RPG Codex - Top 70 PC RPG List

[Thrasher]

That's the Codex for me in a nutshell. Only difference is, that I quickly found the skimming too much work for too little gain, at least for everything past the frontpage articles.

After a couple of years, the amount of new useful info vs. trolling content ratio becomes too low to spend much of my time there.

 

[HiddenX]

The Codex had some very interesting content the last 2 years or so. Watch vs. Codex for D:OS was fun, too

 

[Thrasher]

It's gotten better in the last couple of years, I'll give it that.

 

[sakichop]

Or maybe some people simply like Arcanum for the well-written lore, great soundtrack, and unique setting. Just a thought…

That is a thought..... But old school bias is much more likely.

Even the review in the list could only manage 1 positive sentence out of a paragraph of negatives.

Can't see the slant towards old rpg's at the codex and watch, it's pretty apparent and one of the reasons I enjoy the site but that doesn't mean I just dismiss the new stuff.

 

[Siannah]

I love Wizards & Warriors for the dungeons in this game alone, simply great; character advancement and combat is good, too. Rival Wizardry 8 is more polished and Wizards & Warriors has some more bugs, that's all. I don't rate a game for its bugs, gfx and sound - I rate it for interesting gameplay elements.

I loved Wizards & Warriors and even wrote a walkthrough for it, which was afaik, the only complete one for years. Still would consider the game to be broken beyond repair on several levels.

Not rating a game for it's bugs is exactly where the Codex (and several other critics all over the web) fail regarding Skyrim, all the while praising New Vegas. I challenge anyone to find a more buggy quest than F:NV Beyond the Beef in any Bethesda game.
While I agree that Bethesda can (and should) learn a lot about quest design from Obsidian's New Vegas, they've been always superior in world design. The Mojave for me was never as interesting as F3 or Skyrim.

The gameplay elements is exactly where Skyrim shines for me. As pointed out before, I can roleplay in directions other games (including NV) don't allow me to do. One can consider this as not their style, artificial or LARPing, but dismissing it entirely because of that, is failing to see what Bethesda does so much better than anyone else.
Yes, they could have added more restrictions into the game. But most of the suggested "improvements" wouldn't work at all. All NPCs killable - with random dragon and (with Dawnguard) vampire attacks in town. Right… that wouldn't work out sooner or later and is failing to see, how much more dynamic the world of Skyrim is (even though it's still blatantly scripted).
Or restricting guild access - if you fail to do that on your own, according to the role you picked, you fail at roleplaying. How is that the games fault?

I'm not trying to convince you, the Codex guys or anyone else. Just trying to explain why Skyrim works for me on levels, that other RPGs simply don't achieve or lack entirely.

 

[HiddenX]

Siannah - if you really love Skyrim so much then volunteer to write an article for felipepepe's book.

Again - You don't have to convince me of Skyrim.
I know all it's qualities and flaws.

 

[Dajjer]

Just for you Codexers.

I've been RPGing since the TI99.

Skyrim replaced Gothic 2 as my all time favorite RPG. I was reluctant to do this because the game hasn't been out that long. But I put in over 300 hours in a non-modded game. And I never finished any of the main line quests. I was just wandering around and doing a bunch of mini quest and helping folks as I traversed the landscape. For me it was the best CRPG world ever created. Sandbox? Perhaps, but the game allowed me to role play that role.

It always boggles my mind that anyone could just put in 50 or so hours and feel they have played the game. Sheez some of the larger towns have 50 hours of game play. And in one of the larger cities, even after 300 ours of game play I can not enter a sector without getting attacked. Maybe some dungeons reset, but certainly not that particular town.

If the Codex as a whole feels the game is not worthy of the their to 70 list, I'm okay with that. I have said repeatedly that I like the list you guys came up with.

But, DArtagnan has pointed out some inconsistencies that are spot on. And I find myself agreeing with him on most of his points.

 

[wolfing]

I love Wizards & Warriors for the dungeons in this game alone, simply great; character advancement and combat is good, too. Rival Wizardry 8 is more polished and Wizards & Warriors has some more bugs, that's all. I don't rate a game for its bugs, gfx and sound - I rate it for interesting gameplay elements.

That brings an interesting point. I don't mind if a game was totally broken and a bug-fest at release as long as it was patched later. Basically, for anyone looking for a game to play today does it really matter that 10 years ago the game was a mess? No, all that matters is if the game can be played fine today. A game that scored 40/100 because of bugs, could be a 90/100 now if it's patched, and that's the score I would be interested in reading.

 

[Dajjer]

That brings an interesting point. I don't mind if a game was totally broken and a bug-fest at release as long as it was patched later. Basically, for anyone looking for a game to play today does it really matter that 10 years ago the game was a mess? No, all that matters is if the game can be played fine today. A game that scored 40/100 because of bugs, could be a 90/100 now if it's patched, and that's the score I would be interested in reading.

I give you Gothic 3
A release so bad that I doubt if anyone finished the game in its release state. That game kept crashing my computer to blue screen.

However, I just finished Gothic 3 a few months ago (2014). Minimal bugs*-nothing game stopping, no slow downs and best of all it still holds up to anything released today. I had great fun playing that game and wished they made more like it.

*one quest had me leading slaves to a rebel camp. The slaves kept getting stuck behind logs or refused to follow me and would take the long way around a mountain. Very frustrating and it took a while to get them to the camp.

 

[Kordanor]

@Dajjer But weren't the last patches also created by fans?

 

[HiddenX]

Gothic 3 was fixed by fans - Jowood granted even access to the source-code after the split with Piranha Bytes.

 

[Dajjer]

@Dajjer But weren't the last patches also created by fans?

Yes, I think that is correct.

But Wolfing's point is still valid. It's not what it was on release day but what it is today. Isn't Vampire/ Masquerade fan patched and it's number #6 on the Codex list. V-TM works today and that's all that that should count.

 

[Lev]

Wizards & Warriors was nice. Played it two or three times and I liked it. Meaningful dialogs which were easy to follow, interesting adventure, interesting places.

 

[Kordanor]

Hrm...but imho it would feel kinda wrong to "honor" a company with an "reward" like this, if it's the fans who fixed it.

If you "reward" a Game which only became good due to Patches and Mods, I would also list it as such. E.g. Jagged Alliance 2 (Fanpatch 1.13) if you want to praise the modded game instead of the basic game. (JA2 basic was already extremely well though).

 

[Siannah]

That's a difficult point and, at least for me, one you'd have to answer on a case by case basis.

VTM was always a great game, be it from scope, replayability, different paths to go - with the fanpatchs it's just not that buggy mess anymore.

Gothic 3 while not a bad game, still can't hold a candle to Gothic 2 and again, fans patched the bugs out. While interesting in the beginning, it rather quickly became a chore for me (cleaning towns of all orcs.... ugh).

Wizards & Warriors on the other hand, never received much patch love. There's that one NPC in the toad village that can get stuck on a chokepoint... which you have to pass through - never patched. It's also very difficult getting it to run on nowadays system. I remember having to load / save the avi files because of codec issues, otherwise the towns wouldn't be visible on visit - and that was well before Windows Vista time if I remember correctly. It still would make my list well before Gothic 3.

However going that way, where do you differentiate between patch and mods? VTM or Gothic 3 you want to play with fanpatch. VTM had that discussion between "just patching" and "restoring original content" (that never made it, at least visibly, into the release game). Where do you put in any game with mods? And which ones?

@Kordanor it's not about honoring a company. If we head down that road, everyone has his own love/hate devs/publishers which add more problems than solving any - let's settle with honoring the games, shall we?

 

[Kordanor]

@Kordanor it's not about honoring a company. If we head down that road, everyone has his own love/hate devs/publishers which add more problems than solving any - let's settle with honoring the games, shall we?

Sure. Just said it that way due to the lack of a better expression.

Example Scenario: Game releases, is unplayable due to bugs and let's say the last chapter isn't accessible. Company doesn't patch it at all. Some fans fix it via a fanpatch, now it's playable and you can actually finish the game and due to the mechanics, lore and so on it's pretty awesome.
I would feel pretty bad to shout something out like "Best Game of the Year!".

Now maybe after 10 years or so these lines become blurry maybe. But I still wouldn't feel comfortable to praise this game without explicitly mention the fanpatched edition.

Edit: That actually fits to the Oblivion discussion (not because it was buggy though). If you add a (Nehrim) behind it, you can very well add it to the list if you ask me.

 

[tuluse]

… and by the Codex and about 99% of it's userbase, I'm not because I enjoyed Skyrim, F3 and Oblivion. So…. welcome to the "real" side.

As for Wizards & Warriors: DArtagnan is right though. I actually enjoyed D.W. Bradleys second last work and played through it more than once, but the game is broken in more ways than I can count. The only one I mention is, how character storing / the inn works. Anything even remotely close to this system in a Bethesda game, would get quartered, stoned and shred to pieces within an instant on the Codex.

All fair and square, given the background of the Codex users view on recent (past Morrowind) Bethesda titles. But if you take how much they're willing to see past flaws in other titles, you wonder where they'd have to put said titles if they applied the same standard - luckily we know, they don't. And we didn't expected anything else.


That's the Codex for me in a nutshell. Only difference is, that I quickly found the skimming too much work for too little gain, at least for everything past the frontpage articles.

What standard is that? It's pretty clear that bugginess was not a factor in voting at all. That "standard" was applied to all games. The voters not voting for Skyrim had nothing to do with bugs.

 

[JDR13]

That is a thought….. But old school bias is much more likely.

Even the review in the list could only manage 1 positive sentence out of a paragraph of negatives.

Can't see the slant towards old rpg's at the codex and watch, it's pretty apparent and one of the reasons I enjoy the site but that doesn't mean I just dismiss the new stuff.

To be honest, the only bias I'm seeing here is yours. You've mentioned previously that you don't like Arcanum at all, which is fine, but that doesn't mean the people who like it are necessarily biased for older games.

Personally, I think #5 is much too high, but I can definitely understand why it's in the top 20 for so many crpg fans.

 

[DArtagnan]

Just to clarify, I'd like to point out that I love Arcanum, and I was quite fond of Wizards and Warriors. Believe me, I struggled trying to love W&W - and yes, I did love the dungeon design - but the game just didn't work. Not on release, anyway.

I'm also one of those strange people that quite like Dungeon Lords.

But I do realise how those games should rank, if I was trying to be objective.

My point has never been that they don't belong on a list - even an objective list.

My point was that not having Skyrim on a list with 70 games - but having Arcanum in the top 10 - and including Wizards and Warriors - is obvious bias against Skyrim. Also, if you look at the rest of the list, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the old-school bias all-round.

Why am I talking about Skyrim and not another game? Because it's the most obvious example. Skyrim is not a game you "forget" to put on your list. It's a game you deliberately omit from your list, for whatever reason.

I literally have NO idea why we're having this discussion. There's nothing wrong with old-school bias. Nostalgia is a powerful force no matter what anyone claims. It's why we love Star Wars so dearly - even though the visuals are no longer impressive.

That's fine - it's cool.

So, not a single member of the Codex gave Skyrim enough points for it to be ranked at all? So what, you're biased against it - big deal. HiddenX played it for 600+ hours - and he elects to pretend the modders are the reason for that - as in the game itself apparently deserves no significant credit. How many Codex members secretly enjoyed Skyrim (or FO3)? I'm going to bet at least half of them. Yes you did.

But denial does no one any good. Not from where I'm sitting, anyway.

That said, it's pretty clear that even if I'm right - no one from the Codex would own up to it anyway, so we'll never know.

I'm perfectly ok with that - so maybe the discussion has run its course, finally?

There are many other things on that list worth talking about.

 

[HiddenX]

DArtagnan: Again you are projecting your opinion on others.
I like Skyrim - it is just not in my very exclusive list of my personal favorites:

Jagged Alliance 2
Ultima 7 - Black Gate
Planescape Torment
Wizardry 7
Bards Tale 2
Gothic 2 NOTR
Evil Islands
Dungeon Master 1
Fallout 1
Betrayal at Krondor
Vampire Bloodlines - The Masquerade
Exile/Avernum 1
Might & Magic 4
Albion
Ambermoon
Amberstar

so it got zero points from me. I would not exchange any of these games on my top list with Skyrim, Oblivion or Morrowind, maybe I could exchange Evil Islands with Daggerfall - this game is good without any modding.
(BTW: Arcanum, W&W are not on my top list, too). Call this old school enthusiam, nostalgia, bias whatever - this my personal opinion. There's no denial or Bethesda hate on my site (I have all games as collector editions). I love their game engines and really like what modders make out of it.
Contrary to you I'm not obsessed with Skyrim, I see qualities and flaws in it.
Skyrim, Redguard & Morrowind are in my personal top 35, Daggerfall & Battlespire, Nehrim are in my personal top 25. Arena and Oblivion are in my personal top 60.