I was thinking of Alien Isolation when I read the title. Some games have specific save places as a point of purpose and risk, which can also help in those games avoid a potential soft-lock by saving right next to the big bad that kills one instantly.

Okay.

None of that matters to the Labor of Love nomination.

Again, it's a good foundation. The game is good in its style and most of its mechanics. I enjoy it. I'm playing it again. But that doesn't mean it deserves this award. This is just a deceptive comment meant to imply the game has a lot of content. It doesn't have as much as you imply, unless you're a builder type, but at that point many games could be that. Conan, Terraria, Minecraft etc etc etc but many of those have had more updates than Valheim

Because you should be expected tp finish your product.

Part of it is probably just the bad apples spoiling the bunch, except there's a lot of bad apples. Any time someone puts a game out in EA and it stays there forever. A game getting an award doesn't guarantee its completion to 1.0, and that's probably part of the worry here. You want X, while there's still a chance you could just dump it and run? Then throw it that there's games that have hit 1.0 and still update, and when you compare X and Y, some people think Y deserve it more.

Likely this is a Valheim post, and while I like Valheim (I've even been replaying it recently) the game doesn't qualify for this award, full stop. They have probably 50 pages of comments on thdir steam post about it saying thdy dont deserve it yet. A popular alternative people like is Deep Rock Galactic, which hit 1.0 a while back, and is full of spirit as well, and has been updating with seasons and etc. My only hangup with DRG is they still sell cosmetics, versus a game like Terraria which won last year and pretty much only ever sells the game more with their updates.

Valheim has barely made any updates in its time of 'release', and beyond that hasn't even hit 1.0 yet.

At time of writing Valheim has done, what, Hearth and Home. Wolf caves, and made Mistlands a public beta? There might have been a food update in there. Or perhaps that was with wolf caves.

Terraria, the previous winner, has received some 53 or so updates. Now I'm sure not all of those are major updates, but if you know terraria, enough are.

Valheim is outstanding in its potential. It's potential. Not its updates history. If they got their shit together then one day it will be a downright amazing game. But until then they shouldn't beg for an award they haven't earned. They have 3 (4 if counting ocean)entire biomes they have barely touched, that were in original release.

Labor of love is for a game that could be dropped as Standalone, but they kept plugging away at it and updating it. (IMO, this also disqualifies live service) Much as I Aldo like Satisfactory, I would say the same thing about it. You're not done yet, don't go begging for awards.

I like FFXIV, I just wish they'd release it on Xbox so I could be casual with it and play it on the big screen.

The free trial...is semi worth it. When I play FFXIV it's for the crafting/gathering systems, but the free trial limiting your inventory space and denying access to the marketboard kills that. You can go to the effort to make HQ versions and such but it'll only ever sell for 10 cents (basically) to the npcs. You wind up needing so many materials and stuff you get from other classes your inventory can't keep up...

In the other areas, it's an mmo. Combat is slow and based on the traditional button on a timer system. It looks nice, but personally looking nice on my computer monitor don't matter as much as looking nice on the big TV.

Having a subscription system in today's day and age is ass, especially since they also have cosmetics. They offer a free trial to play up until the end of the first dlc, but of you've ever paid for the game you can't play the free trial anymore. The system surrounding the game is so stupid and asinine that it half kills it for me, but if you just subscribe and play it shouldn't get in the way.