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The development teams for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, NieR: Automata, Persona 5, Splatoon 2, and Yu Suzuki, won CEDEC 2018 Awards in various categories.
Here are the winners and the categories they won:
Excellency Award for Engineering:
Winners: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild development team
Reason: Providing an example of how the development environment for large-scale projects should be handled
- The development team revealed a task management feature in their Zelda Editor that was created and used in order to support massive-scale game development. This feat of engineering was very highly appraised.
Excellency Award for Visual Arts:
Winners: NieR: Automata UI design team
Reason: Creating a groundbreaking UI design that seamlessly merges the game and flat design
- Using flat design as a base, the UI team added realistic touches and animation in order to strengthen the mechanical worldview, and have been highly appraised for this. Their detailed designs have opened up new possibilities for future game UI design.
Excellency Award for Game Design:
Winners: Splatoon 2 development team
Reason: Mechanics design that promote player cooperation
- While keeping the game design of having the amount of ink turfed be the absolute determining factor of the winners, in this game the development team made it possible to collect the needed resources usually found through online versus in a co-op mode as well. This game design has helped further expand the audience of light users for online third-person shooters.
- Furthermore, the development team’s ability to maintain relative weapon balance despite adding new game rules and stages to the game was also highly appraised.
Excellency Award for Sound Design:
Winners: Persona 5 sound team
Reason: Sound design that was able to express both the unique worldview and a sense of fashionableness
- Apart from composing various distinctive tracks that managed to express the above two factors, the sound team was also highly appraised for their overall sound design and attention to detail.
Special Award
Winner: Yu Suzuki
Reason: As a creator, beginning with arcade games like Hang-On and After Burner which let users feel the action, he created various big hits that utilized groundbreaking ideas, such as the 3DCG hardware fighting game Virtua Fighter.
Furthermore, for home consoles games, he helped create what could be said to be a predecessor to open-world games with Shenmue, which strongly influenced the innovation of new game development skills.
Suzuki has been globally appraised for being a pioneer who has helped forge a path of future possibilities for games.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Splatoon 2 are available on Nintendo Switch. NieR: Automata is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Persona 5 is available for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.
