Earlier this week, the Video Game Awards announced their nominees for their respective awards. Every year there’s snubs, there’s some games that seem undeserving of an award, and even some pleasant surprises, but this time around one game stood out to me amongst the nominees, and that game was Cyberpunk 2077.

The RPG category is one I hold close to the heart; I’ve grown up loving games such as Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI-X, and Legend of Dragoon, even today my love for this genre remains equally as strong. Naturally, when these nominations come out, I tend to over analyze the games that were announced, this years nominees are: Monster Hunter Rise, Scarlet Nexus, Shin Megami Tensei V, Tales of Arise, and the infamous Cyberpunk 2077. In this category, I’ve only played Tales of Arise, SMTV, and Monster Hunter Rise, while only watching Scarlet Nexus and Cyberpunk 2077 via streams.

I really don’t think Cyberpunk 2077 deserves the nomination.

This isn’t an argument on the game itself. The graphics look incredible, the story seems great, and the customization is next level, however, should we reward CD Projekt Red for releasing a somewhat broken game? Cyberpunk 2077 essentially didn’t work on PlayStation 4 and Xbox – there were incessant crashes, slowdowns, and bugs that permeated every aspect of the game to the point where the game was pulled from the PlayStation store, then brought back 6 months later. I honestly believe that we should be considering a game as an entire product, and not just the idea of what a game could have been. In this case, if Cyberpunk 2077 came released with only minor issues that could have been fixed with a small patch, then I’d be happy to see them here.

CD Projeckt Red has released multiple patches over the course of the last 11 months trying to bring the game up to a respectable level, but it still isn’t quite there yet. The release of Cyberpunk 2077 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series is slated to release in early 2022 with no release date yet.

I look at games like NEO: The World Ends With you, Eastward, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Bravely Default 2, Cris Tales, and Astria Ascending that had their developers put so much love and care into their games, and released them as a complete package, but don’t get nominated. It feels so disrespectful to developers who made sure that they released a product that works, but they didn’t get nominated, yet CD Projekt Red gets celebrated for their game virtually not working.

How do you feel about the RPG nominations? Am I being too harsh on CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk 2077, or is the harshness deserved? Is there a game that you would have liked to see nominated? Let us know in the comments section or on our Discord!

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