What's up everybody welcome to IGN GameSoup. I'm your host Damon Hatfield. Joining me this week is Justin Davis, Sam Clayborn.

Tell some scoops left in this year and Terry Schwartz. So happy to have you back here in the Scoop Studio, the Scoopio, as we call it here.

We've got a great. It's a good start. Scoop, scoop, scoop, you know, we've got a great show for this week. We're going to talk about Mega Man 11. We're going to talk about God of War. But first game of the year. It's that time is upon us all year long. We follow we follow game of the year watch. We keep track of all the best games of the year. But now it's time. We have announced IGN's official nominees 10 nominees for Game of the Year and they are Cuphead destiny to division divinity.

Divinity OGs in two, horizon zero dawn breath of the wild near automata person five PUBG Mario Odyssey and Wolfenstein to 2011. No.

Or Sam's bad accounting. What a great list of games. It's a good it's what the series one of the good ones. We all got in a room every year. I sort of love and also dread like our game of the year meetings because it's stressful. Like you get a bunch of opinion.

People in a room together and kind of do it out. But it's also really fun and lovely and wonderful. Having everyone. You know, make a case for the games that they loved and have people vote. Yeah, and nobody but Andrew Goldfarb cried. So that was in the loudest person one.

And whoever shouts the loudest. Yeah, they get there again. Yeah, it's usually that's how you do movies to right. Actually our move entertainment of the year awards meeting nomination meeting was like very tame. It was suspiciously tame. Yeah, everyone was great.

There were a lot of people on the phone. No one talked over each other. I'm going to chance to speak. What I know it was very odd. What was the biggest fight in that like what do you think you give some people like some context behind the scene. Well, there's a big discussion around PUBG and whether or not that should be.

Yeah, we eventually landed on the side of I don't actually think there's too much discussion about whether it's eligible or not. But what does it mean for like if a game's an early access one year and then comes out in final access.

So next year we kind of don't think it's fair for something to be eligible more than once. But we said look the game we think is one of the 10 best games you can download and buy and play this year. So we kind of didn't overthink its status like whether something's early access or not is irrelevant to like a gamer.

It's just kind of well it's one of the 10 best. I mean, it's very it's I think maybe when early access was first introduced I would have said no absolutely not this shouldn't be nominated for game of the year but the industry's changed.

Early access is very common now the game is available to buy and play now. So it's also different flavors of like sometimes game developers release a game in early access. That's just very like hey come along this journey with us in our games of prototype and it's going to evolve and change over time. But PUBG was like a very not polished but you know like it was a whole sort of package of you know it felt like more of a complete experience.

And speaking of early access super hot has a standalone roguelike mode what coming to early access this week. Oh boy we have to check that out super hot.

I don't think we had any arguments between two things a lot because like right now we're just doing the nominees. So I think we had to have like 20 things that we had to fit into 10.

And that would always be like there's you know people here that didn't there's fewer people here that played near than played the legend of Zelda right well.

So you have to listen to those people and make sure you know that we're giving them the time to speak about a game that like everybody can't be like oh that's totally beyond everyone has to have a responsibility to you know close that knowledge got themselves like if if that's what we have to wait like a five people played near and they all loved it like how do you weigh that against you know if 20 people play destiny and 12 of them really loved it.

Yeah it's more voices shouting for destiny but like maybe that means near is a better game and so we develop a complicated algorithm.

And we just try to give people homework right like go these are the games you have to go play yeah one of the more interesting conversations actually I that I thought came out of that meeting was how we were handling remasters on switch specifically and whether we would consider I mean typically our port.

Right cuz of Mario card deal yeah is the next year can be considered for different platforms but I thought the switch conversation was really interesting with Mario Kart how it's such a different player experience to play that on on switch versus you know we

I thought that just open a really interesting conversation that the show will be ongoing yeah I actually I'm a little aches our nominations are live now but you know we're gonna sort of publish I find print of you know whoo how was something eligible for the access and what categories is something available for as Terry said if a game is on one platform and is ported to another platform the only award it's eligible for is that platform or it can't be nominated again for RPG or whatever but it was a little bit complicated by switch you know is there so many ports.

Well and is the experience of it being portable and having detachable joy cons does that is it transformative enough to consider it a new game in the case of like Mario Kart in particular when will the winners be revealed December 20th December 20th.

Yeah, just people's people's choice is going on now too so yeah it's important to us and it really does matter a lot to the game developers and publishers.

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