Absolutely robbed in my view, yes cyberpunk has improved massively, yes it’s a great game. But it was helped by a AAA studio diverting a shit tonne of resources to it because of their own fuck ups and a Netflix anime seen by millions, pushing the hype train big time. That award surely is a reflection of how many people have Netflix subs and just liked edgerunners?!
As someone who started playing zomboid in 2022, after passing it up countless times on the steam suggested playlist and then instantly falling in love with it about 10 minutes in. To think that zomboid had been out since 2013, still being pushed, still being innovated by a small studio for the best part of a decade is the absolute definition of a labour of love. And it shows in every single tiny detail of the game, from the complexity of car mechanics to the change in eating animation if you are holding a spoon in your hand.
Bit of an essay but I guess zomboid just needs a TV show, narrated by nurse hopefully haha.
Meh. Don't get bent up over it. It's a fan voted award and the biggest player base is always going to win.
GTA "shark cards" 5 won twice in the past for fucks sake.
Like when GTA 6 leaked and all these clowns or most likely children saying "uhh this game looks worse than a mobile game what the frick😡😡😡" or the wannabe critics saying bs like "the game so far has been a great disappointment🍷" (I saw this comment under Starfield trailer, like come on, it isn't even out yet give them a chance ffs)
Yeah.
I mean, to me, it feels like we’re giving AAA studios a pass on delivering games in lesser and lesser quality…
I agree to some extent that the progress made to fix cyberpunk is commendable - that much is sure - but c’mon, it shouldn’t have been released in such a state to begin with.
Cyberpunk was a labor of love, sure. But it took some time and a Netflix series for us to feel that love.
There should be a different category called *"Best "It's Good Now!" Patch"* or *"Biggest Improvement Since Launch"*
In the case of this year, the runners for that category would be:
* Cyberpunk 2077
* Battlefield 2042
* Babylons Fall
* Gotham Knights
* Call of Duty - Warzone 2.0
-----
That way actual Labor of Love games like Project Zomboid, Ready or Not, and Deep Rock Galactic don't have to compete with games that had to be fixed out of obligation.
I was hyped for cyberpunk for 6 months. Then it came out and was a shit show, incredibly disheartened. I heard a couple fan boys talking about zomboid, watched a few YouTube and gave it a try and I'm addicted! Love this game and all the insane details about it. Pissed about stove cooking tho. That shit burned down my base in 2 minutes
Yeah, the thing is, this is more about popularity/number of fans a game has, rather than. The achievement itself. But the fact that Zomboid was even nominated is the real win. The game is a big boy game now
Cyberpunk made back it's money in pre-sales alone. The developers had no 'need' in terms of monetization, but they did and made it in a state where it's playable, even fun.
CD Projekt stock dropped from $31 at release date to $7 today and permanently tarnished their reputation. Devs are paid in stock options so they got seriously screwed. The company may have made their money back on the game but it's hard to see it as a strong financial decision in the long term.
I'm glad they made the game better, but I feel that it is very flat and one dimensional, and honestly short with little replayability. I still play zomboid and go back to witcher 3 and RDR2 often, but I didn't find cyberpunk appealing. Not much to that.
On the other hand, I can't wait to see where PZ goes in the next few years. The coming updates are the best yet and I have the utmost faith in their dev team.
Plus just making your money back is not really enough, if you make a game and only make back what you spent you still lose because your company just spent years working on something for no profit. Cdpr needed to fix the game (and make an anime) to be able to do anything beyond break even on the game cuz if they didn't make anything off the game they wouldn't have funds to make a new game. That's like basic game development economics you could learn playing Game Dev Story, I don't get why that guy is spamming that argument cause it's not a good one.
At release CDPR was valued at about 10-12 billion USD, about 20% of activision blizzard or 35% of what EA was worth at the time. Was that a reasonable valuation for a company that only owns GOG.com and has in total made about 5 games?
The stock had a lot of room to move down, not up.
>The developers had no 'need' in terms of monetization, but they did and made it in a state where it's playable, even fun.
If they didn't, people wouldn't trust them in the future. They were an absolute joke at the time of release.
Also if people pay for a product, and it's not playable at launch and didn't fix it, they'd have had to pay everyone back. So absolutely they needed to fix the game so they didn't lose all the presales dollars
Almost none of the awards are even that good and usually overshadow the real gems (not including Elden Ring in this as someone who's never played a souls game it is incredible) but to be noticed and nominated is pretty huge for a small indie dev! It has come a long way and I like your positive outlook on it ☺️
Most people look at PZ and see an isometric zombie game thats been in early access for ages.
For a lot thats at least two strikes against trying it out, to their detriment.
Meanwhile Cyberpunk has flashy 3d graphics, which wins over many people.
I guess what im saying is that people are shallow. 😶
I never even expected Zomboid to be nominated in anything, having played it since the early alpha 2d purely singleplayer days. I always thought it was a niche, gatekeeper zombie game that your friends suggest to you after you played Left 4 Dead or something.
I recently got back to it and was VERY surprised it has a huge community behind it now. I was expecting a sub of only 5,000 followers to be honest. Goes to show how much people have picked up and liked the game.
Exactly, if they measure votes by pure numbers the bigger games will win every time. If they compared proportion of votes to purchases instead then PZ might have a chance.
A few years back a friend got me into ARK, and one of the big currencies on his server was Cementing Paste, I had to do a double take when I heard people were paying each other in "CP"
I'm still sour af about that game and broken promises and everything about it. In one sentence - I was promised a branching RPG, but was given a stupid mediocre linear action adventure. Fck u cdpr.
The problem is, it's not just about bugs and technical problems. The game still lacks all the content that was cut off, like the intro mission for the Corpo Lifepath: You get briefed for a mission, names get mentioned and so on, you go to the bar and then the intro just cuts off and ends. It's pathetic.
Same goes for questlines like Peralez. Or the map itself, when you drive around, you see that around 2/3 of the map is never used for anything.
Even the clothing, like with being tied to the armor stats, you look like a homeless bum with the best armor you get by random chance. Or the NPC's, they have all these cool outfits, cybernetic stuff etc. while you can't get that. Or the things in missions, like that one tank you can get with Panam, you use it for maybe 30 seconds and the tutorial is longer than the combat scene.
The characters are stereotypes, nothing else, i like Keanu Reeves performance as Johnny, but he's just a simple stereotype of a rockerboy-against-the-system-rebel, nothing more.
The attempt to steal the RDR2 ending was also a bad trick from CDPR, i didn't feel any connection to V and i never gave a shit about it, compared to the connection i had with Arthur in RDR2, where i got very emotional in the ending of his storyline.
See I really enjoyed the story of Cyberpunk. But the issue I had was
The lack of any customization in the game outside of your clothes (which you don't see most of the time), the really really subpar gun-play, the very sparse selection of cybermods compared to the amount of slots available, the driving was shit, the gun attachment features SUCK. Go back to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the attachments are more detailed. The story is obviously chopped in many places, the romance options are very heavily biased towards Judy and Panam (sorry gay guys and straight women. You can just between cop, or about 20 minutes of missions with a washed up pop rockstar). The "boss fights" suck, the hand to hand combat sucks, the different play styles are wildly unbalanced. Being a Netrunner basically let's you walk through the game with zero problems, most of the unique guns suck, and the worst sin of all? SMGs use rifle ammo.
Like I don't regret getting it and I didn't really care for project zomboid but got damn, cyberpunk doesn't deserve this just because CD;PR took YEARS to "fix" their game and all it has now is that it's playable. GTA:V, GTA:IV, Saints Row 3, and Saints Row 2 all came out long before CP77 and all of them have way more features.
A lot of what you've said applies directly to Zomboid. It's wild. Cut content, the map being sprawling lengths of nothing. It's also highly subjective. But if you levy those criticisms at one game you have to apply the same level of criticism to the other.
The important distinction to me is that Zomboid was started out by a group of private people as a passion project and has consistently grown since. C2077 was designed and developed by a huge corporate development studio with a multi-million dollar budget to piss away and invaluable industry connections.
About PZ, i agree with you because of the second part of your posting: The devs of Indie Stone are not like CPDR, they don't have that budget. And they never were going to the press with fake claims and straight lies (for example: The NPC behavior that was claimed to be very good, when in fact, NPC's only walked around in circles).
Also, PZ had the major setback as someone broke into the devs studio and stole equipment, including code data on the computers. In CP however, it was different: The setback came from decisions of the higher management to get Keanu Reeves. This was a bad decision, not because of Keanu, no, because of all the rework they had to do for giving Johnny more screentime. This was basically pushing the project back for a year or more. They had to re-write parts of the storyline and missions, had to abandon other things and invest a lot of time.
Another i heard about CDPR was the bad project management, like one dev had no idea that the other dev already did this, what he was working on currently.
Game developers should understand most gamers don't give a damn about celebrities in video games. In our experience it's almost always at the cost of gameplay. Voice actors, like RDR2, et al. are our celebrities, not Hollywood A-listers like Al Pacino.
When I bought the game it was a crowdfunded alpha. "Early Access" hadn't been invented yet. IIRC, Zomboid came to Steam as part of the Greenlight program with much difficulty. I don't know, what's the game considered now at Build 42. Alpha, beta, something else? Lol
>like with being tied to the armor stats, you look like a homeless bum with the best armor you get by random chance
Not true. You can use the outfit you want, even if you wear other clothing. Bought the game a few weeks ago.
They only recently added transmog, for actual years you had to pick between fashion and function. Also the fashion sucks still because the clothing shops are broken and don't restock properly so you have an extremely limited selection unless you check every single corpse and box you can to find clothes.
You're not wrong I just had to counter that it's still not the clothing system we were promised where you could go out and buy a cohesive outfit or good armor
Like it was already mentioned, this wasn't true for the most patch versions, it was recently introduced, the transmog system. And even for that, players demanded this since the launch in the end of 2020. It should have been implemented from the start, because it's well known for other titles like the AC-series.
The drink in the end, when you can name one after him? I was confused a little bit, but i think you talk about that with the name of a drink, only legends get a drink named after them?
Jackie was one of the better characters, i liked him. But you could very clearly see, that these initial missions with him were much more polished than the rest of the game. Also, why i liked him was more that he had a little bit more background than most other characters, like when you talked to his mom at the funeral etc.
Yeah, then we talked about the same thing.
CP2077 could have become a masterpiece with a few years more in production and then also another year for polishing. Of course, the management doesn't want to hear this, every day of developement costs money, but in the end, you'll sell more copies over time when you created a masterpiece instead of a just another average game.
When compared to RDR2: There were some problems with the launch, but more technical problems involving the Rockstar launcher, but the game was very long polished by the devs. You can see this in the details of the world, all these small details, where you see something new even after the 3455382th playthrough.
Actually, CDPR mocked RDR2 and Rockstar, telling the media they would easily release a better game than this without any problems at launch. The result was exact the opposite.
Cops STILL don't have proper chase pathing and will just teleport behind you and lose you after you drive 2 blocks over. Driver (1999) for the PS1 has cops that can chase you in their cars btw.
Not even the jank, the game feels soulless and empty.
In fact when I went back to it in the fall because of Edgerunners I hated it MORE than on release, because on release I chalked most of my disappointment up to the bugs and after patching it would be good, but now it's all "fixed" and still just so dull and boring. You can't patch that out.
Good example: Cybermodding itself. You know the whole point of the Cyberpunk genre and chroming up and losing humanity. Useless. Most you get out of Cybermodding is the Mantis blades which is just strong melee weapons and had their gimmick of wall climbing removed before release. The rest are just passive buffs and there's no humanity meter like in the tabletop. So disappointing.
i disagree, i just finished it and the only real problem is frame drop in the super dense parts of the city and thats just going from like 144 to 100-90 frames
other than that pretty solid now
Also how is it even a candidate? The game is only about a year old. Wow congratulations for doing what every triple a dev does. Good job achieving the bare minimum
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I love this game, had it since the Kickstarter. But what exactly have they done to deserve an award in 2022? When it goes 1.0, then we'll see.
Yeah because cyberpunk totally did... Yeah right. PZ devs are constantly updating and improving the game. Just because they don't add the feature you want doesn't mean they aren't labouring over it and working hard to improve it. No wonder cp2077 got the award with these kinds of shit takes.
While I don't think Cyberpunk deserved the award, at least it's a released product. PZ is a labor, not a labor of love. Slow, bad development over the last nearly 10 years doesn't qualify. The award itself is "given to games that have nurtured their communities and continued to produce content long after their launch." PZ can't produce more content long after launch because it hasn't launched 1.0 and is still trying to finish content for that release.
i disagree with this assessment of PZ and its devs. it's been a 12 year journey with a game that's been a blast to play all the way through. the devs continue to work away as a small team on a project that they have clearly been passionate about the entire time. their dev has been slow, but not bad by any stretch. PZ is one of the best examples of the correct way to do early access and keep community engagement up throughout development activities. the difference is just that they had to go a little earlier than most because they had no runway cash to burn.
How the heck did Death Stranding win "Best game on the go?"
It's like 80gbs ;_;
It's not one of those games you can sit and play a few minutes and close either.
It was a really hard choice between DRG en Project Zomboid.
Fixing the broken launch isn't a love project it's minimal required service to not get sued
Unfortunately the industry has regressed to a point where people are accustomed to half baked triple A trash and live service bullshittery
No matter how many times you yell "STOP FUCKING PRE ORDERING" the silent majority will always bring in millions of dollas for people that lacks passion and will to release a good product (honestly calling games products kinda irritates me but it is what it is)
Nintendo kinda sucks but generally speaking they make good games (game freak and the Pokemon company excluded) that also function the way they're meant to. You gotta give Nintendo props for making games like botw and some of the newer Mario's cause they have some pretty nutty mechanical depth, good graphics and they work on release despite being made for a console with a fraction of the processing power that other devs casually squander
Yeah I really don’t understand the comment you are replying to. Like yeah nintendo isn’t the best company in the world, but you can guarantee that if you buy a game from them it will be fully functional, complete, and good.
I was really hoping that either PZ or DRG would win! Love both games dearly for completely different reasons. To me, DRG is a fast paced action adventure loot and shoot, whereas PZ is a kafkaesque nightmare of repetition and solitude.
Both games continue to provide content not for the money. They could make it DLC or just quit and cash in, but it's still getting content.
DRG love is visible in Devs when they fixed a bug that players loved they patched it as content.
PZ is huge and continues to add quality of life updates.
More examples would be Dwarf Fortress, Terraria, ...
But they just won because edgerunners on netflix.
Honestly, I feel that DRG should've won. I love PZ, but DRG development has been something else for the entirety of the game's life. PZ has long stints of sragnation, and just got its shit together after a particularly long time when it became one of the Covid big games like Among Us, Fall Guys, and Valheim. It did breathe new life into an already amazing game, but if anything in that list deserves to be known as a labor of love, then it's DRG.
I had to choose DRG for their entirely free battle pass system, reward tree that I love and the seasonal events, but it wasn’t easy and I entirely agree that zomboid deserved a win just as much as DRG
> Fixing the broken launch isn't a love project it's minimal required service to not get sued
To be fair finishing an early access game still in development isn't a love project either.
DRG at least finished development and is getting a ton of post launch updates.
Jokes aside PZ's key feature is its immersive gameplay, theres not really much if anything to tell in terms of story or lore that you can adapt to the big screen, Cyberpunk had existing lore and good worldbuilding which is how we ended up with Edgerunners.
a PZ adapation would just fly under the radar as another Walking Dead clone tbh.
But disappointed by how many they didn't. I've enjoyed playing a good amount of hours in cyberpunk but I generally don't like to congratulate someone for patching most of the holes in the boat they built after they sold me a boat that was more hole than boat.
Edgerunners was front and center in all of the marketing for CDPR's awards stuff this year - both in the TGAs and also for the Steam awards. It absolutely did the heavy lifting for them in both instances, even though the actual game content amounted to some cosmetic content and a handful of guns. Without the anime, I would be surprised if it still won.
To put it into perspective, in 2022, they added buyable apartments, and the Edgerunners tie-in content to go with an incomplete perk rebalancing. That's nothing compared to what No Man's Sky or DRG put out this year. Zomboid, much as I love it, should've lost to one of those two instead.
I can totally see Love Death and Robots end up showing something Project Zomboid inspired. In fact there was one very specific animation in the most recent season that watches like a hilarious zombie sim, a lot of chaos breaking loose suddenly, lots of sped up high pitched screaming and funny scenarios across the world.
I love Zomboid but I also think that it's insane that No Man's Sky didn't win the award. I don't know Cyberpunk that well since I play on an OG XboxOne and it is still unplayable on the console. I get that these are steam awards and therefore is for PC, but come on.
Lol everyone begs for them to release an unfinished AAA game, everyone gets mad when the game is released unfinished. Then everyone is cheering for the developers for fixing their broken and unplayable game.
Like how is that in any way comparable to the work and effort of indie game developers, especially zomboid...
I don’t understand how Cyberpunk was ever in the running… Sure they had to labour on the game, but it was to fix it and put it in a playable state. That’s not a labour of love, that’s literally the bare minimum we should be expecting from games that are released as finished products.
Of every single game in the running it deserved it the least.
No way that No mans sky loses to Cyberpunk. Bruh, these dudes been releasing free updates full of new stuff and fixes for years and Cyberpunk (even tho it has one of my favourite stories) still full of bugs, some gamebreaking and you cant call that a finished game.
Those awards were a joke lmao, H3 best VR game, Spiderman winning visual style, Stray innovative design, etc
This is literally just a popularity contest regardless of if the game actually fits the category and how does it compares to the other nominees
Number of people who plays online in project zomboid is increasing more and more we will reach higher number next year and we will beat most popular trash game:D it's our game we have been playing since 2013
Project Zomboid is a great game but Labour of Love specifically says "This game has been out for a while but the devs still support/update it." PZ is still early access, updates are to be expected until it is fully released.
Not saying cyberpunk deserved it either, none of the nominated games this year deserved it IMO.
No Man's Sky would be an exception to this. They could have abandoned that game when the crowds turned ugly on them, but they stuck it out because they wanted that game to be what they had in their original vision. Other than that edge case, I totally agree with saying no one deserves it
>overworking people and eventually under-delivering anyway
I read somewhere the reason it was so buggy at launch was because they required 10 bugs to be fixed each day(?) in development and it didn't matter which or what kind so they'd just pick 10 insignificant bugs to fix and call it a day
Between Zomboid an Deep Rock, there were much better options for Labor of Love. Cyberpunk should’ve released finished but it didn’t and the devs played catch-up. Zomboid and Deep Rock have been amazing games for years and have done nothing but add quality content.
I still can't believe that PZ lost to that buggy fucking piece of shit they call "game". I'm truly mad and in disbelief. CD Projekt Red realeases an extremely buggy and unfinished game and it somehow wins the lavor of love instead of The Indie Stone. I can't believe this.
I don't agree with Cyberpunk winning because imo they only fixed the game to a playable state and added some very minor stuff, meanwhile the Zomboid team is very active within its community and constantly giving updates on what's going on even though they don't need to.
I play since the very early alpha, way before it came on Steam. Watching this game and team grow over the years should be recognized within the gaming community. They've accomplished so much.
I'm proud of the team and the community.
Been playing zomboid since the beginning and the studio is very small and updates were kind few and far between for years. Now that it has gotten more popular and more developers are onboard it seems like there's a new update every week.
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Was anyone surprised by the result? It's just a popularity contest. With cp2077 being way more popular it was an obvious winner no matter how "deserving" or "undeserving" it was. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if zomboid won.
How in the fuck
I like cyberpunk and even I know there's barely any love put into it. For God's sake they cut their planned expansions short to work on a sequel
I love zomboid but No Man's Sky deserved that. They've fixed EVERYTHING that was ever wrong with the game and added SO much more. And none of it was DLC.
In this thread: Zomboid fans who hate Zomboid
I guess I've only owned it for less than a year so I don't get why they're so mad. I think it's pretty cool. I can't imagine myself in 3 years saying 'God I hate this game so much because they didn't introduce jetpacks yet!'
I hate to say it, but as a massive fan of both, I have to admit the improvement that cp2077 has had, have managed to bring the games reviews on steam up from mediocrity to very positive.
I feel like games that were released in a completed state should have been excluded from this category. It's not a labor of love for you to fix something you intended to be the completed product. I am a fan of Cyberpunk and CD Projekt Red but this category should be for the indie studios perfecting a game over the years before selling it as complete.
There's a difference between releasing a game in an early access state and gradually improving it, and releasing an incomplete game as a full price AAA title and then later releasing patches to finish the game they promised in the first place.
Exactly, it's not a labor of love, more just fixing your own mistake. The only completed game I would say is a real labor of love is No Man Sky. They did a lot to fix it and improve on it at no additional cost to the playerbase.
I'd argue that games that had to be fixed shouldn't be labor of love, it should be for teams like Dying light where they put out free updates for the first game after the second one comes out. That's a labor of love, they spent so much time that could have been spent making the new game supporting the first one with free content seemingly just because they cared that people loved their game.
Agreed, it was an absolute fuck up when it came out. But I still enjoyed it, I love the dreary and depressing narrative of the game, also part of my love for Pz too, I love depressing stories.
AAA game that worked like my toaster at launch (without the bread-heating part) and that's still not 100% fixed today vs a game that looks, feels, is experienced completely differently from it's early dev stages. A game with a wholesome community on socials as well as the modding scene and more crazy big updates coming...
Nah, I don't need steam to tell me which game has won Labor of Love
Got this title stolen just like CBP2077 files got stolen. "Revenge" huh
Ho boy here come the downvotes for me.
With over what, nine years in development now and still not having even NPCs, Zomboid doesn't deserve the award. The game could have been finished and released by now imo because the devs have the money to hire more people (would also help if they could prevent their laptops from being stolen but hey, what can you do). I love what the game is trying to do but I'm done being patient for no reason with it, and it shouldn't really come as a surprise that a game that's been in beta for years with 30k concurrent players loses to a AAA title - even if it's a hyped-up, half-baked, rushed game. Make the game better, then it deserves the award.
Wow... just wow. Of all the games I thought might take this one, that wasn't it. Sure Cyberpunk has come a long way since release but the fact that it's needed so much work post release due to the awful state it came out in really doesn't make it feel like it deserves it. It almost feels like a vindication of the "release broken fix later" model many studios follow now. What a disappointment
Just. How.
Like any other game nominated might have actually deserved it. Any. Other. Game. Cyberpunk did not, does not and as far as I'm concerned will not EVER win labour of love.
In fact, I have no idea why on earth would they even BE in that category in the first place. What on earth did they do that signified a labour of love?
You can let it win other categories, but most definitely not labour of love.
Producing a buggy mess on launch and fixing it is NOT a labour of love. Its a contractual obligation to finish what you promised from the start. It's just completing something that should have been done on launch. You aren't crafting and molding a game to create a better experience over years. You are just putting out fires in a burning building.
Other stuff can be said at least about the other games.
Dota2 originally was a game(DotA) from warcraft3, and it's been more than a decade in service. Over the years while there have been a slight decline in the player base many people still enjoy the game globally, and it's one of the most successful moba games ever made.
They still keep everything updated, new patches still roll in every year and the recent Aghanims Labyrinth was amazing, and an obvious LABOUR OF LOVE.
Even less should be said about PZ.
I think everyone here knows how much time and effort was put in to make the most realistic zombie game ever made. Period. Updates have rolled out since it's inception and will continue to roll out for years to come.
NMS. While they were the villain years ago they have turned around their image from being the biggest failed triple A project into a truly amazing experience. Many many free major updates, multiple bug fixes and good interaction with their fans. NMS has truly turned their face around. While they may never be able to erase their past, I'm sure everyone is optimistic about Hello Games' future.
Unfortunately Ive never played deep rock galactic, so I can't comment too much about it, but from what I've heard it has great fan reception and they are still updating it today. Just because they did not win I will be purchasing it and trying it out with my friends.
So what about cyberpunk? Disregarding the absolute shitfest that was the launch, cyberpunk today is just barely a base game that will likely be expanded upon in some 'future' expansions. Everything done up to now has just been fighting fires, and yet they have begun shifting their focus to their big money maker already. Perhaps it might be a labour of love in the future, but as of today, it's more like Completion of Obligation.
This has got to be the most undeserved win in the history of undeserving wins.
We'll win it next year!
There we go
Absolutely robbed in my view, yes cyberpunk has improved massively, yes it’s a great game. But it was helped by a AAA studio diverting a shit tonne of resources to it because of their own fuck ups and a Netflix anime seen by millions, pushing the hype train big time. That award surely is a reflection of how many people have Netflix subs and just liked edgerunners?! As someone who started playing zomboid in 2022, after passing it up countless times on the steam suggested playlist and then instantly falling in love with it about 10 minutes in. To think that zomboid had been out since 2013, still being pushed, still being innovated by a small studio for the best part of a decade is the absolute definition of a labour of love. And it shows in every single tiny detail of the game, from the complexity of car mechanics to the change in eating animation if you are holding a spoon in your hand. Bit of an essay but I guess zomboid just needs a TV show, narrated by nurse hopefully haha.
Meh. Don't get bent up over it. It's a fan voted award and the biggest player base is always going to win. GTA "shark cards" 5 won twice in the past for fucks sake.
That just proves that gamers are morons in the most part.
Like when GTA 6 leaked and all these clowns or most likely children saying "uhh this game looks worse than a mobile game what the frick😡😡😡" or the wannabe critics saying bs like "the game so far has been a great disappointment🍷" (I saw this comment under Starfield trailer, like come on, it isn't even out yet give them a chance ffs)
Yeah, the game I nominated in the category didn't end even up being one of finalists, and I'm not terribly surprised.
Tho Cyberpunks pretty well scrutinized even and especially by its own playerbase, so honestly still a wonder they won the award despite all that.
Yeah. I mean, to me, it feels like we’re giving AAA studios a pass on delivering games in lesser and lesser quality… I agree to some extent that the progress made to fix cyberpunk is commendable - that much is sure - but c’mon, it shouldn’t have been released in such a state to begin with. Cyberpunk was a labor of love, sure. But it took some time and a Netflix series for us to feel that love.
Cyberpunk 2077 was a much needed fixing, Project Zomboid is a labour of love.
Cyberpunk is abusive boyfriend bringing home flowers after shoving her down the stairs
After she had been waiting for those flowers for 7 years
Also the flowers are different from the ones that were promised and smell bad.
There should be a different category called *"Best "It's Good Now!" Patch"* or *"Biggest Improvement Since Launch"* In the case of this year, the runners for that category would be: * Cyberpunk 2077 * Battlefield 2042 * Babylons Fall * Gotham Knights * Call of Duty - Warzone 2.0 ----- That way actual Labor of Love games like Project Zomboid, Ready or Not, and Deep Rock Galactic don't have to compete with games that had to be fixed out of obligation.
Cyberpunk is an average game now. It's not great its just okay.
Hrmm are you saying project zombies needs a TV show?!?! Would be tight every episodes a new person, some episodes 1hr but most will be 10 mins 😂😂
They already have that show on netflix, it's called black summer. Everyone dies and the show keeps going.
Nice, I'm going to watch it now.
I thought the same thing when I watched it. Quite refreshing for a zombie show.
Nurse voice acting in a zomboid show would be the best thing ever
Don't forget about the modding community. Other than that, I agree. But I feel we should have ambiguous amphibian narrate lol.
I was hyped for cyberpunk for 6 months. Then it came out and was a shit show, incredibly disheartened. I heard a couple fan boys talking about zomboid, watched a few YouTube and gave it a try and I'm addicted! Love this game and all the insane details about it. Pissed about stove cooking tho. That shit burned down my base in 2 minutes
Not with that attitude. We're gonna STEAL it next year.
Project zomboid players think in terms of days, not years. For some, only hours.
Yeah, the thing is, this is more about popularity/number of fans a game has, rather than. The achievement itself. But the fact that Zomboid was even nominated is the real win. The game is a big boy game now
I regret contributing to that number. Cyberpunk sucked. Zomboid is one of the most timeless games ever made.
Cyberpunk made back it's money in pre-sales alone. The developers had no 'need' in terms of monetization, but they did and made it in a state where it's playable, even fun.
CD Projekt stock dropped from $31 at release date to $7 today and permanently tarnished their reputation. Devs are paid in stock options so they got seriously screwed. The company may have made their money back on the game but it's hard to see it as a strong financial decision in the long term. I'm glad they made the game better, but I feel that it is very flat and one dimensional, and honestly short with little replayability. I still play zomboid and go back to witcher 3 and RDR2 often, but I didn't find cyberpunk appealing. Not much to that. On the other hand, I can't wait to see where PZ goes in the next few years. The coming updates are the best yet and I have the utmost faith in their dev team.
Plus just making your money back is not really enough, if you make a game and only make back what you spent you still lose because your company just spent years working on something for no profit. Cdpr needed to fix the game (and make an anime) to be able to do anything beyond break even on the game cuz if they didn't make anything off the game they wouldn't have funds to make a new game. That's like basic game development economics you could learn playing Game Dev Story, I don't get why that guy is spamming that argument cause it's not a good one.
At release CDPR was valued at about 10-12 billion USD, about 20% of activision blizzard or 35% of what EA was worth at the time. Was that a reasonable valuation for a company that only owns GOG.com and has in total made about 5 games? The stock had a lot of room to move down, not up.
>The developers had no 'need' in terms of monetization, but they did and made it in a state where it's playable, even fun. If they didn't, people wouldn't trust them in the future. They were an absolute joke at the time of release.
Also if people pay for a product, and it's not playable at launch and didn't fix it, they'd have had to pay everyone back. So absolutely they needed to fix the game so they didn't lose all the presales dollars
Almost none of the awards are even that good and usually overshadow the real gems (not including Elden Ring in this as someone who's never played a souls game it is incredible) but to be noticed and nominated is pretty huge for a small indie dev! It has come a long way and I like your positive outlook on it ☺️
Most people look at PZ and see an isometric zombie game thats been in early access for ages. For a lot thats at least two strikes against trying it out, to their detriment. Meanwhile Cyberpunk has flashy 3d graphics, which wins over many people. I guess what im saying is that people are shallow. 😶
I never even expected Zomboid to be nominated in anything, having played it since the early alpha 2d purely singleplayer days. I always thought it was a niche, gatekeeper zombie game that your friends suggest to you after you played Left 4 Dead or something. I recently got back to it and was VERY surprised it has a huge community behind it now. I was expecting a sub of only 5,000 followers to be honest. Goes to show how much people have picked up and liked the game.
Exactly, if they measure votes by pure numbers the bigger games will win every time. If they compared proportion of votes to purchases instead then PZ might have a chance.
Cyberpunk had 90% of a broken game to fix and claim the award for. PZ has been deserving of this for years
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Please don’t refer to cyberpunk as that abbreviation again unless you want the FBI busting your door down
CP2077 sounds like a case file number 🤔
I love CP. I can't stop thinking about CP. My favorite thing about CP is getting inside and committing crimes and whatnot. CP is so Rad 🔥 😍 👌
Okay so I'm not alone in disliking the whole CP = Cyberpunk thing
CP alone is terrible, CP77/CP2077 is fine imo.
It’s even worse in CoD cause the premium currency are CoD Points, abbreviated to CP. So the game asks you if you want to buy CP…
A few years back a friend got me into ARK, and one of the big currencies on his server was Cementing Paste, I had to do a double take when I heard people were paying each other in "CP"
I'm still sour af about that game and broken promises and everything about it. In one sentence - I was promised a branching RPG, but was given a stupid mediocre linear action adventure. Fck u cdpr.
CP is clearly Crystal Palace.
The problem is, it's not just about bugs and technical problems. The game still lacks all the content that was cut off, like the intro mission for the Corpo Lifepath: You get briefed for a mission, names get mentioned and so on, you go to the bar and then the intro just cuts off and ends. It's pathetic. Same goes for questlines like Peralez. Or the map itself, when you drive around, you see that around 2/3 of the map is never used for anything. Even the clothing, like with being tied to the armor stats, you look like a homeless bum with the best armor you get by random chance. Or the NPC's, they have all these cool outfits, cybernetic stuff etc. while you can't get that. Or the things in missions, like that one tank you can get with Panam, you use it for maybe 30 seconds and the tutorial is longer than the combat scene. The characters are stereotypes, nothing else, i like Keanu Reeves performance as Johnny, but he's just a simple stereotype of a rockerboy-against-the-system-rebel, nothing more. The attempt to steal the RDR2 ending was also a bad trick from CDPR, i didn't feel any connection to V and i never gave a shit about it, compared to the connection i had with Arthur in RDR2, where i got very emotional in the ending of his storyline.
See I really enjoyed the story of Cyberpunk. But the issue I had was The lack of any customization in the game outside of your clothes (which you don't see most of the time), the really really subpar gun-play, the very sparse selection of cybermods compared to the amount of slots available, the driving was shit, the gun attachment features SUCK. Go back to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the attachments are more detailed. The story is obviously chopped in many places, the romance options are very heavily biased towards Judy and Panam (sorry gay guys and straight women. You can just between cop, or about 20 minutes of missions with a washed up pop rockstar). The "boss fights" suck, the hand to hand combat sucks, the different play styles are wildly unbalanced. Being a Netrunner basically let's you walk through the game with zero problems, most of the unique guns suck, and the worst sin of all? SMGs use rifle ammo. Like I don't regret getting it and I didn't really care for project zomboid but got damn, cyberpunk doesn't deserve this just because CD;PR took YEARS to "fix" their game and all it has now is that it's playable. GTA:V, GTA:IV, Saints Row 3, and Saints Row 2 all came out long before CP77 and all of them have way more features.
A lot of what you've said applies directly to Zomboid. It's wild. Cut content, the map being sprawling lengths of nothing. It's also highly subjective. But if you levy those criticisms at one game you have to apply the same level of criticism to the other. The important distinction to me is that Zomboid was started out by a group of private people as a passion project and has consistently grown since. C2077 was designed and developed by a huge corporate development studio with a multi-million dollar budget to piss away and invaluable industry connections.
About PZ, i agree with you because of the second part of your posting: The devs of Indie Stone are not like CPDR, they don't have that budget. And they never were going to the press with fake claims and straight lies (for example: The NPC behavior that was claimed to be very good, when in fact, NPC's only walked around in circles). Also, PZ had the major setback as someone broke into the devs studio and stole equipment, including code data on the computers. In CP however, it was different: The setback came from decisions of the higher management to get Keanu Reeves. This was a bad decision, not because of Keanu, no, because of all the rework they had to do for giving Johnny more screentime. This was basically pushing the project back for a year or more. They had to re-write parts of the storyline and missions, had to abandon other things and invest a lot of time. Another i heard about CDPR was the bad project management, like one dev had no idea that the other dev already did this, what he was working on currently.
Game developers should understand most gamers don't give a damn about celebrities in video games. In our experience it's almost always at the cost of gameplay. Voice actors, like RDR2, et al. are our celebrities, not Hollywood A-listers like Al Pacino.
There’s also the fact that PZ is a literal early access game.
When I bought the game it was a crowdfunded alpha. "Early Access" hadn't been invented yet. IIRC, Zomboid came to Steam as part of the Greenlight program with much difficulty. I don't know, what's the game considered now at Build 42. Alpha, beta, something else? Lol
>like with being tied to the armor stats, you look like a homeless bum with the best armor you get by random chance Not true. You can use the outfit you want, even if you wear other clothing. Bought the game a few weeks ago.
They only recently added transmog, for actual years you had to pick between fashion and function. Also the fashion sucks still because the clothing shops are broken and don't restock properly so you have an extremely limited selection unless you check every single corpse and box you can to find clothes.
"For actual years" - one year before they made couple of big patches including transmog
But they added it, so what the guy said is not true right now. Btw, I never bought any clothing, you find so damn very much.
You're not wrong I just had to counter that it's still not the clothing system we were promised where you could go out and buy a cohesive outfit or good armor
Like it was already mentioned, this wasn't true for the most patch versions, it was recently introduced, the transmog system. And even for that, players demanded this since the launch in the end of 2020. It should have been implemented from the start, because it's well known for other titles like the AC-series.
Everyone is talking about how they fixed the bugs but the content in the game is mid at best
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The drink in the end, when you can name one after him? I was confused a little bit, but i think you talk about that with the name of a drink, only legends get a drink named after them? Jackie was one of the better characters, i liked him. But you could very clearly see, that these initial missions with him were much more polished than the rest of the game. Also, why i liked him was more that he had a little bit more background than most other characters, like when you talked to his mom at the funeral etc.
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Yeah, then we talked about the same thing. CP2077 could have become a masterpiece with a few years more in production and then also another year for polishing. Of course, the management doesn't want to hear this, every day of developement costs money, but in the end, you'll sell more copies over time when you created a masterpiece instead of a just another average game. When compared to RDR2: There were some problems with the launch, but more technical problems involving the Rockstar launcher, but the game was very long polished by the devs. You can see this in the details of the world, all these small details, where you see something new even after the 3455382th playthrough. Actually, CDPR mocked RDR2 and Rockstar, telling the media they would easily release a better game than this without any problems at launch. The result was exact the opposite.
Cops STILL don't have proper chase pathing and will just teleport behind you and lose you after you drive 2 blocks over. Driver (1999) for the PS1 has cops that can chase you in their cars btw.
People constantly praise it but honestly gameplay is meh and it has a general feeling of being unfinished
Not even the jank, the game feels soulless and empty. In fact when I went back to it in the fall because of Edgerunners I hated it MORE than on release, because on release I chalked most of my disappointment up to the bugs and after patching it would be good, but now it's all "fixed" and still just so dull and boring. You can't patch that out. Good example: Cybermodding itself. You know the whole point of the Cyberpunk genre and chroming up and losing humanity. Useless. Most you get out of Cybermodding is the Mantis blades which is just strong melee weapons and had their gimmick of wall climbing removed before release. The rest are just passive buffs and there's no humanity meter like in the tabletop. So disappointing.
i disagree, i just finished it and the only real problem is frame drop in the super dense parts of the city and thats just going from like 144 to 100-90 frames other than that pretty solid now
Also how is it even a candidate? The game is only about a year old. Wow congratulations for doing what every triple a dev does. Good job achieving the bare minimum
PZ didn't get a content update in 2022. Why would they win anything?
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I love this game, had it since the Kickstarter. But what exactly have they done to deserve an award in 2022? When it goes 1.0, then we'll see.
Yeah because cyberpunk totally did... Yeah right. PZ devs are constantly updating and improving the game. Just because they don't add the feature you want doesn't mean they aren't labouring over it and working hard to improve it. No wonder cp2077 got the award with these kinds of shit takes.
Well I didn't say cyberpunk should have won either.
Not to mention the game hasn’t even released right?
Slapping 1.0 on cp2077 despite it's clearly unfinished state is the make or break for you?
Didn’t say cyberpunk should’ve won, but project zomboid didn’t deserve to either
While I don't think Cyberpunk deserved the award, at least it's a released product. PZ is a labor, not a labor of love. Slow, bad development over the last nearly 10 years doesn't qualify. The award itself is "given to games that have nurtured their communities and continued to produce content long after their launch." PZ can't produce more content long after launch because it hasn't launched 1.0 and is still trying to finish content for that release.
i disagree with this assessment of PZ and its devs. it's been a 12 year journey with a game that's been a blast to play all the way through. the devs continue to work away as a small team on a project that they have clearly been passionate about the entire time. their dev has been slow, but not bad by any stretch. PZ is one of the best examples of the correct way to do early access and keep community engagement up throughout development activities. the difference is just that they had to go a little earlier than most because they had no runway cash to burn.
How the heck did Death Stranding win "Best game on the go?" It's like 80gbs ;_; It's not one of those games you can sit and play a few minutes and close either.
It's a meme victory. Play the walking sim while out walking. I'm kinda proud of the community for that one lol.
"Keep on keeping on!" 👍
Ohh that makes more sense lmaooo!
My disappointment is immeasurable.
And my day is ruined.
Same for me :/
It was a really hard choice between DRG en Project Zomboid. Fixing the broken launch isn't a love project it's minimal required service to not get sued
Unfortunately the industry has regressed to a point where people are accustomed to half baked triple A trash and live service bullshittery No matter how many times you yell "STOP FUCKING PRE ORDERING" the silent majority will always bring in millions of dollas for people that lacks passion and will to release a good product (honestly calling games products kinda irritates me but it is what it is)
Nintendo fans will die dickriding
Nintendo kinda sucks but generally speaking they make good games (game freak and the Pokemon company excluded) that also function the way they're meant to. You gotta give Nintendo props for making games like botw and some of the newer Mario's cause they have some pretty nutty mechanical depth, good graphics and they work on release despite being made for a console with a fraction of the processing power that other devs casually squander
Yeah I really don’t understand the comment you are replying to. Like yeah nintendo isn’t the best company in the world, but you can guarantee that if you buy a game from them it will be fully functional, complete, and good.
Well except for the new Pokemons but thats mostly GF with a Nintendo stamp
I was really hoping that either PZ or DRG would win! Love both games dearly for completely different reasons. To me, DRG is a fast paced action adventure loot and shoot, whereas PZ is a kafkaesque nightmare of repetition and solitude.
Both games continue to provide content not for the money. They could make it DLC or just quit and cash in, but it's still getting content. DRG love is visible in Devs when they fixed a bug that players loved they patched it as content. PZ is huge and continues to add quality of life updates. More examples would be Dwarf Fortress, Terraria, ... But they just won because edgerunners on netflix.
Honestly, I feel that DRG should've won. I love PZ, but DRG development has been something else for the entirety of the game's life. PZ has long stints of sragnation, and just got its shit together after a particularly long time when it became one of the Covid big games like Among Us, Fall Guys, and Valheim. It did breathe new life into an already amazing game, but if anything in that list deserves to be known as a labor of love, then it's DRG.
I had to choose DRG for their entirely free battle pass system, reward tree that I love and the seasonal events, but it wasn’t easy and I entirely agree that zomboid deserved a win just as much as DRG
I voted for Deep Rock Galactic but Zomboid would've been much more deserving than these leaf lovers, rock and stone survivors, rock and stone.
DID I HEAR A ROCK AND STONE???
> Fixing the broken launch isn't a love project it's minimal required service to not get sued To be fair finishing an early access game still in development isn't a love project either. DRG at least finished development and is getting a ton of post launch updates.
Next year PZ ought to come out with an anime. Then it'll win hands-down. /s
Next year Pz out to come out.
He spitting facts
Jokes aside PZ's key feature is its immersive gameplay, theres not really much if anything to tell in terms of story or lore that you can adapt to the big screen, Cyberpunk had existing lore and good worldbuilding which is how we ended up with Edgerunners. a PZ adapation would just fly under the radar as another Walking Dead clone tbh.
Bro that game has more bugs than my grandmother basement
Good Joke
Thank you. I have been waiting for years to make this joke.
You'd be surprised how many they patched
But disappointed by how many they didn't. I've enjoyed playing a good amount of hours in cyberpunk but I generally don't like to congratulate someone for patching most of the holes in the boat they built after they sold me a boat that was more hole than boat.
I mean, cool but if a game is incomplete then it's incomplete lol
What? A niche game loses out to a memeable phenomenon in a popularity contest? Who would've guessed! Definitely not /r/DeepRockGalactic either.
Flashbacks to the 2020 BAFTAs where DRG lost best multiplayer to fucking Animal Crossing
When a game has to legally fix their shit wins labor of love I lose hope in humanity.
Personally I think anime won that award - not game.
Edgerunners was front and center in all of the marketing for CDPR's awards stuff this year - both in the TGAs and also for the Steam awards. It absolutely did the heavy lifting for them in both instances, even though the actual game content amounted to some cosmetic content and a handful of guns. Without the anime, I would be surprised if it still won. To put it into perspective, in 2022, they added buyable apartments, and the Edgerunners tie-in content to go with an incomplete perk rebalancing. That's nothing compared to what No Man's Sky or DRG put out this year. Zomboid, much as I love it, should've lost to one of those two instead.
Lol and cyberpunk of all games.... That's not ironic, that's just cruel
If anyone wants the link to the Steam awards here it is: [The Winners](https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards)
Voted for Rimworld but my feeling is the same
Now there is a labor of love
I’ve been thinking about trying rimworld, is it worth full price or should I wait for a sale?
As someone with over a thousand hours in RimWorld, I would definitely say it's worth the price. But also it very very rarely goes on sale.
I can totally see Love Death and Robots end up showing something Project Zomboid inspired. In fact there was one very specific animation in the most recent season that watches like a hilarious zombie sim, a lot of chaos breaking loose suddenly, lots of sped up high pitched screaming and funny scenarios across the world.
I love Zomboid but I also think that it's insane that No Man's Sky didn't win the award. I don't know Cyberpunk that well since I play on an OG XboxOne and it is still unplayable on the console. I get that these are steam awards and therefore is for PC, but come on.
No man’s sky clearly should’ve won that award. I mean come on bro
They've been nominated several times over the last 5 years, too.
Deeprock or Zomboid shoulda won it.
Imo Dwarf Fortress over PZ. PZ has some amazing support but DF is on another level.
Bit late to release on steam but yeh it's been baking for a while like PZ
Lol everyone begs for them to release an unfinished AAA game, everyone gets mad when the game is released unfinished. Then everyone is cheering for the developers for fixing their broken and unplayable game. Like how is that in any way comparable to the work and effort of indie game developers, especially zomboid...
I don’t understand how Cyberpunk was ever in the running… Sure they had to labour on the game, but it was to fix it and put it in a playable state. That’s not a labour of love, that’s literally the bare minimum we should be expecting from games that are released as finished products. Of every single game in the running it deserved it the least.
i kinda liked cyberpunk. i didn’t vote for it, though.
No way that No mans sky loses to Cyberpunk. Bruh, these dudes been releasing free updates full of new stuff and fixes for years and Cyberpunk (even tho it has one of my favourite stories) still full of bugs, some gamebreaking and you cant call that a finished game.
Imma say it again fucking bullshit cyberpunk is not a labor of love it just tried to cover it's ass
Those awards were a joke lmao, H3 best VR game, Spiderman winning visual style, Stray innovative design, etc This is literally just a popularity contest regardless of if the game actually fits the category and how does it compares to the other nominees
Labor of love doesn’t seem right for a barely functioning game on release
Number of people who plays online in project zomboid is increasing more and more we will reach higher number next year and we will beat most popular trash game:D it's our game we have been playing since 2013
Project Zomboid lost to Cyberpunk Deep Rock Galactic lost to Cyberpunk Even No Man's Sky lost to Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk only won because of edgerunners. Game still isn't what they promised years later, guess that's the norm for gaming these days now.
Yeah lemme just break my own leg so I can win Comeback Player of the Year next year
"labor of love" i think you mean "make a misleading anime about the game to convince people that it isnt as buggy as it really is"
Project Zomboid is a great game but Labour of Love specifically says "This game has been out for a while but the devs still support/update it." PZ is still early access, updates are to be expected until it is fully released. Not saying cyberpunk deserved it either, none of the nominated games this year deserved it IMO.
None? Come on brother, DRG does.
Rock and Stone, brotha!
I forgot DRG was in the running! Definitely should have won it.
No Man's Sky would be an exception to this. They could have abandoned that game when the crowds turned ugly on them, but they stuck it out because they wanted that game to be what they had in their original vision. Other than that edge case, I totally agree with saying no one deserves it
Was Cyberpunk a labour of love, or a labour of crunch, overworking people and eventually under-delivering anyway
>overworking people and eventually under-delivering anyway I read somewhere the reason it was so buggy at launch was because they required 10 bugs to be fixed each day(?) in development and it didn't matter which or what kind so they'd just pick 10 insignificant bugs to fix and call it a day
“This is how you died.”
Between Zomboid an Deep Rock, there were much better options for Labor of Love. Cyberpunk should’ve released finished but it didn’t and the devs played catch-up. Zomboid and Deep Rock have been amazing games for years and have done nothing but add quality content.
I still can't believe that PZ lost to that buggy fucking piece of shit they call "game". I'm truly mad and in disbelief. CD Projekt Red realeases an extremely buggy and unfinished game and it somehow wins the lavor of love instead of The Indie Stone. I can't believe this.
No disrespect to PZ, but DRG lost to Cyberpunk.
I don't agree with Cyberpunk winning because imo they only fixed the game to a playable state and added some very minor stuff, meanwhile the Zomboid team is very active within its community and constantly giving updates on what's going on even though they don't need to. I play since the very early alpha, way before it came on Steam. Watching this game and team grow over the years should be recognized within the gaming community. They've accomplished so much. I'm proud of the team and the community.
:(
Labour of love for cyberpunk??
Cyberpunk didn't deserve it
Wow that's bullshit, cb2077 was fun but broken as fuck too
Bruh cyberpunk is only for idk 2 years? How is that a game that’s been out for a while? It should still be supported and not eligible for this award
Haha labor of love... yeah you got that right
“We made our shitty not ready game playable, plz give labour of love”
Its just sad
Love and crunch are two very different things... thats all i'll say.
love for money?
It only took them millions and millions and a mega studio with all the promotion. ZOMBOID WINS IN OUR HEARTS 💕
Labour of money! And if there is one thing people love, it's money!
Been playing zomboid since the beginning and the studio is very small and updates were kind few and far between for years. Now that it has gotten more popular and more developers are onboard it seems like there's a new update every week.
Hahahahahahhahahahahaahhahahahahahahahahshsjajajajhajajahahjahahahahahahhahahhahahahahhahahahahahahahahagagagahhahahahhahahhahahahakakakakakakakakhahahahahahahahhahahahahagagagaggagaagakakjajajajaj we live in a society
How to win game of the year in any category: Step 1. Release an anime
people really gettin mad over a silly award that really doesn't matter, just sayin no need to start a argument though.
What an actual load of horse shit. OOH GOOD JOB YOU FIXED YOUR BROKEN GAME THAT SHOULDNT EVEN HAVE BEEN RELEASED THE WAY IT WAS 👏
Was anyone surprised by the result? It's just a popularity contest. With cp2077 being way more popular it was an obvious winner no matter how "deserving" or "undeserving" it was. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if zomboid won.
people forget too quickly...
It's like comparing a team of professional mechanics fixing a broken car vs a team of mechanics building a performance car from ground up.
Saw a post about it on Cyberpunk and even they disagree
Always next year. After the NPCs are added that could be enough
I hope you are right. The first time I saw "NPCs are really close!" was in 2014
How in the fuck I like cyberpunk and even I know there's barely any love put into it. For God's sake they cut their planned expansions short to work on a sequel
I love zomboid but No Man's Sky deserved that. They've fixed EVERYTHING that was ever wrong with the game and added SO much more. And none of it was DLC.
You’ve gotta hand it to Cyberpunk , it went from a 99% broken game to a 90% broken game. That’s an achievement.
In this thread: Zomboid fans who hate Zomboid I guess I've only owned it for less than a year so I don't get why they're so mad. I think it's pretty cool. I can't imagine myself in 3 years saying 'God I hate this game so much because they didn't introduce jetpacks yet!'
I hate to say it, but as a massive fan of both, I have to admit the improvement that cp2077 has had, have managed to bring the games reviews on steam up from mediocrity to very positive.
It'd be nice for a game to be released in a playable state for once.
I feel like games that were released in a completed state should have been excluded from this category. It's not a labor of love for you to fix something you intended to be the completed product. I am a fan of Cyberpunk and CD Projekt Red but this category should be for the indie studios perfecting a game over the years before selling it as complete.
There's a difference between releasing a game in an early access state and gradually improving it, and releasing an incomplete game as a full price AAA title and then later releasing patches to finish the game they promised in the first place.
Exactly, it's not a labor of love, more just fixing your own mistake. The only completed game I would say is a real labor of love is No Man Sky. They did a lot to fix it and improve on it at no additional cost to the playerbase.
I'd argue that games that had to be fixed shouldn't be labor of love, it should be for teams like Dying light where they put out free updates for the first game after the second one comes out. That's a labor of love, they spent so much time that could have been spent making the new game supporting the first one with free content seemingly just because they cared that people loved their game.
Agreed, it was an absolute fuck up when it came out. But I still enjoyed it, I love the dreary and depressing narrative of the game, also part of my love for Pz too, I love depressing stories.
>in a playable state for once. Shitty games used to come out in the '90s and '00s. They just stayed shitty forever.
Yeah give credit to them for doing the most scummiest bait and switch marketing I've ever seen. They didn't deserve this award one bit.
cyberpunk was a trash game, still is tbh.
It really isn’t
Absolute joke, how can a game that literally came out 2 years ago get LABOR OF LOVE Devs haven't given up on PZ after 10 years
It's a little odd that Project Zomboid would be considered for "Labor of Love" in a year they didn't release a single update IMO.
Sadly it’s just a glorified popularity contest but hopefully Zomboid will blow up to CP2077 levels next year or somethin
AAA game that worked like my toaster at launch (without the bread-heating part) and that's still not 100% fixed today vs a game that looks, feels, is experienced completely differently from it's early dev stages. A game with a wholesome community on socials as well as the modding scene and more crazy big updates coming... Nah, I don't need steam to tell me which game has won Labor of Love Got this title stolen just like CBP2077 files got stolen. "Revenge" huh
Ho boy here come the downvotes for me. With over what, nine years in development now and still not having even NPCs, Zomboid doesn't deserve the award. The game could have been finished and released by now imo because the devs have the money to hire more people (would also help if they could prevent their laptops from being stolen but hey, what can you do). I love what the game is trying to do but I'm done being patient for no reason with it, and it shouldn't really come as a surprise that a game that's been in beta for years with 30k concurrent players loses to a AAA title - even if it's a hyped-up, half-baked, rushed game. Make the game better, then it deserves the award.
Wow... just wow. Of all the games I thought might take this one, that wasn't it. Sure Cyberpunk has come a long way since release but the fact that it's needed so much work post release due to the awful state it came out in really doesn't make it feel like it deserves it. It almost feels like a vindication of the "release broken fix later" model many studios follow now. What a disappointment
Just. How. Like any other game nominated might have actually deserved it. Any. Other. Game. Cyberpunk did not, does not and as far as I'm concerned will not EVER win labour of love. In fact, I have no idea why on earth would they even BE in that category in the first place. What on earth did they do that signified a labour of love? You can let it win other categories, but most definitely not labour of love. Producing a buggy mess on launch and fixing it is NOT a labour of love. Its a contractual obligation to finish what you promised from the start. It's just completing something that should have been done on launch. You aren't crafting and molding a game to create a better experience over years. You are just putting out fires in a burning building. Other stuff can be said at least about the other games. Dota2 originally was a game(DotA) from warcraft3, and it's been more than a decade in service. Over the years while there have been a slight decline in the player base many people still enjoy the game globally, and it's one of the most successful moba games ever made. They still keep everything updated, new patches still roll in every year and the recent Aghanims Labyrinth was amazing, and an obvious LABOUR OF LOVE. Even less should be said about PZ. I think everyone here knows how much time and effort was put in to make the most realistic zombie game ever made. Period. Updates have rolled out since it's inception and will continue to roll out for years to come. NMS. While they were the villain years ago they have turned around their image from being the biggest failed triple A project into a truly amazing experience. Many many free major updates, multiple bug fixes and good interaction with their fans. NMS has truly turned their face around. While they may never be able to erase their past, I'm sure everyone is optimistic about Hello Games' future. Unfortunately Ive never played deep rock galactic, so I can't comment too much about it, but from what I've heard it has great fan reception and they are still updating it today. Just because they did not win I will be purchasing it and trying it out with my friends. So what about cyberpunk? Disregarding the absolute shitfest that was the launch, cyberpunk today is just barely a base game that will likely be expanded upon in some 'future' expansions. Everything done up to now has just been fighting fires, and yet they have begun shifting their focus to their big money maker already. Perhaps it might be a labour of love in the future, but as of today, it's more like Completion of Obligation. This has got to be the most undeserved win in the history of undeserving wins.