God of War got yet another award on Sunday when the Writers Guild of America announced the 2019 winners. The prize for 'Best videogame writing' went to the game developed by Sony Santa Monica, which managed to beat Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Telltale's Batman: The Enemy Within (Episode 5 - Same Stitch) and Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.
God of War, Written by Matt Sophos, Richard Zangrande Gaubert, Cory Barlog; Story and Narrative Design Lead Matt Sophos; Story and Narrative Design Richard Zangrande Gaubert; Narrative Design Orion Walker, Adam Dolin
As you can see, notably missing from the list of nominees was Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2, which would be weird given how the game's great writing is one of its many highlights. However, we reached out to the Writers Guild of America and received a response that the game was simply not 'submitted for consideration' for this award, though it is unclear why.
Anyhow, God of War continues to rack up awards. It won Best Action Game and Game of the Year from both our staff and our community; it got nine prizes at the DICE Awards last week. We'll see how it measures in terms of wins against Red Dead Redemption 2 at the upcoming GDC 2019 Choice Awards, where it got six nominations (like Marvel's Spider-Man) whereas Rockstar's Western epic had seven.
Whereas most of the highly successful games these days continue to get post-launch content updates such as free and/or paid DLC or even expansions, Sony Santa Monica made a different choice and skipped DLCs entirely. It is widely believed they've started working on a sequel already, though even in that case we won't see it released until well after the PlayStation 5 has launched, given the usual development time for these games.