Originally published at: Starfield gets passed up for GOTY, fans are angry | Boing Boing
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I’m sure it will at least get nominated for some of the dozens of other official GOTY awards out there. And even if it doesn’t, it’ll still get a GOTY edition.
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It may be a great game, but the short video in that first tweet just makes it look like a higher resolution version of Halo or even Doom. I assume there’s more to the game than that, but if you want to make the point that this game is new and groundbreaking while the latest Mario game is just the same thing Mario has been for 20+ years, that’s an odd choice for a gameplay clip.
ETA: I hate visiting Xitter, but I was curious how that tweet was received. Holy shit is it getting dragged. The best reply was “The part where he shot the gun and reloaded it was mind boggling honestly. Game of the Generation”.
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Starfield was great, i played the hell out of it and beat the first loop of the game. Once i hit NG+ i lost interest though. That said i would struggle to say it’s worthy of being GOTY, i have so many thoughts on how the game could’ve been better and when i compare it to something like No Man’s Sky on the sci-fi exploration end, or even comparing it to Bethesda itself with Skyrim it’s just not quite there. If Bethesda sticks with supporting this game and improving it over time like how NMS did then i might consider it a great game but so far it’s fun but still needs baking time.
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lol, I loved the game, spent over 7 days play time in it, I was literally just running some missions 10 minutes ago. But it’s not GOTY worthy, it’s just not. It’s buggy as hell, the world is incredibly empty (yes, space is empty, but come on, we’d have more than 3 small-town sized cities after hundreds of years of space travel), most cutscenes are just static shots on a talking head, a lot of the ideas seem half-baked, it just feels thin. I think it’s a great framework for modders to work with, but it’s ridiculous that we have to hope modders finish Bethesda’s game.
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Buggy? What are you talking about? Smooth as glass (/s)
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You have to love the video trying to be a 10-second demonstration of Starfield’s superiority making it look like the most generic-ass shooter imaginable. Oh, look, dark and gloomy and sci-fi-horror-ish environments and monsters and pistol shooting, oh my! How innovative and imaginative! Do these people even actually like the type of game Starfield is (/is trying to be)? 'Cause a sci-fi horror shooter ain’t it.
I think it’s great to see The Game Awards managing to avoid some of the “big budget = good game” stuff, even if it’s by no means immune to this still.
Also, the whole sentiment of “Waaaah, the game I like isn’t widely acknowledged to be the best game, waaah!” makes me chuckle. And, to be clear, that comes from someone with a long, long list of deep-seated insecurities - but at least I’m (somewhat) aware of them and working on improving, and can understand that my tastes aren’t universal. A rarely-shared fact of the world is that it is, in fact, fine to like something that other people like less, or not at all. Shocking, I know!
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Even things as base building and collecting resources is not very compelling compared to something like No Man’s Sky. The powers you gain are such an afterthought that they don’t really add much to the game, they’re situationally useful but if they were gone would anyone miss it? I don’t like how the ship building works, how you spend all this effort to build a ship and you can’t even fly it around a planet. Don’t like how the stats for armor and weapons isn’t more clear, so when doing upgrades i’m never quite sure what’s a better armor or weapon to upgrade, keep, or sell. I’m sure i can think of more to complain about 
At the end of the day i did enjoy and love the game, but if Bethesda doesn’t have plans to improve it i would consider it a waste of people’s time.
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Speaking as someone who spent literally a quarter of october playing (clearly not my sanest time ever), I will say is an engaging game, but not GOTY material. It plays to bethesda’s fortes - the environmental building and the soundtrack are awesome - but it also comes with exactly the same disappointments - a lackluster main quest, the bugs, half baked mechanics, The Bugs, a very limited inventory, THE BUGS -…
My veredict is that is going to be GOTY material in 5 or 6 years, once the modders finish all the QoL patches we need 
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I continue to enjoy the war between BG3 and TotK hardliners, demanding that their chosen game gets GotY. I played them both and felt while BG3 was deep, it had a learning curve that was brutal. TotK on the other hand was easy to pick up, fun to play, had a few neat new mechanics, but the story had the least depth since Adventure of Link.
TotK was far more polished and ran out of the gate fantastically. BG3 was in early release for 3 years and still launched with an armada of bugs, some causing game altering things, but had a stunning amount of options, choices, and a story that can go so many ways that you can probably play a dozen times and not have the same story.
One of the two will win. People need to get over “their team” winning and just be happy we had such a great year. It was a great year for gaming. There’s lots of great games that didn’t even get the nod. Sea of Stars, for example, was a great, old school type game. Honestly, Starfield felt like a slightly discount yet with polish in weird places version of today’s No Man’s Sky. It had an insane amount of hype and totally didn’t live up to it.
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Yes. I bought BG3 because a client did some work on it and I wanted to check out all the hype. I did like it, but just couldn’t remember how to do anything when I came back to it. Will try again soon.
Love TOTK, but it feels like a continuation of the last one. Haven’t finished yet.
Enjoying Starfield but agree with the criticisms. It’s soothing for me to play in brief times off.
Unlike Rust, which I started getting into recently, which is just Brutal.
Looks like I need to try No Man’s Sky.
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No Man’s Sky is somewhat in the direction of Minecraft or Valheim. It’s the kind of chill game you play to relax to and have fun exploring and building, if this kind of game is up your alley it’s definitely worth your time
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I didn’t see much impressive in either of those clips, but having completed Super Mario Wonder I know that it has some truly excellent set-piece levels. Hell, just the second level with the singing Piranha Plants has more creativity in it than anything I’ve seen from Starfield. The freedom to just totally up-end what type of game you are playing mid-level is great, and the way badges can totally recast the challenge of a given level is brilliant, too.
The actual best and most interesting game of the year not only didn’t make the TGA GOTY list, it didn’t make their indie games list. Which: understandable, a black-and-white pixel-art turn-based game vaguely related to Sokoban block pushing is a really hard sell. But please believe me when I say that Void Stranger does the coolest stuff of any game released this year.
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I’m not a huge gamer (I bought an X-box and Gamepass subscription specifically for MS Flight Simulator) but I went ahead and downloaded this game to see what all the fuss was about. Didn’t find it particularly engaging or unique and gave up on it after maybe 90 minutes of gameplay.
I know that a lot of people were raving about the physics of the game engine but it seemed just as unrealistic as any other shooter game. At one point I had the guy running around on another planet wearing nothing but underpants, yet somehow carrying hundreds of pounds of random garbage that he had picked up, and miraculously producing huge guns and other objects out of nowhere when selected from inventory. Just felt dumb.
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Hate to break that narrative a bit, but this is the real controversy of the year’s awards
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No Man’s Sky is, currently, a nicely full game. It was a trainwreck at launch and credit to the devs, they have done a lot. I played it on Switch was slightly challenging at times (also no multiplayer) but still enjoyable. It was on a killer sale for $30 (just checked and looks like BB has it for that now) and I feel I got my $30 out of it. I don’t feel it has a lot of replay value, but I spent a solid month playing it and really loved most aspects of it.
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And now I need to play the new Mario Game and Void Stranger. I love most of the Mario Games, but haven’t played the last several.
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I like starfield just fine.
It just had the unfortunate timing to come out the same year as BG3, which is a long awaited and masterfully done sequel to a genre classic.
In terms of the 2D Mario titles, Wonder is pretty widely considered the best of them since possibly Super Mario World. There’s a lot of little mechanical and visual touches that make it a better game than the “New Super Mario” sub-series that dominated for so long; John Linneman’s dive into it here is a great watch for anybody who’s curious about the fine details:
On Void Stranger, go in knowing that it’s bastard hard and expects a lot of you. It demands near-perfection eventually, though the “bad ending” itself is very worth experiencing. If you don’t want to rely on a guide, it might be worthwhile to keep old-school written notes about puzzle solutions.
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I don’t see Starfield as GOTY contender in a world with people playing BG III and Cyberpunk 2.0. Bethesda looks really shallow in character development and world-building by comparison.
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