Starfield fails to appear on the GOTY nominee list of The Game Awards 2023, what went wrong?

Starfield was highly hyped over for years and everyone believed it would be nominated for GOTY. However, that plan turned into ashes soon after its final release. While many claimed the game ran fine on most PCs, some insisted it had horrible optimization. Players worldwide even complained about the game’s issues and wanted fixes to restore it to its glory.

However, Todd Howard assured that the game has been well-optimized for all PCs and Xbox. He even said, “You might need to upgrade your PC” during an interview at Bloomberg Technology. Still, the game performed inadequately on Nvidia’s 3000 series cards which are capable and were released in 2022.

In the case of Xbox’s new generation consoles, the game was only able to run at 30 FPS despite having powerful specifications. Additionally, the rendering quality of Starfield wasn’t that impressive and just didn’t justify the performance drop.

Coming to Starfield’s gameplay, it didn’t excite many players despite being an RPG with numerous endings. The game only has four main endings, which was toppled over by Baldur’s Gate 3 which has over 17,000 endings and was released almost during the same release window.

Additionally, the core gameplay felt repetitive in many ways, with players stuck on fast-travel screens for hours. Space exploration is also a thing in Bethesda’s latest game, but it only works with fast travel and does not provide a seamless transition like No Man’s Sky. Thus, the excitement of space exploration soon turned to ruins due to the hectic and inconvenient fast travel style.

Even after 10 years of development, the game couldn’t keep up with the expectations of both players and critics for its lack of features. Moreover, the game did not innovate as such to be deserving of the GOTY nomination as it wasn’t so special.

What are the criteria for GOTY at The Game Awards 2023 and why Starfield didn’t make it?

There are two main criteria that are set for the Game of The Year nominations at The Game Awards 2023. One, it should be creative with its approach and two, it should excel in technical fields as well for delivering a great experience. With these criteria in mind, six titles made it to the top-tier list of GOTY and Starfield is not one of them.

When it comes to creativity, Bethesda created Starfield as a generic RPG shooter much like its previous titles. However, to make it seem innovative, they added a space exploration part which seemed exciting on paper. While these things sound great for the Space RPG title, it couldn’t keep up with the second benchmark.

In terms of technicality and features, the game felt like an average RPG game with no unique takeaways. Additionally, space exploration felt lackluster as No Man’s Sky has already set a certain bar of expectation that couldn’t be beat yet. On top of it, space exploration was lackluster and failed to give us the feeling of being in the void. In fact, this could be the biggest reason why it was not nominated for the GOTY list in 2023.