Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

Her Story, The Witcher 3 top IGF, Game Developers Choice 2016 awards

By

CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt claimed top honors at the 16th annual Game Developers Choice Awards this week, earning the event’s coveted Game of the Year award during a ceremony held at the 2016 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Organizers of the Independent Games Festival also hosted an awards ceremony during GDC this week, naming Sam Barlow’s Her Story as this year’s winner of the IGF’s Excellence in Narrative award as well as the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game.

Recommended Videos

The annual Game Developers Choice Awards honor innovation and quality among commercially released console and PC games. In addition to winning the event’s Game of the Year award, The Witcher 3 also took home the Game Developers Choice Awards’ prize for Best Technology.

Related: 
Best new movies to stream on Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, HBO Max, and more

Xbox One and PC platformer Ori and the Blind Forest also earned multiple awards at this year’s ceremony, including Best Debut and Best Visual Art. Her Story, in addition to its cross-category wins at the Independent Games Festival, earned Game Developers Choice Awards in the Best Narrative, Best Handheld/Mobile Game, and Innovation Award categories.

Other Game Developers Choice Awards winners include Rocket League (Best Design) and Life is Strange (Audience Choice). This year’s event also granted its Ambassador Award to USC Games Program director Tracy Fullerton and honored Bethesda’s Todd Howard with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. Pioneer Award honors went to Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson.

The annual Independent Games Festival Awards highlight independently produced and unconventional games, including 2016 award winners Mini Metro (Excellence in Audio), Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (Excellence in Design), Oxenfree (Excellence in Visual Art), Cibele (Nuovo Award), and Beglitched (Best Student Game).

Developer Girls Make Games received the event’s ID@Xbox Rising Star Award, while Toby Fox’s Undertale won the IGF’s Audience Award. All IGF reward winners receive a $3,000 cash prize for each category won.

Danny Cowan
Danny Cowan
Former Contributor
Danny’s passion for video games was ignited upon his first encounter with Nintendo’s Duck Hunt, and years later, he still…
Topics

Editors’ Recommendations

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 gets a visual upgrade but stays wonderfully familiar
THPS 3 + 4

The year was 2001, and I was flat on my back in the middle of the street after bailing hard from a failed ollie.

Once I dusted myself off, I decided to try again, but in a safer, more digital aspect. Two decades ago, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 devoured my free time, and now the remake is back and doing the exact same thing. An excellent remake, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 brings two classic titles to a modern audience but adds little to the original experience in a way that leaves the game feeling curiously anachronistic.

Read more
The best PlayStation launch games, ranked
best ps1 games sony ps1

The most important time in a console's life is its launch. This is when a new piece of hardware needs to prove that it is worth investing in, which always comes down to games. Launch titles are rarely the best games on the system, although some of Nintendo's launch games buck that trend, but at least need to show off what the system can do. PlayStation always had a secondary selling point with its consoles, such as doubling as a CD player or DVD player, so it is interesting to speculate how successful those early consoles would've been judged solely on their games. We now have launch titles from the PS1 all the way up to the PS5 (and soon to be PS6) to look back on with fresh eyes to see just how good those first games were.

Air Combat - PlayStation 1

Read more
The Switch 2 is the perfect example of why console launches don’t feel special anymore
The Switch 2 being unboxed.

I will never forget the unbearable excitement I felt on that early morning on my 7th birthday. It was 1998, and Pokémon was the biggest thing in the world, especially for an elementary school kid like me. Except that I didn't have a single card or game to my name. In fact, I didn't even have a Game Boy. That, plus Pokémon, was the only thing I asked for that birthday, and I knew I would get it.

I can still remember lying awake half the night, unable to sleep while my imagination ran wild with unrealistic machinations of what the game would be like. I woke up just as early to the sounds of my parents and sister setting up decorations downstairs and bided my time before I could go down. It was a school day, but they could sense my excitement well in advance and agreed to let me open one thing before school.

Read more