Are they the same people though? I avoided Arcanum for that reason, and I didn't bother with ToEE until it was patched up. A steaming pile of well-intentioned software is still a steaming pile. :p

Some yes, others no :P Disagree with your last statement - when problems are fixed, it is no longer steaming pile. Not that I thought Kingmaker was steaming pile in first place, I'd call it a flawed gem ;)

Difference between Troika games and Kingmakers is, that those didnt get nearly as post-release support. Some of them had to wait for community patches to save them. And Im saying that while being big fan of Troika as I played and loved their games years before the community patches even existed.

Thats because I can appreciate bold design choices, where developers show some vision and ambition. Those games have potential to surprise me with something new, which comes for a cost usually. But I will always consider such creative approach superior.

Kingmaker is a worthy winner. Haven't had so much fun with a RPG for quite some time.
My prediction was a pretty safe bet but still, feeling good about calling it. Thinking about getting into the prophecy business full time now. :cool:

Both Arcanum and Vampire were released in 2001. While highly rated, neither of them would win the 2001 GOTY of the Watch, as that would have been Gothic by a landslide. I still remember the RPGDot reaction to it. Hot dang. We had entire sub forums dedicated to Gothic RPing.

I wasn't a member in 2001 on RPGDot as at that time I was mostly a console gamer. Are there any archived links to those awards & Gothic RPing, or are they dead?

I think it's all gone, unless @Myrthos knows of something. What I do know is that we quickly became something of a haven for Gothic fans, to a point where even KaiRo (Kai Rosenkrantz) posted regularly there, including Gothic-related articles/news and such. It was basically RPGDot and World of Gothic that were the go-to places for anything Gothic, especially in English.

Congrats, Owlcat! Can't wait to play it!

I must say, though, twas not the best year for RPGs to play with ones tabletop crew. I wonder how many Pathfinder players were disappointed they'd have to play solo? :(

Hopefully Wasteland 3 gives us a real RPG to play with friends!

Now I remember why I came across RPGDot at first place!:)

Same here! :D

I indeed know 'of something'. I have the entirety of RPGDot, database and design (until the beginning of 2006). I also have it operational. But the RPGDot software is not secure and neither is the version of PHPBB we used. I've tried making an HTML file based version of it, but that didn't work out that well as the software I used gave up after a very long time.
Options I have considered, but not went into yet are:

1. Converting everything besides the forums to HTML pages and move the forums to the most recent version of PHPBB.
2. Converting the news, articles and whatnot to RPGWatch and integrating the RPGDot forums into the RPGWatch forums.
3. Get a better site crawler software that gets the job done.

Option 3 might not be available. The current software gave up after having handled 1.000.000 links/references to internal RPGDot pages.
Option 1, might be the easiest. So we would end up with a different site (which would be static), like rpgdot.rpgwatch.com or rpgdot.net.
Option 2 is the most complicated one and because of that is very unlikely to happen :)

Owlcat Games:

Apparently we are also blocking the IP address of their Russian studio. However as I don't know what their IP address is, I can't unblock it….


As to making this sticky. These days I think if there is enough interest in commenting it will remain near the top. If not, it will disappear from the first page.

Commenting won't keep it at the top on the front (news) page though, right? Only inside the forums.

No, but it is an article, so it will remain visible in the article list for some time on the front page.

The simple truth is I'm older now and have less time to waste on shoddy construction. Flawed gems are a time sink. I'll try it after the patching starts to slow down significantly. :)

Nice to see that Ghost of a Tale made it to place 9. :)

And I still need to check out Atom…

Not exactly a surprise to see the familiar fan-service games top the innovative and bold visions :)

This IS the Watch, afterall.

That said, the two top fan-service games were particularly well executed, so I suppose I shouldn't whine too much.

How have you voted (or would vote)?

I think KCD deserves the number one spot by quite a margin, but that's not necessarily because it's an objectively better game. It's more about doing new things and not playing it safe - as well as being extremely impressive for such a relatively small team.

I personally enjoyed it more than Kingmaker and PoE2 - but both of those games are excellent, so it's no big deal.

Wow, that's quite an old gold mine you're sitting on then! Not that I'm sure I would like to see all the old posts, as I'm sure a lot of us wrote a bunch of nonsense back then, hah.

Option 1 certainly sounds like the most realistic one. Either that or just make some sort of basic HTML archive of it, which can't be edited in any way.