This year's The Game Awards will have a handful of big reveals on the scale of the Elden Ring reveal at Summer Game Fest, according to host and producer Geoff Keighley.
Speaking to USA Today about the reveal of the first Elden Ring gameplay trailer – which dropped during Summer Game Fest, another event hosted by Keighly – he revealed that The Game Awards 2021 will showcase "four or five things of that level", while teasing that "there may be more coming" in relation to his work with Elden Ring developer FromSoftware.
"There were a lot of things that were good about that so yes, I was uniquely excited to be able to bring that to people," Keighley told USA Today. "This year? Oh, God, there are probably four or five things of that level. I can’t wait to show people this stuff. Summer Game Fest was a new thing that I had created. The fact that FromSoftware bet on me and Summer Game Fest where they could have done more traditional E3 stuff, that meant a lot to me. It was a huge honor to work with the From guys, so stay tuned, there may be more coming."
Keighley went on to tease that viewers will get a sense of "true next-generation gameplay at the show", which takes place on December 9, which means we can likely expect some reveals or premieres for upcoming Xbox Series X and PS5 games.
But it sounds like these "things", as Keighley calls them, won't be quite what we're expecting. The Game Awards host told the publication that most of the rumors he's read online have been wrong, but that we could see some of the games fans are expecting – with some brand-new reveals from major studios on the cards too.
"Probably six or ten of our games are things that people don’t know exist, but we’re going to reveal them at the show in a fun way," Keighley told the publication. "We’ll see how it all plays out, but I feel pretty good. It’s a very diverse lineup from a lot of studios across the industry. It really did come together this year. There will always be people that will be disappointed that X game is not there or the studio didn’t show up with something. But by and large, I think it’s one of our stronger lineups that we’ve had across the entire show."
Analysis: What could we see?
One of the best parts in the run up to The Game Awards each year is the speculation over what we might see there – and Geoff Keighley has certainly given us something to get hyped over.
While Keighley has only said that there are "four or five things" (emphasis on things) of similar scale to the Elden Ring reveal, our minds are already racing – that's much more than we anticipated. Throw in the fact that he teased some "brand-new reveals" and we've bought our first-class hype train ticket – choo choo!
So what could those four or five things be? If we had to pick five announcements we think (read: hope) will happen at The Game Awards, they would be: a Breath of the Wild 2 release date, a new Splinter Cell game announcement, the first trailer for BioShock 4, another Elden Ring update or the announcement of another FromSoftware title (based on Keighley's tease) and a big update on a Microsoft first-party title such as Forza Motorsport, Fable or Starfield (Elder Scrolls 6 is a bit too much of a reach). As an extra guess, we'll throw in a gameplay reveal for Hogwarts Legacy too.
Of course, these are simply predictions right now, and we won't know for sure what Keighley has up his sleeve until the show itself, which takes place on December 9 at 8pm ET / 5pm PT (or December 10 at 1am GMT / 12pm AEDT).
- New games 2021: upcoming game release dates for console and PC
