broken by two new projects, in the form of The Last of Us, coming from Naughty Dog, the studio behind the Uncharted series, and Fortnite, which is made by Epic Games, the developer of the Gears of War or Unreal Tournament franchises.

While I’m certainly looking forward to many of the aforementioned games, I’d appreciate it if the focus was more on new IPs, instead of older ones that don’t really need that much exposure to attract fans and make them interested.

We’re at a point in the console cycle which doesn’t really allow for that much innovation. As such, when studios actually do take risks with all new games, perhaps we might need to showcase them in a more elaborate manner, instead of just focusing on titles that end with larger and larger numbers.