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The Player’s Voice award at The Game Awards is a way for fans to express which games are their favorites, and it’s down to its final five nominees to decide which game will win.
The five remaining nominees for the award are Doom Eternal, Ghost of Tsushima, Hades, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and The Last of Us Part II. Voting will continue until December 8th at 2:00 AM ET.
The Game Awards Player’s Voice Nominees
Of the top five games, only Hades is an indie title developed and published by Supergiant Games, the creators of games like Bastion and Transistor. Hades continues in Supergiant’s pattern of being a high-octane hack-and-slash game with a uniquely great soundtrack.
Like Hades, Doom Eternal sports a hellishly good soundtrack paired with high octane action, although it switches the hack-and-slash gameplay for Doom’s first-person perspective. Doom Eternal is the second part in the smash revival of the Doom franchise, this time sporting more RPG elements than its prior counterpart.
Similarly, Spider-Man: Miles Morales is itself a sequel to the PS4’s surprise hit, Marvel’s Spider-Man. Miles Morales picks up where its predecessor left off, with players now filling the shoes of a new Spider-Man. Miles Morales partly rides the wave created by Into the Spider-Verse which proved that there was a desire for more and better minority representation in the superhero genre.
Minority representation in games has been a bit of a hot-button issue in 2020, a fire in part fueled by The Last of Us Part II. How the Last of Us Part II handles LGBTQ+ representation is another discussion, however, and the game mostly earned its spot in The Game Awards due to its unapologetically dark story which led to an intense and deeply emotional backlash from fans of the first game.
Around the time of this backlash, Ghost of Tsushima released and picked up a lot of the alienated fanbase from The Last of Us Part II. Sucker Punch’s open-world tale of a samurai who must resort to stealth and trickery as he single-handedly defends Tsushima against a Mongol invasion has been praised for its detailed and respectful representation of Japan and Japanese culture.
The Game Awards continues
The top five nominees for the Player’s Voice at The Game Awards represent the most popular games of the year. Voting in The Game Awards for this round is currently split mostly between the rival fanbases of The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima, with 41% and 34% of the vote.
Hades, Doom Eternal, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales trail with 12%, 9%, and 5% respectively. However, The Game Awards Player’s Voice voting continues for a while longer and these numbers will no doubt change significantly in the coming hours.
Make sure to watch The Game Awards live on December 10th to see which games win in the other categories as well.
