I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there’s a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.

I leaned toward games that came highly recommended that I actually played.

Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.

Yeah, I liked that one more than its reputation as well. In some ways, I liked it better than the 2 remake.

I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.

You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.

But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.

In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.

The campaign, yes.

Well, it keeps getting pushed back, not forward, so that helps.

I’d take GTA 4 or 5 over San Andreas, easily. And at this point, a large part of the appeal is GTA Online for a ton of folks; not me, but a ton of folks.

Which thumb? If your left thumb is still functional, when I had a hand injury in middle school, I got to be really good at Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2. If your dominant/mouse hand is still functional, anything mouse-driven ought to do, and that covers a wide range of genres from CRPGs to adventure games to 4X games and more.

I don’t know what they were testing, but if your output is text, it will be a lot easier for the AI to know it’s correct than any of the plethora of ways that video games can go subtly wrong, and that’s where my lack of faith comes from. Even scraping text from the internet, my experience is more often that AI is confident in its wrong answer than it is helpful.

It also only works as long as the AI can actually competently do the QA work. This is what an AI thinks a video game is. To do QA, it will have to know that something is wrong, flag it, and be able to tell when it’s fixed. The most likely situation I can foresee is that it creates even more work for the remaining humans to do when they’re already operating at a deficit.

If you’ve never had a gaming computer before and you’re on a budget, look up how to set up Heroic Games Launcher and make accounts with Epic and GOG. They give away free games all the time, and almost all of them will work on Steam Deck.

1998 comes up a lot in response to this question, for good reason. Pokemon Red/Blue, Baldur’s Gate, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Half-Life, Fallout 2, StarCraft, and on and on. Games were made much more quickly back then, and the technological advancements allowed for a lot of these games to do new things that no one had done before, that were quite predictably going to be well-received.

If I’m putting together a pantheon of great years in gaming, it looks like 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2023. If I’ve got to pick one, it might be 2004. Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (an odd choice for many, but it’s maybe my favorite in the series), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Halo 2, Burnout 3: Takedown, Star Wars: Battlefront, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims 2, Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Viewtiful Joe 2, Ninja Gaiden, Counter-Strike: Source, etc., etc. This was a magical time in online multiplayer, where it was pretty new for most, and you could do things like proximity chat in a shooter and expect people to actually use it for the video game at hand instead of spewing slurs into the mic. Local multiplayer was abundant. Obtuse game design made to sell strategy guides was just about obsolete, and DLC had yet to be invented (outside of beefier expansions). Midnight launches were exciting, and I have fond memories of, for reasons I can’t explain, playing Halo 2 on launch day in a 12-player LAN using bean bags, projectors, and 3 Xboxes set up in a local college’s racket ball court.

Maybe not Age of Decadence itself, but it launched in the middle of a time where crunchy CRPGs were having a moment, and that moment has a direct path to trace forward to Baldur’s Gate 3. Regardless of D&D branding, Divinity: Original Sin 2 was already a multimillion seller that scored in the 90s on Open Critic; in a lot of ways, BG3’s success was preordained, which is why they were confident enough to increase the budget so much over their last games.

As I see it, there’s a common thread that binds all of the success stories in this article that “prove” that people want RPGs with “crunch”: they can all be brute forced at a surface level, but they all reward you for going in deeper. You can just shoot a thing in Borderlands until it dies, turning it into a mindless co-op shooter with some jokes from time to time, but the game is much better when you’re creating a feedback loop of different effects that interact with your active ability and proc abilities that proc other abilities. You can play through Baldur’s Gate 3 by doing little more than your basic attack and an occasional AoE spell, or you can get really creative with spells that grant flight or stack damage from other spells. So my answer to this author would be that these games serve both masters effectively, which is not an easy trick to pull off.

It’s cruise control for doling out new gameplay over the length of the game. Any game worth its salt will establish some rules, test you on it, introduce a new wrench thrown in the works, and repeat. RPG systems are a way of giving you new, gradual additions to respond to those new wrenches thrown in the works. I agree that, for many genres, they’d be better off using other methods.

The Egypt one was definitely one where they changed it a lot. So much so that I no longer enjoyed playing them.

It’s a random statistical sample. They know that approximately 3 people for every 100 are on Linux, but it doesn’t matter which 3.