Game of the Year Award - Baldur’s Gate 3
VR Game of the Year Award - Labyrinthine
Labor of Love Award - Red Dead Redemption 2
Best Game on Steam Deck Award - Hogwarts Legacy
Better With Friends Award - Lethal Company
Outstanding Visual Style Award - Atomic Heart
Most Innovative Gameplay Award - Starfield
Best Game You Suck At Award - SIFU
Best Soundtrack Award - The Last of Us Part I
Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award - Baldur’s Gate 3
Sit Back and Relax Award - Dave the Diver
Sorry, but wtf was as innovative as to warrant a GOTY in Starfield?
EDIT: no a hater, 90hrs played, overall would not recommend and genuinely don’t see what was innovative.
This exactly made me chuckle. What on Earth is innovative on Starfield’s gameplay?
I think it’s innovative in the fact they made it a menu/load screen adventure game… and people still bought it.
And to think nobody called EVE Online innovative during its release for being a “spreadsheet simulator”. Truly, we live in an age.
I made the same comment when I saw it was nominated. It’s Fallout 4 in space with both free base building (outposts) and grid base building (ships). The procedural generation of locations is reminiscent of Arena. The class system is a simpler version of Skyrim and Fallout 4. The story is cliche science fiction using mechanics from earlier Bethesda titles. The dogfights are decades old. The drudgery of running around forever for a simple objective hails back to earlier titles like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and similar Ubisoft map objectives.
I have no idea what Starfield innovated. It’s just like every other Bethesda game with some new things done better elsewhere. I am in the minority that love it because it is exactly what you would expect from the studio that’s been rereleasing the same game for over a decade.
The innovation is… Bethesda not re-releasing Skyrim again… kinda
I was flabbergasted by this. It’s literally veered headlong into “Mostly Negative” reviews. Even the overall reviews are “Mixed.”
I kind of feel like Valve just shoved some of these games in award spaces because they couldn’t give Baldur’s Gate III every award.
Source: I voted for BG3 for nearly every award.
its a new bethesda IP. Thats literally all it has going for it. Considering their last IP was made last millenium, i guess that kind of counts as innovative? For them?
Todd Howard has been talking about how many big games he’s got left in his career. He should beg Michael Kirkbride to come back and stick to what they’re good at.
RDR2 labor of love?! Didn’t Rockstar basically abandon the multiplayer a while back throwing the community into a clown protest. Even the single player mode has an audio bug introduced in the final update (many years ago) that affected many people (including myself) and the only fix was running a script some guy on a forum made. The game is completely abandoned by Rockstar and can get the fuck off that list.
Also, I’m one of the people who actually really enjoyed Starfield but to call it the most innovative I would not. Viewfinder, Cocoon, Jusant, Dave the Diver, Humanity, Venba, Hi-Fi Rush to name a few that feel much more at home in this category.
That’s RDR2 online. It is even sold separately.
RDR2 the game is truly a masterpiece and indeed feels like a labour of love and passion. RDR2 online is shit and flopped hard.
RDR2 though released 5 years ago now (4 on PC), how did it end up on ANY kind of list for the best games of 2023?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing game, I just don’t understand why it would be included alongside 2023 releases.
The whole point of that category is games that weren’t released this year…
This game has been out for a while. The team is well past the debut of their creative baby, but being the good parents they are, these devs continue to nurture and support their creation. This game, to this day, is still getting new content after all these years.
Other Finalists: Rust, Apex Legends, Dota 2, Deep Rock Galactic
LMAO which is even more hilarious. Has ANY new single-player content been added since launch? I’ve played through the game at least a half-dozen times over the years and don’t recall anything new.
But even under these guidelines it fails. This game hasn’t been touched since launch. Even the online spin off hasn’t been touched in years and everyone complains about the bugs and the cheaters that are running rampant because Rockstar abandoned this.
It came out on PC four years ago. Rockstar isn’t exactly laboring on it now.
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Yeah, if anything, it should go to Cyberpunk 2077. They went from a really rough release to a really solid DLC.
Yeah, HOW did Cyberpunk 2077 not win that?
Steam awards never fail to be baffling.
Most Innovative Gameplay Award - Starfield
Really? Really?
What the hell innovation does Starfield have?
New levels of Jank
I seriously was wondering if it was actually because it is arguably the most stable Bethesda release ever. I mean, it ran well even on hardware that didn’t meet minimum requirements in my personal experience. While not innovative to gaming as a whole, a stable Bethesda RPG is pretty innovative for Bethesda.
They should’ve released the modding tools instead, then the unofficial patch would make it stable and everyone would’ve been happier.
Dunno, I remember Skyrim being significantly more stable on my computer back in 2011 than Starfield. SF crashed a lot and forced me to endure some 5 blue screens of death, either mem_corruption or page_alloc errors.
Don’t you mean what gameplay? Lol
Never before was there a game with this much fast travel. Even forcing you to fast travel. This is true innovation
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cubic potatoes!
Hogwarts Legacy is a great game, but it doesn’t play as well on Steam Deck as many other incredible titles do. I’m not sure why it was picked for that.
This whole list is full of questionable choices imo.
Since (I think?) these are community awards, they are just hype/marketing indicators. Average voter sees the most commonly known title and goes clickclickclick. I’m not even sure if they only allowed SD users to vote for it or it’s just random people voting
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I respect the Dave the Diver pick. Lethal Company looks interesting. Everything else looks real questionable except BG3.
Lmao most innovative gameplay - Starfield. Guess 6 loading screens per quest truly is innovative.
I prefer the innovation I saw in a YT comment:
Bethesda released the first space exploration game without exploration and without space.
I thought it was innovative how they could pack so much in and have it all feel as compelling as doing your taxes.
BG3 is a great game. Many of the rest of these serve as a reminder that the average person has questionable taste.
Bg3, Dave, and lethal company assuming you have a good crew are all excellent.
The others I don’t know but starfield is a load of shit. I’ve said it before but I might have had a better opinion of it if it released decades ago. Before all the other space games at least. Imagine if star citizen had uncanny valley NPCs, shops with inventory that can be stolen by clipping under the map, worse everything related to space and less everything related to space, shitty fetch quests (oh wait I think it does), but at least you don’t buy the ships with real money I guess? Everything has been done better before by many different games.
Big budget devs need to give me a cross between stellar overload and nms with star citizen flight and ship mechanics from the time when racing was fun, maybe with the economy systems like some of the other games I have tried briefly but didn’t actually own, and terraria like base raids and bosses, and creepy abandoned facilities from lost civilizations with cool ancient tech and SCP inspired entities. Even better the whole game should be modular mods of its own engine like how minetest/mineclone or vintage story work, with a few of the core modules of the base game open sourced or just source available so the community can tweak the game to suit anyone’s preferences and have a good reference for how further mods can be made.
Or Bloodborne for PC. I could forget space ships for a while.
with a few of the core modules of the base game open sourced or just source available so the community can tweak the game to suit anyone’s preferences and have a good reference for how further mods can be made.
Right now, OpenMW is pretty much that and RWC (RoboWindConstruct) is a game made with the engine and all new assets - https://modding-openmw.com/mods/rwc-robowind/
Honestly, Early Access games should be disqualified. Or at least have its own category.
Well deserved
Hogwarts Legacy runs like absolute dogshit on the Steamdeck. It isn’t even possible to run it at a stable 40fps. Anything less than 40 is unplayable to me on a computer 😭
I have difficulty with the fact that a number of the games nominated for several categories had mixed or negative reviews. I feel like that should be a disqualifier for these awards. Starfield is the best example but there’s a handful of others that were not well received but still made the cut. It makes me question the voting process.
Big game better because money
