I am sorry, that this post turned out so long and I thought about splitting it into different topics. Somehow my mind just went floating around and saying all the things I wanted to say on this forum for a long time:
For me the greatest is still The Witcher 1. It was the first RPG I ever played and it had a lasting impression on me. I felt so immersed and was moved by everything when I first played it in 2009. I remember how I was scared to go outside at night in the outskirts. The dread of going into caves on my own. The loneliness in the open fields and the separation from everybody else in Wyzima. I felt like a Witcher. I was a monster hunter. I needed to be alert to save my life from those creatures, but yet I knew, it was on me to kill them. My purpose and my duty. I was an outcast, disconnected from society. I wasn't one of them. I felt alone often walking through the streets. People would talk to me, when they needed me, but keep their distance otherwise. I had friends I could rely on and people I trusted, companions and people I cared about. I remember the dirty and grimy city, which wasn't beautiful or inviting. People were living here, but I felt the dark times. I crept through the sewers fending of beasts hiding there. Not because I wanted to be there, but because I had to. I saw every human evil imaginable: murder, treachery, cannibalism, rape, incest, hate. Some women gave me their bodies, cause they were attracted to my strength and me being different and exotic. But few of them actually cared, who I was and I wouldn't be just an adventure to them. I remember the music, that raised every hair on my body. The sounds that made me listen up in anticipation of danger and shiver in excitement. The atmosphere was just so perfect, that I will never forget it.
I must admit that The Witcher 2 disappointed me a bit in that regard. I was stunned by the beautiful visuals (although I was only ever able to play on minimum settings on my laptop), but I was missing the darkness, the loneliness and emptiness, I felt in the first game. There I felt like an outcast, a remnant not belonging in this world, an exotic creature, sometimes handy, but not part of society. In the second game I was someone with a purpose, people respected me and valued my opinion, the world was beautiful and although there were many problems and horrible things, I never felt the despair and utter uselessness of my existance. I didn't feel like a witcher, that had his days. I felt like I was in the prime of my life and I could change something. I felt important. For me the second game wasn't dark enough.
Planescape Torment will be one of those games, I will probably never play, because I can't motivate myself to it. I might have enjoyed it back in the day, I don't know, but it is hard to start it now. I can't describe why. I am originally an RTS player and grew up with The Settlers 2, 3, 4 and Age of Empires 2, later on I played StarCraft 1 and 2, when 2 came out and also expanded my interest to point and click adventures, like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Edna Escapes, Harvey's New Eyes or Deponia. So I never had problems going back to older games, but somehow it hasn't teased me yet enough, to try it.
Recently I stumbled on this discussion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PtFlcZome4&feature=g-user-lik
And they were talking about storytelling in games. And the host reflected my attitude (and I think many of the forum members) fairly well in being quite critical on how stories are presented in current generation games. But I was very disappointed, when he hadn't even played The Witcher and couldn't see an exception to this. I am not a big fan of The Elder Scrolls (especially Skyrim) or Mass Effect. To me the world always seemed bland. I enjoyed watching Shepherds story as a Let's Play, but I didn't care about the characters, I didn't feel immersed, it was light entertainment to me. There were no heavy decisions, no particular emotions or realism involved in the story. I knew, I was for some weird reason, the invincible Shepherd and although I only had one gun and a ship, I would eventually kill everything and I couldn't fail. To me the struggle and the personal suffering, the doubt and the failure of the protagonist was always most appealing. And although I prefer stories, where the character is not the centre of the world, even super heroes are most engaging, when they struggle and fail. I love the new Batman movies, because he is constantly fighting himself and the world, he is not perfect, but he is the one with the will to go on. The new trailer of iron man moved me more than all the other movies about him, when his armour gets destroyed and he falls. Spiderman is his best, when he has to give up his love, to protect her. Snape is one of the best written characters in the books, because of what he has to become to do what is right and what he has lost. "And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."
From the interview, I decided to take a look at Dear Esther (Journey is the next on my list). I am regularly watching TotalBiscuit, because I like his critical thinking and comments about the gaming world and how many things are dumbed down and bad business practices like drm and micro transactions. He once said, he thinks it is a highly overrated game. But my breath was taken away by it. It has beautiful graphics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z36mjGakFEg
(realism!), where the world feels at first broken and later magical. It has perfect world-literature writing. And the most important thing is the atmosphere. I was there. I walked the paths, I discovered the world, I was the protagonist. It was like reading a book and then seeing it in my head. It was simply perfect. I never thought anything could do that, but it instantly became the best game of all time for me. It moved me on such a deep level and connected to me, how I thought only my fantasy or maybe good books could. The story was so personal and intimate.
I am a nut for lore and details in a fictional world. One of my passions is Lord of the Rings and although not everything is perfect in the stories, what really fascinates me is the detail of the world, the relations and connections between everything, how events in the past, influence the present. That is one of the things why I love The Witcher and especially the books, the world feels realistic, because it has background. And although we don't know everything (same in LotR), there is universe we are in. The same goes for A Song of Ice and Fire and the Coldfire series (I think it was never translated from German and even there it is hard to get all the books, but I think it would make a great background for another CD Project RPG http://www.welt-der-fantasy.de/serie.php?serientitel=Die%20Kaltfeuer-Saga). These worlds are complex and interconnected. Everything seems to have evolved and even in its own ruleset it feels real.
