Honestly, I had forgotten that some of these games had come out this year. It just feels like there's been so many in 2023. Also pleasantly surprised to see People Make Games get nominated for Content Creator of the Year. I don't think they'll win but it is nice to see their documentaries/ deep dive investigations receive some recognition.
I’m shocked that RE4 got a GotY nomination. I thought there were rules against remakes or remasters getting Game Awards nominations; am I wrong, or did that change at some point?
Starfield only getting one nomination–and in a category it has no chance of winning–is not at all what I would have expected going into this year.
I don’t know if that speaks to how nuts this year has been for new releases or to how much Starfield fell short, in light of the fact that its player counts on Steam are starting to fall below Skyrim.
To be perfectly fair, Skyrim has a decade of sales and mods in its favor when it comes to Steam numbers, and whether or not Starfield has fallen short by any metric, the things that it does were more novel when Skyrim did a lot of the same stuff 12 years ago.
Starfield player counts will go way up once the modkit is released. Every single one of those people playing Skyrim on Steam have modded it out the wazoo.
They might go up but I’d be surprised it will rival Skyrim. I’m a Skyrim fan, yet I’m not enticed to play Starfield for reasons beyond me. It feels like it’s lacking something and I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t believe mods would make much of a difference, but who knows, maybe I’m wrong.
I modded Skyrim (and Oblivion) because the vanilla game was exciting already, in spite of its flaws. I couldn’t be bothered otherwise.
Depth is what Starfield is lacking, imo. It fixes a lot of what both skyrim and f4 did wrong (there’re backgrounds, they affect your skills, and they come up from time to time, to mention one), but they regressed so hard on other things. They tried new stuff but the delivery was so limp dicked that everything landed awkwardly, or not at all. Think the game suffered because of scope creep, honestly, if they had limited the game to just a handful of planets, they could’ve tailored the experience and they wouldn’t feel so empty.
And as always, their obsession to let you do everything in one playthrough hurt the game hard. There’s very little reason to go for a second playthrough.
Like, they did a good job with most of the game’s mechanics, but everything else is mid as hell. Very forgettable.
For me, it’s the vast expanses of procedurally generated nothingness in Starfield that turns me off the most, especially combined with the menu-based fast travel heavy way you get around.
The magic of Bethesda games comes from their handcrafted open worlds, always full of things to see and explore and get sidetracked by. Its the feeling that kicks in when the horizon first opens up after you exit the sewer/vault/customs office and you realize that you can just pick a direction and start walking and you’ll come across something interesting.
Starfield doesn’t do that. You can’t just pick a direction and go, it’s all fast travel. And if you’re down on a planet you can, but there is no magic to be found because it’s all procedurally generated emptiness between copy-pasted points of interest.
In their ambitions to have a bigger scope than ever they sacrificed the very thing that made their games so compelling to begin with.
I don’t think starfield does anything worth giving it an award for. You should give awards to things that do something unique or took a risk. Starfield is a very safe game that didn’t really do anything unique or risky. They just made Skyrim in space.
The space elements were a big part of the marketing. I knew better than to expect atmospheric flight or anything but simple space combat, but intra-system travel being only done in menus and the space sections being put in small lightboxes with planet renderings was rather shocking. That’s 20th-century stuff. It’s especially bizarre given how much of the Bethesda magic has leaned on roads in the past, and there aren’t any roads outside of cities. Even the cargo runs are 100% in menus, without talking to a single person.
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