Starfield's been left out to dry at The Game Awards—and even dedicated fans are 'not terribly surprised'

pcgamer.com:

Starfield was primed to go galactic in the steady countdown to its launch. It was the first big mainline Bethesda RPG in a while. It was big and ambitious—one small step for Bethesda as a studio, one giant leap for gamer kind. 

Post launch, though, and that hype's cooled significantly. What we got was more Bethesda standing in place, while gamer kind just… shuffled around in a circle, wondering how the studio still hadn't put together a good inventory system, again.

That's not to say Starfield's a bad game, or anything. It's one of the more stable Bethesda launches by far. I enjoyed my couple dozen hours with it, and our own Christopher Livingston gave it a 74 in his Starfield review—meaning it's a game we actively like. 

Still, it's been left to drift in space at The Game Awards—only scoring one nomination among its 31 categories—which feels like it should be more of an upset than it actually is. After all, this was meant to be a genre-defining RPG. 'Skyrim but in space' sounds like prime GOTY material. But it never broke the atmosphere.

What's more, no-one even seems all that surprised—least of all the people who like it. In the Starfield subreddit, a thread announcing the game's absence from the Game of the Year category with over 8,000 upvotes is flooded with shrugged shoulders and sad sighs. «I really enjoy and love Starfield, but [I'm] not terribly surprised,» writes user InitialQuote000. Further comments sing the same sorry tune.

Things are just as nonchalant over on Twitter as well. In a series of quote tweets to Kotaku's story on the game only nudging into one category, most people who enjoyed the game weren't shocked. Granted, there are more dissenting voices to be heard here—since Twitter doesn't really bother