Hello and welcome to TheGamer's first annual awards show, TheGamer Aces. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Game Awards celebrates its winners in early December, we're doing things the more traditional way by waiting until the whole year is over, ℱthen looking back in January. These awards aim to celebrate the smaller parts of games that are o🎃ften overlooked in these end of year wrap-ups, when we can get too caught up in looking at a game overall, or examining specific genres.

TheGamer Aces goes closer, starting with our first award ceremony, for Character. This section💮 specifically deals with the characters within games, and features the award for Best Supporting Performance, Best Lead Per𝓡formance, Best New Character, Best Character, and Best Character Relationship. You can watch the video above for our full discussion, and check back through the week for our two remaining Aces awards ceremonies for Presentation (dealing with elements like Storytelling and Art Style) and Features (dealing with specific parts of games like Level, Expansion, or Mechanic).

Note: Launching these awards when 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 was so strong in so many areas means it features heavily here, as you might expect from our Game of the Year, but given our two previous GOTYs were 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Citizen Sleeper and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Forgotten City, there are𓆏 some lesser known gems sprinkled throughout, and I expect that to continue in 2024's awards.

Best Supporting Performance

• Ralph Ineson, Cid, Final Fantasy 16
• Neil Newbon, Astarion, Baldur's Gate 3 WINNER
• David Harewood, Warlin Door, Alan Wake 2

Neꩵil Newbon's turn as Astarion, moving from the typical debonair, cocky, slightly rakish elf to a far more tragic and vulnerable character able to carry the emotional weight of some of Baldur's Gate 3's deepest moments, has already been laden down with awards these past couple of months. He's our pick too, and with how much he brings to the table, it's hard to look anywhere else.

Best Lead Performance

• Ben Starr, Clive Rosfield, Final Fantasy 16
• Amelia Tyler, The Narrator, Baldur's Gate 3 WINNER
• Nadji Jeter, Miles Morales, Spider-Man 2
• Melanie Liburd, Saga Anderson, Alan Wake 2

For all of these awards we had an open 🐲longlist for nominations, and the three most popular made the shortlist for the second round of voting. In cases where there were ties for the three most popular, the shortlist was extended to four or even five.

Whether Tyler's role is truly a Lead role or more 🅘of a Supporting one was debated internally around these awards, but with so many potential nominees in Baldur's Gate 3's companions, Tyler has a specific and different role. She's an essential part of the game, and a core part of everyone's experience regardless of any other choices they make, and that feels enough to qualify her as a lead. Having been broadly overlooked for what she brings to this game, we hope this goes some way to rectifying that.

Best New Character

• Chai, Hi-Fi Rush WINNER
• Astarion, Baldur's Gate 3
• Shadowheart, Baldur's Gate 3
• Saga Anderson, Alan Wake 2

In something of an upset, despite the obvious popularity of Baldur's Gate 3's cast, Chai's good-natured appeal and excitable humour made him a popular character over at TheGamer. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hi-Fi Rush reviewed well and was thought of fondly (and made our top ten for 202♏3), it's exactly the sort of game TheGamer Aces is all about celebrating - slightly washed away in the tide of bigger releases, but shines through at the things it does best at. Chai takes this one, and expect to see more from Hi-Fi Rush in other categories too.

Best Character

• Astarion, Baldur's Gate 3
• Shadowheart, Baldur's Gate 3
• Karlach, Baldur's Gate 3 WINNER
• Clive Rosfield, Final Fantasy 16

I wish I could explain why all of the Best Character nominations are new characters, but weren’t all up for Best New Character, while our Best New Character winner is absent, but I can't. This is the Ace I most have my eye on for next year, when we'll see a lot of hugely popular returning characters develop their story, and are unlikely to get a game꧒ of Baldur's Gate 3's scale and scope.

But enough about that - more on Karlach. The tiefling barbarian is the standout of a cast of standouts, starting off as a charming and energetic destroyer, already fasci💝nating enough to be the best character in most games, before the final act piles on depth and layers to🐲 show us the real Karlach beneath it all.

Best Relationship

• Clive & Jill, Final Fantasy 16
• Shadowheart & Lae'zel, Baldur's Gate 3 WINNER
• The Hero & The Princess, Slay the Princess

This award is for relationships of any kind, not just romantic, and while Baldur's Gate 3 has dominated the Character Aces already, it's hard to begrudge the relationship that grows between Shadowheart and Lae'zel. An antagonistic, fractious relationship at first, it can develop as the game goes on and has grown further thanks to fanart and the charisma between performers Jennifer English and Devorah Wilde. The final Character Ace also marks the first appearance of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Slay the Princess across these awards, but not the last...

Tune in tomorrow for the Presentation Aces, w🍒here we'll hand out Best Character Writing, Best Storytelling, Most Unique Art Style, Best Character 𒁏Design, and Best Creative Direction.