Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 lead BAFTA 2024 video game nominations

Event: Ee Mobile Game Audience Award Mask Date: Wednesday 3 April 2019 Venue: Science Museum, Exhibition Rd, Kensington, London — Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 prepare to battle it out (Picture: BAFTA/Carlo Paloni) (Credits: BAFTA/Carlo Paloni)

As The Game Awards set a new record, with 118 million viewers, the BAFTA Games Awards have announced their ‘longlist’ of nominees.

Despite courting controversy for the short amount of time given for developer speeches, The Game Awards has consolidated its position as the most popular video game award event, with viewership up 15% to 118 million viewers.

Few would argue that the awards themselves are the primary appeal though and whatever else you say about the BAFTA Game Awards they won’t be interspersed with new trailer reveals and appearances from Gonzo the Great.

BAFTA’s award ceremony takes place in April, with final nominations due to be announced in March, but the longlist of 60 initial nominees has just been revealed, and it’s no surprise to find Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 have the most number of votes.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is nominated in the greatest number of categories, for a total of 15, closely followed by Alan Wake 2 on 14, Spider-Man 2 on 10, Hogwarts Legacy on 9, and Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom and Final Fantasy 16 on eight.

As ever, the most keenly anticipated category is Best Game, which currently has 10 nominees. These will be cut down in the next round of voting, before the nominee shortlist is revealed on March 7.

The BAFTAs often tend to favour narrative driven and/or British made games, while underrepresenting Japanese titles, and that seems to be the case again this year.

As such, it’s very hard to guess what the winner will be next year, between Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2. But since Baldur’s Gate 3 features a number of British voiceover actors we’re going to guess that.