RPGWatch 2008 Game of the Year Vote!

I'm missing one MMORPG that was released in 2008 on the voting list… Everquest II - The Shadow Odyssey

It was in the news…
Tuesday - November 18, 2008
15:41 EverQuest II - The Shadow Odyssey Launched

Diablo III to be released in 2009

I voted for King's Bounty cause everything else was just not-GOTY.
Fallout 3:good but I was bored after lvl15
Mass Effect:Good-ol-bioware you wont get a single vote from me because you are make kotor-mmo,ME's combat sucked BTW
NWN:Great but not as fun as it could be
M&B:#2 Awesome combat
G3FG:normally I would give my left hand for Gothic but this is not Gothic
Sacred 2:hack&slash,hack&slash,hack&slash,hack&slash*bored*

In 2009 I am waiting for
Diablo 3(FUN)
Dragon Age
but most of all for RISEN

Diablo III to be released in 2009

Yeah strange,Arcania and Risen should also be there if Diablo is.

I've only played Mount & Blade on the list, and I am not even sure I'd consider it a RPG. Cant say I have very high expectations for the 2009 either (my "highest" expectations are for Dragon Age and Two Worlds Temptation, and I just flipped a coin to choose between the two).

There wasn't really something UBER on the list. So voted for King's Bounty, just hoping it'll get enough votes to dethrone FO:O and Dumbeffect

I really wanted to vote for NWN2, except for the nasty fact that I haven't actually played it. The only two on the list I've played, sadly enough are Mass Effect and Fallout 3. I had to give the nod to Mass Effect, because despite how superficial its RPG gameplay was, at least it was interesting enough to drive me to the end. I only finished Fallout 3 because the main quest was short enough that I could drive to the end within 2 hours of deciding I was bored with the game and didn't really want to play it anymore.

For next year, I'm really excited about Alpha Protocol, mostly because of the novel setting. I hope there's actually a decent game there. These shallow experiences are getting pretty old.

Please let us know ASAP if you find a game missing on the lists.

Originally Posted by Kostaz
I voted for King's Bounty cause everything else was just not-GOTY.
Fallout 3:good but I was bored after lvl15
Mass Effect:Good-ol-bioware you wont get a single vote from me because you are make kotor-mmo,ME's combat sucked BTW
NWN:Great but not as fun as it could be
M&B:#2 Awesome combat
G3FG:normally I would give my left hand for Gothic but this is not Gothic
Sacred 2:hack&slash,hack&slash,hack&slash,hack&slash*bored*

In 2009 I am waiting for
Diablo 3(FUN)
Dragon Age
but most of all for RISEN


Yeah strange,Arcania and Risen should also be there if Diablo is.

See the best thing about what you listed is….those are all YOUR opinions.

Originally Posted by rune_74
See the best thing about what you listed is….those are all YOUR opinions.

Yes, whose opinions should I list??

Blimey, it hammers home how thin on the ground games have been this year :/
I've only played four of the games on the list, so grudging vote to Mass Effect.

Yep, I too hate that kind of lists… just reminds how scarce RPGs have been this year. Not to mention all the borderline FPS/action games with some RPG flavor added to 'em (such as Fallout 3).

I voted for Storm of Zehir, alas more for the memories of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale it brought than for its own merits.

As far as MMORPG goes, Mines of Moria is said to be excellent… but I'm a PvP junky so I voted for WAR ;-) Patch 1.1 actually fixed a lot of client stability/performance issues.

Originally Posted by Gorath
Please let us know ASAP if you find a game missing on the lists.

If diablo is on the 2009 list then borderlands should be too? Its a 1st person mad max meets "diablo-clone". It has l00t (650000 weapons), random maps and 4 player co-op..

Now back to Borderlands. Randy Pitchford stated this game as Role-playing Shooter which, from what I've seen, implements RP elements into shooter. This was a huge success with highly acclaimed Shock series(System Shock 1 and 2, Bioshock) when it had kickass FPS gameplay with deep RP behind, but in case of Borderlands it's also closer to the opposite as it implements a LOT of RPG elements which ends up sounding like Too Human. Also it utilizes randomly generated maps which hampered some games of these days including already mentioned Hellgate London.

The way I see it, Borderlands seems to have enough RP elements as, basically, a shooter. 650,000 weapons and good storytelling shown in Hell's Highway would be enough. I don't know how the world of Pandora would work but if it's done well, it's going to have some freedom as well. Also, Pandora should not be as hollow as uncharted worlds of Mass Effect.
Problem is a combat system which we would have no idea before we get some real information blowout. I watched E3 2008 bootleg, it looked cool in its stage, but many things were not finished including AI. Luckily it had kickass sound effects for guns and some gore enough to feel that enemies are getting bullets, so we'll see how Gearbox is going to implement things that were absent in E3 2008 demo.

That's the thing. Borderlands is not trying to imitate Diablo. It is not trying to be a deep RPG shooter, that's Fallout 3 territory. What Borderlands is doing, is looking at what exactly made Diablo fun(Loot grinding), and adding it to a shooter. The environments are generated procedurally, so while the terrain may be the same in an area from passthrough to passthrough(I think, not sure on that), the contents will change, such as a new cave to explore, or a very large and hungry monster that decides you'd make a nice snack.

Hellgate got repetitive because they had a limited number of environments and textures, underground with limited open air, always confined to tight spaces, and almost always linear. There was variation as you progressed but not enough. Borderlands is hopefully going to be expansive enough to avoid that, with enough variation from location to location to stay new and fresh even on the 32nd playthrough. In all reality, you could say the Diablo had very repetitive levels but that was alright at the time, and Diablo 2 cycled through the different repetitives fast enough that they didn't get too boring, which is where Hellgate failed.

Fallout 3 - it was not really excellent game, but what else we have? To me every rpgs released this are year pretty much so-so.

Voted King's Bounty as it's the only game on that list I've played substantively this year, and while it's borderline RPG it was a lot of fun.

The 2009 pick was far more difficult though, there are actually 4-5 games I'm genuinely looking forward to there. Ended up going with Alpha Protocol, but at least that took a while to decide.

We do hope to have U6P released by the end of next year, but we could certainly use more people to speed up the process. I'll try to organise an official update in the very near future; there's a TON of content been added recently.

There needs to be a fill in vote. Everquest is not even on the list. Nor is A Tale in the Desert.

Originally Posted by Reyla
There needs to be a fill in vote. Everquest is not even on the list. Nor is A Tale in the Desert.

Well, yeah, you see… there's a thing…. I think to get on the list you have to release something that people have to pay for. City of Heroes/Villains had a couple of big updates, too, but they were free. So no CoX on the list. If, on the other hand, NCSoft and pushed the two updates together and charged people $15 for it, it would be on the list plus it would have gotten reviewed in the press. If Wrath of the Lich King hadn't come out, WoW wouldn't have been on the list, either.

All released games in our database from January first until (but not including December) should be in there. Next year it covers December 1st 2008 until December 1st 2009.
ATitD was released the 13th of December (and isn't in our database). The Everquest II add-on is in the list though.

I had to go with Fallout 3 despite it's issues. I agree with Remus, that the RPG's of 2008 have been "so so" so it wasn't a tough decision for me, there were just nothing else to pick. Could F3 have been better? Could it have been the best thing since sliced bread? I don't know. Hitting the levelcap and getting the best weapon in the game after 20% of the game felt like bad design, but beyond that F3 was one of the refreshing RPG experiences I had from new games in years.

If The Witcher Enhanced Edition was there, that would probably get my vote instead.

Mass Effect was the only other RPG with that felt worth mentioning, but to me Bioware chopped pretty much every RPG mechanic to dumb down the game from their previous titles. Beyond being maybe the most beautiful game I have ever seen, Mass Effect instead get an honorable mention for Worst Inventory System Ever, and since I take such votes literally, I do not hand out "ever" titles easily.

I tried Kings Bounty, and I have to label that as a Strategy game over a RPG.

My best RPG experience 2008 was finally finishing Arcanum.

Of course, for some of us Geneforge 5 has already occupied dozens of hours of out time …