DUSK was the game where shooters finally clicked with me, I’ve played many of them before, whether it was CoD, Serious Sam or DOOM but DUSK is where it finally all clicked and I started to enjoy them. Chrono Trigger completely changed my outlook on RPGs from boring grindfests with pointless texts where you get confused every second to making it my fav genre and finally Yakuza and Zelda BotW completely changed how I viewed open world for better or for worse
Fallout New Vegas set my expectation for quest choice and faction interactivity. I could go on about that, but everyone knows what people think about New Vegas.
Last year, I beat Dark Souls. That’s now set my standard for RPG gameplay. There’s bullshit, same as any game, but I don’t think I’ve ever played another RPG where I’ve felt my skill going up alongside my in-game stats. Then you get to the Bed of Chaos, and that kinda goes out the window…
When I was 6 I was so excited to get a SNES. I wanted the bundle with super Mario World but it was sold out. So my parents gave me the option of waiting of getting this other bundle with this Zelda game. That sounded kind of girly to me being 6 and knowing nothing, but I was also 6 and had no patitience so Zelda it was.
I got home and started playing and was immediately hooked. I spent the next few years exploring every inch of Hyrule and the Dark World.
To this day I still don’t have Super Mario World and have only played a few levels but I have played every Zelda since.
I’ve played dozens or hundreds of games since thrn, many that were absolutely amazing but nothing until Breath if the Wild gave me that same magic of wanting to discover every nook and cranny of the world just to see what’s there.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. First really high quality storytelling I saw in games. Setting is so unique I never saw really any copycats
Nothing has shaped how I view games more than Dark Souls.
Halo comes to mind straight away. The way the enemies react, dodging out the way or charging towards you was something special. Also the music score and freedom it gives you in the semi-open levels to play differently.
I like that sometimes taking your time is not the best strategy. Sometimes you need to be aggressive and push the attack relentlessly otherwise you’ll just get blown to pieces.
A few that seem under represented here:
Oregon Trail
Sim City 2000
Earthworm Jim
Spyro the Dragon:
This is basically the pinnacle of game design to me. It is a collect-a-thon of course, but the gems always sparkle no matter how far you are from them so that if you are in line of sight you will know that they are there making it easy to find them.
Far off sections of the map are basically always reachable and rewards you for trying to get there and utilizing uncommon paths through the map.
When you beat the game to 100% it rewards you with extra stuff and a little more game to show it had fun being made as much as you hopefully did playing it.
All with a fun story that wraps it up and doesnt require anything special to jump in. I want to see games that have thoughtful level design and world building while using the game mechanics in fun ways. The fact that you jump into levels directly and the loading screen is akin to you actually flying to the world is all engrossing to the world.
Questions like these always reveal the core audience of millennials and older Gen Z.
Caught me, I’m a CIA plant doing statistical anilisis on the fediverse
Half life 2. I could conceive of shooter games but until playing HL2 as a teenager, I didn’t quite understand how much storytelling they could pack in. Suddenly, it felt like games could be thoughtful and entertaining pieces of art instead of solely fun time
Removed by mod
Super Mario Bros 1, 2 & 3
Super Mario World
Mortal Kombat 1 & 2
Wolfenstein 3D
DOOM
Commander Keen
Starcraft
Diablo 1 / 2
Unreal Tournament 2003/4
Counter-Strike
Half Life
Everquest
World of Warcraft
The Secret of Monkey Island
Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis / Last Crusade
LOOM
Resident Evil 1 & 2
Legend of Zelda 1
Ocarina of Time
Mario Kart (SNES & 64)
Ogre Battle 64
WCW/NWO Revenge
Portal 1 & 2
Grand Theft Auto 2, 3 and 5Yeah I’m old. Some modern ones:
Breath of the Wild
Valheim
Outer WildsYour not old, your me!. Most of these plus some others definitely, plus a bunch of modern ones as well. Shocked you only liked Half-Life 1 and not 2. I thought 2 was mind blowing at the time and still feel like it’s the first game to bring us into the modern era of games to this day.
World of Warcraft. After it, a lot of player retention mechanics became super obvious in other games for me, especially because a lot of said games were copying “the king of MMOs”
Dwarf Fortress is my main go-to example of procgen done right. Whenever there’s discussions of “game X sucks and is lifeless because it’s mostly procgenned”, I look back at DF. Lazy procgen is the problem.
I know at some point I saw a game with absurdly high damage and health numbers, I can’t remember which one it was, whether a mobile thing around 2014 or a korean mmo, but that was the point where I very easily understood “big number better” is total bullshit
Elder Scrolls Morrowind was the first game I’ve played that gave almost complete freedom to the player, with lots of things carrying consequence, especially in relation to NPCs. That shopkeeper you killed? Still dead. This essential NPC that is a literal demigod? Yeah, you can kill him, have fun in this broken timeline you just created where you can no longer advance the main quest.
I wonder if that MMO with big damage numbers was Shaiya Online?
Doesn’t look like it goes into the millions of damage per hit, which is what I recall seeing back then
Maplestory?
There’s actually an official “back path” for the Morrowind main quest if you killed Vivec. You need to take an item from his corpse to Yagrum Bagarn, but you also need a high reputation. If you muck up the back path, too, you can brute force the main quest by completing the final step anyway, but good luck figuring out how to do that without a quest pointing you to what you need.
ITT: A bunch of people misunderstanding the question
As expected. Many people just see it as an opportunity to talk about their favorite games. That’s okay.
Honestly I love reading about peoples favourite games! I thought it was funny in this thread
But I mean aren’t our favorite games naturally the ones that have most influenced us and our views on gaming?
In a way, I see it more as a square/rectangle situation. A game that helps to shape you is probably a favourite one, not necessarily the other way around. It’s a good thread either way.
In the order I played them in:
- Pokemon Ruby + Pokemon Colosseum
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
- Fable
- Dragon Quest Monster Joker + Dragon Quest 5
- Risen
- Dark Souls
- Dragon Age: Origins
- SMT Devil Survivor
- Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology
- Xenoblade (as a series)
- Witcher 3
There are probably others, but that’s the list I came up with in the moment.
