Open World RPG Archives - Page 25 of 41

Games of the Decade: 2018

December 27, 2019 by Belghast

We are getting towards the end now, two more years to go in this decade worth of gaming. I am finding it as I get more into “recent” history I am having way more trouble narrowing things down to a handful of games. For 2017, 2018 and 2019 I wound up with massive lists, I think in part because everything is still very fresh in my memory. Looking back at 2010 for example you can easily tell which games have stood the test of time. I’ve been playing Witcher 3 this holiday break and I more or less still consider it to be a current game even though it released over four years ago. Lets dig into what turned out to be another really solid year or games. Once again the disclaimer that this is the list of games that were personally important to me and not some sort of objective “best games” list.

God of War

I was a little late to getting around to playing “Dad of War” but this is largely because I have not been the biggest fan of the series for awhile. I loved the original when it came out on the PS2, but each sequel for some reason felt watered down from what worked in the first one. The “newness” had warn off and each derivative sequel failed to show me something new and interesting, which is a weird statement for me considering how much I like dusting off characters I have visited before and taking them on one more ride. What God of War gives me is a reason to care about Kratos. IN the past he was simply murder incarnate which was fun for awhile, but eventually once the carnage passed you were left with minimal story to cling to. This game presents an interesting tale of aging and fatherhood that brings something new to the series and also presents it in a much modern nature.

Far Cry 5

I played the original Far Cry game, not because it was some sort of a story masterpiece but because it presented an extremely high tech shooter with interesting AI. As the sequels released I failed to hop on that band wagon and returned with the 3rd installment and bounced pretty hard during some of the force stealth elements. So Far Cry 5 is the game that managed to rope me into the series once again by presenting an interesting narrative about a religious cult in Montana and the fight of the locals to free themselves from their yoke. I like games like this, where you have an overarching story but a bajillion mini adventures to lose yourself in, and I found the narrative told through the side content to be way more compelling than the main story. The game has its problems, but I enjoyed my time spent with it.

Return of the Obra Dinn

I don’t post screenshots of this game other than the title screen, because effectively everything about it is a potential spoiler. The style of the game is similar to those of the early Macintosh games and it is effectively a visual puzzle game with the interface of an FPS shooter. You are an insurance inspector come to examine the Obra Dinn a ship previously declared lost at sea that happened to drift into port five years too late. You use a compass like device that allows you to jump into moments in time and explore them for clues to ultimately determine the fate of all 51 of the passengers. This game was like reading a great book and from the moment I started it I could not stop until I had solved all of it. Each step gave me more tidbits of the dark and interesting story of this fateful ship and its crew.

Dragalia Lost

This is the second mobile game that I have really imprinted upon, and I am not sure if I can explain fully why it is so compelling. It walks this thin line between abusive micro transactions and giving you lots of free stuff. It feels as though you earn the alternate currency fast enough that you can keep doing gacha summons on a regular basis to keep infusing the game with new things for you to play with. The game also has the best release cadence that I have seen, and I am hoping that more games adopt something similar. There is always an event going on, or an event has just concluded and the next one starts within a few days. These events offer enough of a tweak to the core game play and enough new items and characters to chase to keep you engaged in the grind. Only recently have I stopped playing through at least the daily missions every night, as Diablo 3 on Switch has occupied the same before bedtime gameplay. Excellent game, but I think probably the worst part of it is the fact it is on a touch screen device. I would love to see it on something like the Nintendo Switch.

Magic the Gathering: Arena

I’ve loved Magic the Gathering since I first got my first starter deck back in 1994. I played the game heavily for years and then have dipped my toes in off and on since that point. As various companies explored presenting Magic in an online format I tried to get into those as well. The closest for me was Hearthstone and for years all I really wanted was for Wizards of the Coast to stop fearing the internet and presenting an online game-play experience similar to that. In 2018 they did exactly that and it officially killed off any interest I had in the competitors. I don’t play Arena nearly as often now as I did those first several months, but it is still a deeply enjoying experience that lets me get in and play some Magic whenever I feel like doing so. Also find it super useful for testing out deck ideas since it seems to be way easier to accumulate the pieces on Arena since I Have so many proxy tokens.

Monster Hunter World

For years I had heard great things about the Monster Hunter franchise but found the game as a whole to be extremely obtuse and difficult to get into. You more or less had to already be indoctrinated into the game in order to really grok each subsequent release, either that or have one of your friends willing to sherpa you through the experience. What world does is presents the game in easy to understand bites and with far greater visual fidelity than any of the mobile devices could muster. I played the hell out of this game and it really became an object of obsession when it released later on the PC. I am disappointed that Capcom is seemingly determined to keep the two games separate from each other, but I fully expect in January to dive in head first when the PC version gets the Iceborne expansion.

Games of the Decade: 2017

December 26, 2019 by Belghast

Once again I am continuing down the path to 2019 as I talk through the games of this decade that were important to me. Going back this morning and assembling my picks for 2017 made me realize what a freaking phenomenal year for gaming this was. There are so many games that would have been game of the year… were they not up against other competition. Once again a preface of that this is my personal list of the games that were important to me during the year. Your list probably looks a bit different and there are a few games that were left off because I never quite got into them the way that I should.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Lets be honest… this is the game that sold a bunch of switches. This is absolutely the reason why I bought mine and even managed to start out on the WiiU and then rebought it and restarted from scratch when I ultimately purchased my Switch. I have issues with one gameplay mechanic, and that is the breakable weapons. However even taking that into account there is no denying how good of a game this is. I ultimately greatly prefer playing it now on Cemu running the WiiU game on emulator so that I can apply a mod that removes weapon durability. There is just something about this game world and the pacing that make me want to get out and explore. The fact that through climbing and stamina you can both gate your progress but also feel like you can get anywhere if you try hard enough kept me pushing forward and trying to find the next secret. If I could remove the gyroscope nonsense and the weapon durability this would have been the perfect game.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

I’ve made attempts in the past to break into the Assassin’s Creed series but there have ultimatley been two obstacles. Firstly they are games that were designed for the console in mind and seem to be way more reasonable when played with a controller than a mouse and keyboard. Secondly they were games that felt defined by a bunch of mini games and things like rooftop chases, which some sneaking around that felt forced and limiting. AC:O pushes the Assassin’s Creed game into a full open world experience where you explore large swaths of the Ancient Egyptian countryside and get a real sense of place and setting that make it feel like you are part of something much larger than effectively being trapped in a single city. The combat itself also seems to be way more forgiving of my desire to rush into combat and not stealth at all, which makes for a better experience personally. I love this game and at some point I will get around to playing the follow up Odyssey.

Night in the Woods

While there are significant issues surrounding the co-creator of Night in the Woods, I cannot write the game off because it is extremely powerful. It spoke to me on such a primal level because it effectively could have been my story. I grew up in a tiny town much like the one depicted in the game, and was one of the few of my friends who successfully transitioned into college… but the fact that I lived at home for the first two years commuting back and forth made for a bizarre experience. I was living in two different worlds… the world that remained the same as High School where I saw the same people I did then on a regular basis… and this new fledgling world of experiences as I took my first steps into college. Like Mae I reached a point in my Junior year where I came perilously close to dropping out of School entirely. This game means so much to me, and nothing is probably ever going to change that.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

While this game was universally panned by critics and social media… I loved it and will be forever saddened by the fact we wont see more of this setting. This is the game that YouTube killed because of some pretty bad issues in the early release candidate that were more or less fixed in the first patch. However by that time all of the damage had been done and all of the demo real of horrific facial contortions was shot giving it an endless stream of memetic images. I liked what this game did to Mass Effect by opening it up and bringing us to an entirely new galaxy with its own issues, while at the same time providing hints of the conflicts from the original game that ultimately lead to the splintering of the Andromeda project. I want to see more of this setting and I am hoping at some point EA allows Bioware to revisit it.

Destiny 2

I love Destiny as a franchise, and while I would have greatly preferred that Destiny 2 didn’t exist from the standpoint of that I would have rather seen the first game transition to the PC and get the necessary upgrades it required, I was okay with the reset because it meant I could finally play the game on my platform of choice. Destiny 2 had a rocky road but today we are experiencing a renaissance of some of the best content that has ever existed in a game of this sort. All of that ground work comes back to the transition from the first game to the sequel and the subtle changes that were made to the way the game functioned. It has been an interesting ride but one that began back in 2017, and for that it will always deserve a space on these sort of lists.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn was easily my game of the year for 2017, and would be a heavy contender if I was trying to make a game of the decade. I love the setting and how it takes the post apocalyptic genre into some very new and interesting directions. I love Aloy the protagonist because she represents a new kind of character that we really haven’t seen much of to this point. I am absolutely hungry for more of this series and I fully expect to see a new game in this sequence release as a launch title for the PlayStation 5. I would love to see this release simultaneously on the PlayStation and the PC at the same time, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to ever be a thing. If you have yet to play this… it is worth the purchase of a console just for this game alone.

Games of the Decade: 2015

December 23, 2019 by Belghast

Continuing the series we dive into some of the games that were important to me in 2015. There were a bunch of games that made the early version of this list, but in many cases I didn’t feel like I had a lot to talk about any of them. I’ve been trying to avoid expansions/dlc on the list, and as a result that knocked out Heavensward which took up a significant portion of my year. Similarly this knocks out Destiny Taken King which also was super important. The final list was whittled down to just four games but I feel like there is something special with each of them.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

For years I had heard wonderful things about the Witcher series, but I found them somewhat obtuse and difficult to get into. Maybe if I had played the original when it first was released it might have made a difference, but trying to make it with modern expectations was a nonstarter. I found the interface to be deeply cludgy and confusing. When The Witcher 3 released I was not expecting much from it based on my past experience with the earlier two titles, but I got a free copy with a new video card and gave it a shot. What I found was a deep and rich world that I really enjoyed exploring. I’ve not gotten anywhere close to actually beating the game, but it is on that list of titles that I keep meaning to restart from scratch and play through again. The recent release of the Netflix series is re-igniting that desire so maybe I will spend some time over the coming days giving it another shot.

Dying Light

Dying Light is one of those games that is almost impossible to explain without actually experiencing it. At its core it is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse, but it is much more than that given that there are rich systems where you gain favor with various factions of survivors. The other aspect that is hard to explain is how important movement is to this game. It is a game that takes parkour to the next level as you try and find a path to run on that is safe from the endless hordes of the undead in the world below. There is always this tentative balance between staying in safety and dropping down into the places where you need to scavenge materials from. The total package is wildly enjoyable and now that the game has been out for quite some time you can pick it up on the cheap. If you missed it the first time, well worth grabbing especially since there is a sequel in the works for 2020 release.

Victor Vran

If you have read this blog for very long you will know of my deep affinity for “diablo-likes” and ARPGs in general. One of these that sorta slipped under almost everyone’s radar is a game called Victor Vran, where you take the controls of a Van Helsing like character that hunts demons and monsters. What makes this game interesting to me is that it has really good WASD controls and extremely interesting level design that works in old fashioned Wolf 3D era “secrets” that can be unlocked to find both new paths and troves of loot. The combination makes for a compelling action RPG that in some ways reminds me of early Isometric shooters like Crusader: No Remorse. You have a wide variety of attacks and special abilities and the levels are hand crafted instead of procedurally generated. This leads to a more structured game-play experience but also somewhat harms the replay value. This is now out on even more platforms including the switch, so well worth checking out if you too are a fan of ARPGs.

Fallout 4

I love the Fallout series and have since I first played the original back in 1997. The Fallout community tends to have two distinct branches… those who hold up Fallout 3 as the best title and those who hold up Fallout New Vegas in highest regard. I like aspects of both but tend to fall into the New Vegas camp. Fallout 4 was not exactly the game that either of those factions wanted and as a result it tends to be a fairly divisive title. For me… the aspect that I love about it is Base Building, which is the nail in the coffin for other games. I love feeling like I get to have an effect on the world by linking together disparate groups of refuges into a larger community. When I play this game I more or less ignore the story-line that is forced upon you, and the constantly limiting choice paths… and instead play a game where I am rebuilding the wasteland. I am pretty great at making up my own story when I find the current options distasteful.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2015

2015 was the year that I went to my first video game convention in the form of Pax South in San Antonio. I got to hang out with my friends Ashgar and Rae and explore all of the nonsense that makes up a Pax while also doing various press meetings. I managed to abuse those connections to sneak them into a gameplay session for Gigantic which was probably the game of the show that year. If you start on the right side, the faces that are pointed towards the camera at the screens are me, Ashgar, Rae and then hovering above Rae and explaining the abilities is Lonrem. It was a pretty good year, that started with a bang. I greatly miss going to Pax South each year, but the timing just hasn’t worked out since 2018.

Games of the Decade: 2013

December 17, 2019 by Belghast

This morning we continue the series that involves me looking back at the games released in the past decade. When you look at 2013, there were an awful lot of good and interesting games released, but again we are focused on the games that were specifically important to me. You are probably going to have your own list and there are going to be titles that I exclude that were absolutely bedrock to your gaming experience. Lets dig in because I dredged up four games from my memories and want to talk about them.

Marvel Heroes

Every so often there is a game that comes along that you don’t fully appreciate until it is gone. You will know my love of Diablo style games if you have read this blog for any length of time. Marvel Heroes was an extremely solid entry into that genre, and instead of slaying demons you focused on playing one of the Marvel Super heroes and taking down the traditional baddies of that genre. This is a game that was probably well before its time, and had it been released with the full support of Disney it could have possibly ended up differently.

I mained Captain America because at the end of the day he has consistently been one of my favorite heroes. The only one of my friends who was also super into this game was Thalen, and as a result I spent quite a bit of time running amok with him and clearing content. When I look back this is one of the games that I find I miss the most and wish I had a modern equivalent. There is Marvel Future Fight on the handhelds but it is a little too “free to play” for my tastes. This game had quite possibly the best starting experience because you could effectively play any hero to level 10 before choosing which one you wanted to unlock all of the way. There were also plenty of options for unlocking random heroes withing paying cash shop currency. Will always miss this game and unfortunately it never seemed popular enough for us to be able to get an emulator server.

State of Decay

I love this game, and I am not entirely certain if I can fully explain why. Firstly I am a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse genre, and I still to this day watch Walking Dead and its spin off Fear religiously when the season is going on. Both shows have sorta jumped the shark but I can’t seem to pull myself away from them. I also love games that let me explore and loot areas freely, and State of Decay is a bit of an amalgam of what I think of as the Fallout experience with the Zombie Apocalypse genre. The game also has a heavy emphasis on base building and recruiting new survivor groups to help you out.

The original game was released in June on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360, and I think I bought multiple copies of the game when it came out on Steam to gift to friends. This is just one of those games that I keep going back, especially once the YOSE or Year One Survivor Edition came out adding in all of the DLC content. The big innovation that this game provided that I loved, was the ability to board up windows to buy yourself more time to safely look a location as rummaging tends to attract zombies. Still well worth playing especially as cheap as the YOSE package tends to be these days.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

I figured if I was going to talk about Final Fantasy XIV I should dig out some of my older screenshots. This is your reminder that I started the game as a Highlander. My true enjoyment finally came when I decided to Fantasia my way into Lalafellian adorableness, but my first experiences were as the angriest Bel ever. This game is still to this day one of the best roleplaying game experiences I have ever played. While I keep finding myself falling out of sync with its long term gameplay, I can always return and gobble up new story content and get back into the swing of things.

A Realm Reborn is a feat that should be celebrated, of a game company doubling down on a game that failed spectacularly and then managed to transform that lump of coal into a diamond. This is the “Rudy” sports movie metaphor for the video game world, and we all sorta love that it happened. When you see a bad launch you need this in the back of your head of a time when it did work out, and secretly hope that the company has the fortitude to pull something of this scale off (I am looking at you Anthem). I just heard some news yesterday that Final Fantasy XIV has passed into the 18 million active accounts territory, and that is phenomenal. If you’ve never played this game you should absolutely pick up a copy and try it out. Cactuar is by far the best server and if you can’t stand its radiance… then at least land on the Aether data center.

Pokemon X and Y

This game gets special recognition largely because this is the first time I allowed myself to get caught up in PokeMania. This is the first Pokemon experience I have ever played at launch, and honestly the first time I have really experienced the ins and outs of the game at all. I played Pokemon Blue a bit with an emulator, but I was a College Junior when the original games came out and had long since moved beyond caring about my Gameboy. I had a lot of fun getting caught up in the magic of a Pokemon launch and have since participated in other games including the most recent Sword and Shield. I am still not great at playing this sort of game but I do find them enjoyable. I however care way more about collecting all of the Pokemon than I do about battling, and more or less find battling to be a necessary evil to accomplish the first goal.

Risk of Rain

This is the game that made me realize that I actually do like Rogue Likes. I would probably not have realized this however without the help of Ashgar who spent time playing the game with me. I want to do this again at some point with Risk of Rain 2 and see how well the experience translates to 3D. This is a game that absolutely overwhelms the player, but over time you start to learn the rules of the road and figure out which power-ups you should be focused on. I enjoy the game way more when playing with other people, but I have found myself revisiting from time to time on my own and trying out new classes that I have unlocked. The difficulty scales as you go making it extremely frenetic as you near the end of a level. If you’ve never checked out this game, I am sure you can pick it up these days for next to nothing.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2013

I have to say that 2013 was a bit of a renaissance year for me. It was the year that I began my three plus year long adventure of blogging every single day. This taught me a lot about myself and also showed me the therapeutic benefit of sitting down every morning and dumping my thoughts and feelings out onto the written page. Because of this event so many other things happened like AggroChat my weekly podcast and the whole Blaugust thing and the community that has developed around it. It was a great year.