We continue this morning towards the trajectory of recounting the games that were especially important to me over the last decade. Yesterday I stated that I had been trying to avoid talking about expansions and DLC… and now this morning I am going to break that guideline and include an expansion. I guess that is the good thing about this being a very personal list and not some attempt at a “greatest ever” concept, because I can make the rules as malleable as I like. All of these games feel very fresh in my memory as though I could have played them yesterday.
Doom (2016)
I somewhat hate that they titled this game the same as the game that came out in the 90s… because it forever means that we are going to be stuck putting a year in parenthesis behind it. However on another level it absolutely makes sense. This game is effectively a re-imagining of the original game and bringing it up to modern fidelity. It feels like a game that is a throwback to an older era of visceral shooters that were fast paced and twitchy. It also adapts the style of the game to include much needed breaks in the action allowing you to catch your breath and collect any power-ups that might be laying around before charging head first into another furious wave of combat. This was one of the things I loved about the Painkiller series, and it is nice seeing the originator cherry picking some of the best features of those who ultimately copied it.
Final Fantasy XV
I will admit when I first saw the concept of this game I viewed it with some serious side-eye. I was not sure how I would feel about what looked to be a boy band on a road trip. The end result however is charming as hell and one of the most unexpectedly touching games I played during this year. I was not sure what the future of Final Fantasy would be, but I never quite expected an ode to Route 66 roadside towns. Having lived my entire life near the “mother road”, there is so much of this game that resonates with me and they somehow managed to capture so many aspects of it perfect… albeit filtered through a Japanese lens. What I found the most compelling however was the combat and how it still very much felt like a Final Fantasy game while remaining fully action based. I need to spend some time and finish this game up and play through all of the side content that I missed.
The Division is a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings, not all of which are positive. I latched onto this game hard when it came out and pretty much dedicated every waking moment to exploring it. The narrative it presented was infectious and I gobbled up every bit of lore I could get my hands on about how exactly the fall happened. I personally found it to have some pacing issues as you got higher in level, and not having a stable group was a major detriment to my long term stability in the title. Soloing the content felt amazing at first but eventually became way more challenging since I am not naturally drawn to cover shooters. I kept wanting to try and play this like my beloved Destiny, with a run and gun nature… but was thoroughly punished for it. Regardless of all of this it still carved out a very important place in this very packed year of games and deserves its space on the list.
This is the year that Pokemon Go became a phenomena and people absolutely lost their shit. This also represents the very first time that a mobile game mattered to me. Up until this point I had downloaded and installed very few games on my mobile phone. The interface never felt compelling to me and it always seemed like a worse version of a game genre on either a hand held or console. Pokemon Go was an entirely new type of game-play that only worked on mobile connected devices, and I took wandered outside of my house at night looking for the illusive creatures. The biggest problem I have had with the game is that if you are in Rural areas or the Suburbs, your game-play experience is not amazing. You have to go places to be able to play, because still to this day I can go for a walk around my neighborhood and only encounter a half dozen critters. whereas if I do the same thing in the downtown Tulsa are I work I am constantly coming across new and interesting things. It has earned its place on my list because I still to this day keep popping it open when I am in a new place to see what I might encounter.
World of Warcraft: Legion
Up until 2016, had you asked me what my favorite World of Warcraft expansion was, I would have predictably said Wrath of the Lich King. In many ways I considered that to be the pinnacle of the WoW experience and everything since that point has more or less been a downhill slide with occasional plateaus. Legion was an expansion that I didn’t expect much from because quite honestly it seemed like a bunch of elements left on the cutting room floor from other expansion ideas. However what it wound up being was a complete and total revitalization for World of Warcraft that I greatly miss. Battle for Azeroth has been a disappointment in every possible way, and I think that has been all the more apparent because of the unexpected greatness that was this expansion. My hope is that Shadowlands brings us back to this era of the game and I can wholeheartedly love it again.