5 RPGs That Defined 2009 @ Gear Diary

Remember the 50 RPGs That Defined a Decade piece that kicked off a while back? The first real part is up, with five RPGs to represent 2009. Dragon Age, Drakensang, Risen, Avernum 6 and Borderlands get the nod, with a handful of runners-up also discussed.
More information.

Nice overview. Not sure they defined the year though.

Um… Borderlands?

Calling Borderlands an RPG is a serious stretch...

I read the article and loved it. I nearly agree with Micheal's list apart from Borderlands. I think Divinity 2 is one of the RPGs that represents 2009. I admit it's not perfect and addictive as Divine Divinity. But, I think mind reading, turning to a dragon and battle tower (while can not be implemented perfectly into tha game) are fresh ideas for the RPG genre.

Yes, I agree. Larian managed to bring some new and fresh ideas into the genre. Just take the look of these Goblins alone !

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Yes, I agree. Larian managed to bring some new and fresh ideas into the genre. Just take the look of these Goblins alone !

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I agree with that. Divinity 2 artistic style is really awesome. Apart from goblin design I also like the ghost design. Only drawback is the human characters are so identical. There are so few character models.

There´s barely anything RPG in Borderlands.

I´d say Dragon Age, Risen, Drakensang, Avernum 6 and Divinty II is the correct 5, which basically means that when it comes to cRPGs, 2009 was defined by direct or indirect franchise rehashing . Not that it is a bad thing per se.

The only thing new and fresh Divinity 2 bought was the buggy stuttering engine, the same engine Piranha Bytes and Bethesda (and even some Indie devs) used to creat perfectly stable and WAY better looking games.

There was nothing revolutionary about Divinity 2. I enjoyed its story, NPC's and funny writing, not to mention the great voice acting. But everything else was poorly done, a terrible console port.

Borderlands was generic but it's still a perfectly done Diablo conversion to FPS genre with fuckload of guns (which work as advertised). Basically it removed the pointless story from Diablo and worked on making the combat interesting (which Divinity 2 fails at).