Everyone is mad about this but I still don't understand how RDR2 was even nominated for Labor of Love, let alone won.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fan votes have been and will always be popularity contests.
It's worse than that because Steam essentially pay you to vote (by giving you a card or something you can sell) so people are incentivised to just pick a random game or the only game they've heard of.
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.
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.
2023: Make oblivion in space
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 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.
Steam Award, it just works.
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.
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.
Steam has nothing to do with this, people voted like that.
That‘s a user-vote, no? I can‘t say I‘m surprised that there‘s some headscratchers, I doubt the average user knows what innovative gameplay is supposed to be. They should let people vote as they did, then curate the top 20 of each category into 10 fitting games so those that don‘t match the award category are out, and then let people put their final vote between those 10.
That‘s a user-vote, no? I can‘t say I‘m surprised that there‘s some headscratchers, I doubt the average user knows what innovative gameplay is supposed to be.
Valve incentivized its users to vote in all categories.
Not only incentivized it, but put certain games at the front of all of the categories. I don't know if those games were already voted on by other players, or paid for ads by the companies themselves, but I know that I was presented with games that I didn't feel fit into the category they were in. Personally, though, I really don't give a shit about awards. I can't think of any, aside from some book awards, that aren't bought and paid for popularity contest.
Most people probably didn't even recognize the other games. I only know about Shadow of Doubt (which I think should have won) because Yahtzee made a video about 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.
Winning this award has done so much more damage to Bethesda than I'm sure they could ever have expected.
It's completely fan driven so if thats the result, then fans trolled themselves
Is this some 4chan prank?
No, this is real.
Good god all mighty.
Even if it weren't for all of the problems the game has it's hardly innovative. I don't think a Bethesda game has been innovative ever. They didn't even invent the fallout franchise.
Fallout 3: Find your dad!
Fallout New Vegas: Your quest for revenge will lead you right into the middle of a political struggle which will decide whether this post-apocalypse society will fall to fascism, a corrupt republic that's two bad elections away from fascism, a technofascist, your rule, etc.
Fallout 4: Find your son!
I don't think a Bethesda game has been innovative ever.
Arena was pretty special in 1994. Day/night cycles, dynamic weather, procedural generation to create one of the biggest maps for a game even now...
It's interesting to keep in mind the basically no one who worked on that game still works for Bethesda.
i couldn't even get through the tutorial, space skinned skyrim is a about as innovating as a subscription model for a new app.
It was indeed quite innovative. Was the first game I ever installed on my HDD that refused to run at any acceptable level,
without any warning anywhere that it needed to be on SSD or not at all.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
It's in the system requirements but even games that list an SSD as required there still sometimes work fine on a hard disk.
I can't believe shadow of doubt didn't win it. I guess it just isn't popular enough.
As much as I like Shadow of Doubt, i equally dislike many things about it that, based on the devs replies to forum posts in the game's discussion page, aren't going to ever be addressed.
It certainly is worthy of the innovation award tho.
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.
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.
Omg starfield??? That game is diarrhea dookie!
That is an insult to diarrhea dookie
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.
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?
