Fallout 4 wins best game at Baftas

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35992992

Version 2 of 8.

Fallout 4 has won the best game of the year at 2016's British Academy Games Awards.

It marks the first time its US-based developer Bethesda has won the prize. It did not win in any other category.

British indie titles Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Her Story both won three awards.

John Carmack - the creator of Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake - was also honoured with a Bafta fellowship.

He now works at Facebook's Oculus virtual reality division. He told the BBC there was a "very good chance" VR titles would dominate 2017's awards.

"Award shows like this will tend to be kind of bellwethers about where things are going," he explained.

"[The games] won't dominate the market for some time yet, but they will be the exciting things that people are talking about."

Interview archive

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture won in the game innovation, music and performer categories.

It is set in a fictitious Shropshire village in the 1980s and involves the player trying to find out what happened to the inhabitants who have disappeared.

The pace of the game is slow and the studio behind it said it wanted the title to have a distinctive English character.

"It was really important to us that it wasn't a chisel-jawed American hero going around fighting zombies," The Chinese Room's co-founder Jessica Curry told the BBC.

"It's kind of like the Archers," she added, referring to the BBC Radio 4 soap opera.

Her Story also won three awards: best debut game; best mobile and handheld title; and game innovation.

The game - in which players must try to solve a murder by sifting through an archive of video clips showing a woman being questioned by the police - was developed by Sam Barlow.

The British 37-year-old said he had deliberately tried to do something "experimental" focusing on an actor's performance to see if the idea would appeal.

Another award-winner with distinctive gameplay was Sundown.

Its developer - Mild Beast Games - has created a top-down stealth title in which characters are invisible until they are revealed by a light source.

Guns in the game shoot bursts of light rather than bullets.

The title took the the ones to watch prize for the Los Angeles-based developer.

Rise of eSports

Smite won the AMD eSports Audience Award - a new category that is voted for by the public.

The battle arena title is unusual for presenting its action from a third-party perspective behind each of the 71 gods the players can choose from.

This and other competitive multiplayer titles have become a popular spectator sport.

On Wednesday, it was announced that a new eGames international gaming tournament would make its debut in Rio during this summer's Olympic Games.

The titles nominated for best game are:

Last year's best game winner was Bungie's Destiny despite the fact it did not win any of the other categories it was nominated in.

More to follow