These topics pop up pretty regularly on ever gameboard, and I've noticed that many people - yours truly included - always gives approximately the same answer as previously. So I suppose it'd be an interesting thing to try and look a bit outside the box, in a manner of speaking, and make two lists instead of one. It might be a bit extraneous, but having been around gaming boards for a while, it tends to get a bit tiresome to have one stock response.
So, the "stock" response is a list of games that have not yet been topped in their respective fields by any rival. No game has been able get as much right in the whole as them, and frankly, it'd be a long awaited miracle if one eventually did. And even if might not have played some of them maybe even in a few years, I know from experience, that every time I fire them up, I will get a quality experience and have fun. That's just how good they are. Let's call it the "classics" list. Kinda like with movies... I liked Interstellar, but it's not Solaris or 2001.
The second list is a number of games that might be a bit newer, that did not make it to the stock response, but with which a good bit of fun can and have been had. Maybe theirs is the elegance of timely trending that will eventually dissipate. One that can change rather quickly and which can have surprising names in it.
The classic list - which is pretty much set in stone - is the usual:
- Fallout 1&2
- PST
- Arcanum
- Deus Ex
- Dungeon Keeper
- Wizardry 8 & M&M6 (it's a tie)
- Civ series (the whole series)
- HoMM series
- VtMB
- Morrowind
The "currently trending" list might be something as follows:
- Disco Elysium -- Yeah, it's pretty much a "storybook game", but it's really fun at it. Visible dicerolls and all.
- New Vegas -- A good game to occasionally go back to. Some unfortunate problems, but bearable gameplay and a nice story and setup.
- Divinity: Original Sin 2 -- It's an on/off thing. I like it and fire it up regularly and I want to play it, but the fantasy setting makes me yawn every time.
- No Man's Sky -- I was surprised. I can't call it a good "game" because it is not, but it's a kind of a relaxing tinker-toy-sim with no hurry or push anywhere. Just do some random shit and collecting for a while, quit, come back in two months or half a year, nothing essential was lost and no catching up needs to be done, just continue go on where you left off.
- Shadowrun Dragonfall and Hong Kong -- I like the gameplay stories and mood. Good games to come back to even though I'm not completely sold on the rulesystem or the mixup of tech and fantasy in the setup.
- The whole S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is kinda like one good game. I do like SoC the most, and it is undoubly the most atmospheric shooter, if not the most atmospheric game altogether, I've ever played.
Well, I haven't really played much of anything else worth mentioning here in the past years. All in all, I play much less games now than I did five years ago. It's been gradually going down and there's been only few good games anyway.
One of my friends managed to lure me into playing Fortnite with him and a couple of other people, and it's awful. I kinda get the appeal, but... it's just... not fun. I don't like playing it, but I like chatting with the guys while doing it so occasionally I joing them.
And here I managed to create a wall of text about absolutely nothing of note and if you read it, it's your loss man. You ain't ever going to get that time of your life back.
