2023 Steam Awards: Starfield wins Most Innovative Gameplay award despite "Mostly Negative" recent reviews on PC storefront

The Steam Awards are a way for the community to vote for the best games of the year, and Valve has just released the results for the 2023 event, revealing some surprising entries. As many may have expected, Baldur's Gate 3 took the overall win, nabbing the Game of the Year Award.

Perhaps the most surprising entry in the award-winners list was Starfield, which beat out Remnant II, Contraband Police, Shadows of Doubt, and Your Only Move is Hustle for the Most Innovative Gameplay Award. Not only are Starfield's Steam reviews "Mixed", with only 64% of the game's 89,282 reviews rating it positively, but the reviews are trending downwards, to boot. Of Starfield's 7,213 reviews on Steam from the last 30 days, only 29% are positive, putting it firmly on the "Mostly Negative" side of things.

Starfield's launch was plagued by a number of issues, with many gamers online criticising the game for feeling "outdated." Meanwhile, others were left unsatisfied with the game's empty environments and lack of follow-through on its grand ambitions — a sentiment to which a Bethesda employee comically responded that "The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed."

Regardless of the controversy surrounding the game, its creative mix of hand-made and procedurally-generated environments in conjunction with a wide variety of systems and game mechanics, seems to have won over the gaming community at least in part.

The rest of the 2023 Steam Awards played out as follows:

• VR Game of the Year: Labyrinthine
• Labor of Love: Red Dead Redemption II
• Best Game on Steam Deck: Hogwarts Legacy
• Better With Friends: Lethal Company
• Outstanding Visual Style: Atomic Heart
• Most Innovative Gameplay: Starfield
• Best Game You Suck At: SIFU
• Best Soundtrack: The Last Of Us Part I
• Outstanding Story-Rich Game: Baldur's Gate 3
• Sit Back and Relax: Dave the Diver

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