Technically the game does have innovative gameplay, no AAA studio has the balls to release a game as boring and lacking in gameplay that Bethesda has, they spent over a decade making fast travel the most integral gameplay mechanic.
Fast travel, plus inconsistency in whether or not you even get an “immersive” cutscene. Half the time you click into the menu and BOOM you’re standing outside at some new location. About as much fun as fast traveling to another part of an Excel sheet.
That’s honestly my main issue. I got 25 hours in and got frustrated I wasn’t getting any cutscenes. Been waiting for a mod to add them every time I travel before I go back
Exactly, without them it’s literally impossible to feel like you aren’t fast traveling. The beauty of previous Bethesda games was that you could play the entire game without fast traveling and you would be rewarded almost every time you chose to walk instead of fast travel.
To be fair, that’s on them for not giving the option of allowing PC players to play with low res textures. The game uses 2048 for them, you can download a mod that uses them at either 256 or 512, for instance. Blocky and muddy, but that’d save fuckloads of space and load times.
That was Alan Wake 2 for me, except they innovated one step further. I had to reinstall it on my NVME drive because my SATA SSD apparently wasn’t fast enough.
That’s excessive that it requires an NVMe drive to work at all. It’s a tech that’s really only about a decade old and plenty of people keep dinosaurs much older than a decade running and even game on them. Heck my SATA SSD which predates NVME is still my primary game storage device and it shows no signs of failing anytime soon. Fun fact, my Z97 motherboard was one of the first on the market to include NVME m.2 slots but did not support booting to PCIe slots, so neither those newfangled PCIe SSDs nor newfangled NVME drives could be booted, but it did have NVME support enabled as a later BIOS update!
On the other hand, I suppose we are approaching Windows 10 EOL in less than 2 years, and Windows 11 technically does not support CPU generations old enough to not include NVME support so that does make it a safer bet, but still not a great thing to require
The way that they were able to use their toolset to make space, actually super cool. Especially when you start to poke at it a little and see how the clock actually ticks. BUT, it doesn’t really serve fun. Like I bet there is a morrowind technical dev somewhere who shit their pants when they saw it but for the rest of us, it ends up feeling bland.
So there was some interesting innovation, but it did not serve gameplay. Strange award to give that game. The strongest thing they do is level design and all the bespoke levels are really good. That is a compliment I can give starfield without any reservation.
The awards don’t mean shit, there was nothing even close to innovative about Starfield. They took No Man’s Sky, made it worse, and shoved their 15 year old npc behavior in it.
It was cool at first, but the issue is you lockpick things every 5 seconds and get almost nothing for it but the minigame takes way too long. Maybe if there were less things to lockpick and if there was something acctually worth it inside each time (and not just 1 in 100) then it might not be so bad
They do like money, but Valve also loves providing a service to people.
Nobody uses Epic Games, Origin, Ubisoft Connect, or Battle.net because they want to, they use it because they have to.
Steam Awards is a bit janky sure, but to say that their inability to run pointless awards properly ruins the convenience and value that Steam brings to its users would be a gross overstatement.
No they don’t care about the service, we should be able to play games without steam client, we should be able to resell digital games, developers should not had to pay $100 non refundable fees to upload one game each time, etc.
Neither in steam, the keysellers are scams and the developers can scam you with the key. You don’t own the game, Nintendo lets you own games in physical format and has never let publishers remove them.
Guessing short sighted algorithms. Because you can see on Valves side of things, packages have been updated/added/etc this year which probably allows it to be picked up.
For the nominations users at least had the option to skip sections if they couldn’t think of anything to nominate. For the voting, in order to get the participation reward players had to vote for something in each category.
This led to a lot of users who don’t care about the actual voting and just wanting the participation to vote for the one game they recognized in the category.
I have no side to take, but it’s sorta hilarious seeing people saying the award mean nothing when it’s starfield that win it, and on the other hand congratulate Baldur’s Gate for winning another GOTY. Truly the Schrodinger Award.
Games you liked winning awards is something to celebrate. Games you don’t like winning awards is proof that awards are a joke and should be ignored. Just how things work.
I think the ship builder fits all of that despite your wording. It was new, it was fun, it achieved awesome results. The amount of interesting ships people built was crazy. It plays a pretty big part of the game, and finishing some unique skills out there was cool.
Possibly killing off your spouse or main companion was wild. I can’t recall having the possibility happen in a game like this before. That messed me up for a bit.
The looping gameplay with insane universes was innovative. A bit tedious to achieve but still neat
At best I can agree it’s not the most innovative, but bit apparently some people did. I think hifirush or Shadow of doubt should be there. But that’s just me.
To be fair, “game of the year” feels like it’s meant to measure popularity, while “most innovative” sounds like it shouls measure how innovative a game is, which is perhaps why the two awards get such different reactions.
Well tbf as well, innovative is as subjective as game of the year, what seems to be innovative to some might not be one for another. It’s hard to define “innovation” because it’s simply a process of putting in change on an established thing. Try google “innovative product of (year)” and you might see a tons of “isn’t it just x but y” product.
In my case i haven’t played Starfield nor Baldur’s Gate 3 so i wouldn’t know whether they deserve the award or not, if people think it does, hey, more power to them. Steam Award is a popularity contest voted by people anyway, taking it seriously is missing the point.
Not saying you did. I’m saying while ‘innovative’ might be subjective, it’s hard to see how it actually could deserve the ‘most innovative’ title when practically nobody would agree to that claim. It’s fairly obvious the vote had little to do with the actual game.
Even if they think it is, looking at todays online environment, i understand why it’s not an open statement. I remember the game is well received on launch, then it slowly slip to mixed and negative a month or so later, i shaped my opinion based on this.
For comparison, No Man Sky won Innovative Award by GDC for the launch version.
I don’t really take award seriously, less so with Steam Award. Watching people react to it is still funny though, ngl.
I fucking wish. I’m a huge, bitter whiner about Starfield and I would’ve loved it if it’d kept quality as high as Oblivion was (for its time, don’t laugh)
I played way too much of this game and enjoyed most definitely more than the average player. And uh yeah I’m certain steam users are just making a mockery but such is the Internet haha.
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Technically the game does have innovative gameplay, no AAA studio has the balls to release a game as boring and lacking in gameplay that Bethesda has, they spent over a decade making fast travel the most integral gameplay mechanic.
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The joke is the innovation is having the balls to not innovate
Fast travel, plus inconsistency in whether or not you even get an “immersive” cutscene. Half the time you click into the menu and BOOM you’re standing outside at some new location. About as much fun as fast traveling to another part of an Excel sheet.
That’s honestly my main issue. I got 25 hours in and got frustrated I wasn’t getting any cutscenes. Been waiting for a mod to add them every time I travel before I go back
They make a huge difference! I could at least keep myself in the zone with cutscenes. Without them it’s just absolutely horrible to go anywhere.
Exactly, without them it’s literally impossible to feel like you aren’t fast traveling. The beauty of previous Bethesda games was that you could play the entire game without fast traveling and you would be rewarded almost every time you chose to walk instead of fast travel.
I stoped playing when I got shitty that I had to run to my next destination, got so used to fast traveling that walking became a chore.
Is this some 4chan prank?
No, this is real.
Good god all mighty.
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It’s in the system requirements but even games that list an SSD as required there still sometimes work fine on a hard disk.
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To be fair, that’s on them for not giving the option of allowing PC players to play with low res textures. The game uses 2048 for them, you can download a mod that uses them at either 256 or 512, for instance. Blocky and muddy, but that’d save fuckloads of space and load times.
That was Alan Wake 2 for me, except they innovated one step further. I had to reinstall it on my NVME drive because my SATA SSD apparently wasn’t fast enough.
That’s excessive that it requires an NVMe drive to work at all. It’s a tech that’s really only about a decade old and plenty of people keep dinosaurs much older than a decade running and even game on them. Heck my SATA SSD which predates NVME is still my primary game storage device and it shows no signs of failing anytime soon. Fun fact, my Z97 motherboard was one of the first on the market to include NVME m.2 slots but did not support booting to PCIe slots, so neither those newfangled PCIe SSDs nor newfangled NVME drives could be booted, but it did have NVME support enabled as a later BIOS update!
On the other hand, I suppose we are approaching Windows 10 EOL in less than 2 years, and Windows 11 technically does not support CPU generations old enough to not include NVME support so that does make it a safer bet, but still not a great thing to require
The way that they were able to use their toolset to make space, actually super cool. Especially when you start to poke at it a little and see how the clock actually ticks. BUT, it doesn’t really serve fun. Like I bet there is a morrowind technical dev somewhere who shit their pants when they saw it but for the rest of us, it ends up feeling bland.
So there was some interesting innovation, but it did not serve gameplay. Strange award to give that game. The strongest thing they do is level design and all the bespoke levels are really good. That is a compliment I can give starfield without any reservation.
They did a great job at actually simulating space and such but it’s a shame that interacting with it is so boring.
Wait, do they know what the word innovative means?
Wait, do they know what the word gameplay means?
Wait, do they know what the word most means?
It was community chosen. So a lot of people trolled. There’s a random dating sim in the"Outstanding story" finalists
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2322560/Love_Is_All_Around
Ah, thanks for clarifying, or explaining how it actually happened. 👍
This was a popular game amongst streamers this year.
Steam awards are a joke
ALL awards are a joke
Sounds like someone never won an award
Get your ears checked, it was typed words
Words that you definitely weren’t awarded for.
It’s like the points are made up and don’t mean anything
“Everything is made up and the points don’t matter.”
seeing as we are the ones voting I don’t think it reflects steam as a platform - just gamers
The awards don’t mean shit, there was nothing even close to innovative about Starfield. They took No Man’s Sky, made it worse, and shoved their 15 year old npc behavior in it.
It’s for the lock pick mini game.
Which was he first thing I modded out of the game because I hated it.
It was cool at first, but the issue is you lockpick things every 5 seconds and get almost nothing for it but the minigame takes way too long. Maybe if there were less things to lockpick and if there was something acctually worth it inside each time (and not just 1 in 100) then it might not be so bad
Digipicking and a builder for a ship you can’t meaningfully use were the only refreshing and engaging mechanics in that game.
Everyone is mad about this but I still don’t understand how RDR2 was even nominated for Labor of Love, let alone won.
Valve loves money and it clearly shows. The steam awards just became an advertising tool, people in Valve had to write the paragraph about the game.
They do like money, but Valve also loves providing a service to people.
Nobody uses Epic Games, Origin, Ubisoft Connect, or Battle.net because they want to, they use it because they have to.
Steam Awards is a bit janky sure, but to say that their inability to run pointless awards properly ruins the convenience and value that Steam brings to its users would be a gross overstatement.
No they don’t care about the service, we should be able to play games without steam client, we should be able to resell digital games, developers should not had to pay $100 non refundable fees to upload one game each time, etc.
Steam cares about money, it’s just that simple.
Are you able to resell digital games on Nintendos platforms? What about playstation or xbox? Wow, no you say?
Neither in steam, the keysellers are scams and the developers can scam you with the key. You don’t own the game, Nintendo lets you own games in physical format and has never let publishers remove them.
They’re a business, not a charity. OF COURSE they care about money. What’s nice is that they do it ethically and in a consumer-friendly way.
Damn i only have EG and Gog accounts because of the free games… and Ubisoft because of the AC (except
Valhalla, fk that), series .The steam awards has paragraphs?
Only write-ups I could see was for the description of the award. I don’t remember if the games had write-ups during the voting period though.
Guessing short sighted algorithms. Because you can see on Valves side of things, packages have been updated/added/etc this year which probably allows it to be picked up.
https://steamdb.info/app/1174180/depots/
You can see here, the DLC was updated in 2023 https://steamdb.info/app/1190051/info/
It’s a popularity vote, players nominated and voted for the games. So they just trolled the votes for this and Starfield
Popularity based on trolling. Every year Labor of Love goes to Terraria or CSGO or something earnest like that.
For the nominations users at least had the option to skip sections if they couldn’t think of anything to nominate. For the voting, in order to get the participation reward players had to vote for something in each category.
This led to a lot of users who don’t care about the actual voting and just wanting the participation to vote for the one game they recognized in the category.
A bugged, half empty interplanetary map game… Didn’t “No Man Sky” already did that? Maybe the innovation is that they don’t plan to fix it later?
I have no side to take, but it’s sorta hilarious seeing people saying the award mean nothing when it’s starfield that win it, and on the other hand congratulate Baldur’s Gate for winning another GOTY. Truly the Schrodinger Award.
Games you liked winning awards is something to celebrate. Games you don’t like winning awards is proof that awards are a joke and should be ignored. Just how things work.
For real. The new in thing is to sit on any game you are mildly disappointed in and claim it’s the worst game of all time and no one can like it.
For being the shittiest game of all time there sure are a lot of people (myself included) who put in nearly a hundred hours into it or even more…
Everyone obsessed with absolutes these days, no place for middle ground or a measured response.
Yeah, but whether you like Starfield or not, can we all admit that it’s for sure not most innovative?
What did it do that’s particularly new, innovative, or great?
Why did you include great in new/innovative?
I think the ship builder fits all of that despite your wording. It was new, it was fun, it achieved awesome results. The amount of interesting ships people built was crazy. It plays a pretty big part of the game, and finishing some unique skills out there was cool.
Possibly killing off your spouse or main companion was wild. I can’t recall having the possibility happen in a game like this before. That messed me up for a bit.
The looping gameplay with insane universes was innovative. A bit tedious to achieve but still neat
At best I can agree it’s not the most innovative, but bit apparently some people did. I think hifirush or Shadow of doubt should be there. But that’s just me.
Steam Award, it just works.
To be fair, “game of the year” feels like it’s meant to measure popularity, while “most innovative” sounds like it shouls measure how innovative a game is, which is perhaps why the two awards get such different reactions.
Well tbf as well, innovative is as subjective as game of the year, what seems to be innovative to some might not be one for another. It’s hard to define “innovation” because it’s simply a process of putting in change on an established thing. Try google “innovative product of (year)” and you might see a tons of “isn’t it just x but y” product.
In my case i haven’t played Starfield nor Baldur’s Gate 3 so i wouldn’t know whether they deserve the award or not, if people think it does, hey, more power to them. Steam Award is a popularity contest voted by people anyway, taking it seriously is missing the point.
I don’t think I’ve actually heard a single person unironically assert Starfield is ‘innovative’…
I assert nothing though.
Not saying you did. I’m saying while ‘innovative’ might be subjective, it’s hard to see how it actually could deserve the ‘most innovative’ title when practically nobody would agree to that claim. It’s fairly obvious the vote had little to do with the actual game.
Even if they think it is, looking at todays online environment, i understand why it’s not an open statement. I remember the game is well received on launch, then it slowly slip to mixed and negative a month or so later, i shaped my opinion based on this.
For comparison, No Man Sky won Innovative Award by GDC for the launch version.
I don’t really take award seriously, less so with Steam Award. Watching people react to it is still funny though, ngl.
2006: Make oblivion
2007-2022: Recycle gameplay for other IPs
2023: Make oblivion in space
Truly innovative
I’d play the hell out of it if it’s Oblivion in space
That would be good.
This is TES online in Space, with half of the features replaced by loading screens.
All they had to do was to reskin oblivion and pass it through an AI upscaling for models. Reskin the horse to be a spaceship and you’re done.
I fucking wish. I’m a huge, bitter whiner about Starfield and I would’ve loved it if it’d kept quality as high as Oblivion was (for its time, don’t laugh)
No laugh. Oblivion still holds up imo. Sure, most npc are thin as paper, but so are in starfield. Tho oblivion at least have them silly and memorable.
I dunno why everyone is defending the game. You don’t even need to. This award was determined by community votes.the community wanted this.
I played way too much of this game and enjoyed most definitely more than the average player. And uh yeah I’m certain steam users are just making a mockery but such is the Internet haha.
Winning this award has done so much more damage to Bethesda than I’m sure they could ever have expected.