RPG Codex - Top 101 PC RPGs

Everyone is under influence of their own social bubble which creates some level of bias towards any topic. As per my opinion, development of modern communications ironically made influence of social bubbles stronger, as it is much easier to find and flock with people of similar views. No matter, being it politics, migration or computer games.

If anybody can share out of the top 101 list which of those games have excellent questing, as in multiple ways to solve Quests, and going by obsidian’s three pillars: dialogue, stealth or combat resolution for Quests. I consider that one of my most important aspects of RPGs, that I like.

Examples of games that I really liked quest mechanics/writing in, is Arcanum, Fallout 1 and 2, Fallout New Vegas and Deus Ex.
Games I have, and I'm either playing or going to soon are Shadowrun dragonfall, Pathfinder kingmaker, Hero U, Serpent in the staglands, age of decadence.

I have Underrail and I played the first build I found the writing for quests to be pretty bland and there wasn't a ton of options. I don't know if the newer builds quests are better, anybody have any info on that?

I would guess that Divinity OS 1&2 would have good questing and environmental interactivity which I like.
Of the others which have the best multiple ways to approach Quests and good Quest writing, not just fetch quests?

Dude, you are really making us work to understand what you are talking about. Proofread and format those sentences please.

rjshae said:

I see Grimoire made it on the list, and at #22 -- ahead of many more widely acclaimed games. Hmm… Has anybody actually finished that game? I can barely stand blobbers any more, so not my cup of tea.

Click to expand...

Grimoire is #22 on the list of top RPGs of ALL TIME? That alone automatically invalidates the list, as far as I'm concerned. What exactly about Grimoire is so new, innovative or "great" that it should be #21 on a list of the greatest RPGs in history? It's basically a rehash of the gameplay and features of much better games that were made over 15 years ago.

When I loaded Grimoire and tried to play, the game completely locked up and froze, and I had to use Task Manager to kill it. GREAT GAME!!

Maybe the title is just misleading. They should have called this "the favorite games of the 234 guys we could get to do a survey, from the handful that they played during the last year or two".

I bet the 234 people who took the survey never even played 75% of the games on the list.

HellRazor said:

Grimoire is #22 on the list of top RPGs of ALL TIME? That alone automatically invalidates the list, as far as I'm concerned. What exactly about Grimoire is so new, innovative or "great" that it should be #21 on a list of the greatest RPGs in history? It's basically a clone of a lot of much better games made over 15 years ago.

When I loaded Grimoire and tried to play, the game completely locked up and froze, and I had to use Task Manager to kill it. GREAT GAME!!

Maybe the title is just misleading. They should have called this "the favorite games of the 234 guys we could get to do a survey, from the handful that they played during the last year or two".

Click to expand...

Well many games on that list had and still have issues such as this (and some use fan made patches to fix such issues).
Technical difficulties never prevented great games (Pathfinder: Kingmaker) to overshadow average games without such difficulties (Pillars of Eternity).

Archangel said:

Well many games on that list had and still have issues such as this (and some use fan made patches to fix such issues).
Technical difficulties never prevented great games (Pathfinder: Kingmaker) to overshadow average games without such difficulties (Pillars of Eternity).

Click to expand...

I agree, and I don't even dispute that Grimoire is a fun game. (I couldn't get it to run, and this was as of last week! But some seem to like it).

Maybe I am just being too picky. My issue is probably the title and description of the list. If the list was titled something like "Top 101 Favorite RPGs" it would be a more accurate description.

But if they call it "101 Top RPGs" and said the voting was intended to determine the Top RPGs of all time. No way, no how is Grimoire one of the Top RPGs of all time. (Well, I guess it depends on what is used to define "Top" but you know what I mean).

In fairness, they do add "As with the previous one, the rankings after the Top 20-30 games are not as important, it should really seen as a list of interesting games to try out."

I'm probably being too anal about it, lol. I'm half joking, I know it's all in fun anyways.

(Although there are some pretty mind boggling omissions. Yeah, I get it, it's popular over there to trash Skyrim, it's kind of the trendy cool thing to do. But if this list is supposed to represent the top RPGs of all time, Skyrim surely should be placed on that list somewhere. It only sold a few gazillion copies, surely someone must have liked it.)

Well like all the lists, it is made by people using their subjective criteria.
Skyrim would surely get on any list that counted number of sales, but that is then another list.
I still consider this list better than what many gaming sites do where they makes lists based on likes of 1 to 3 journalists that work there.

Also lets compare this with movies. Imdb top250 list of best movies ever (which I consider to have most merit as it is based on lots and lots of votes and filters out crusaders vs something that give fake scores), when you look at it, it has very small number of movies there that earned lots and lots of money but their quality is questionable.
In top 50 there is only two Avenger movies, and the 2019 one should not be counted (any 2019 movies should be ignored as movie scores always go down after a while as more people watch them and rate them, people with more objective outlook on quality of movies). Further Titanic and Avatar are nowhere to be found but certainly they could easily be Skyrim of movie world, no?

But to make my point. I think people on Codex (and here) on average have better/more experienced taste than general public at large and are better qualified to look at quality of things objectively and give a more fair score.
Of course that does not mean it is perfect or anything, but it should not be just dismissed as only 234 guys or something.

Of course, one should not get butthurt that what they really like is not on the list. Nobody can tell you what you like. Nobody but you can decide that Skyrim is your best game ever just like no IMDB list can tell you that you are wrong for loving Avatar over any other movie.
But one also has to respect opinions of others and accept their view on things and reasons behind those views.

Yeah, it is a definitely a better list than most. Some of these gaming sites with "best RPG" lists don't even seem to know what an RPG is.

I totally agree that sales don't necessarily equal quality. AVATAR made a shitload of money, but I doubt it is on too many people's "Top 5 Best Movies Ever Made" list. While CITIZEN KANE was a box office flop, but is considered by many critics to be one of the best movies of all time.

And I know its all subjective, but I personally don't see how anyone familiar with these games can say with a straight face that Grimoire, Might and Magic X, Wizards and Warriors, Heroine's Quest, Space Rangers 2, etc. are better RPGs than Skyrim. Hell, a good argument can be made that a few of the games on the list are barely even RPGs at all.

But like I said, this is really more of a list of "our community's favorite RPGs" which is a whole different thing than "all time best RPGs in RPG history". There is usually criteria to define "best", but the only criteria for "favorite" is personal preference, which isn't really debatable (as you said).

Has the list been changed already? What was Grimoire ranked? I just went and looked again and now I don't see it.

*Edit* Ok, my eyes were playing tricks on me. I see it at #22.

Yeah… that's a complete joke when you have games like Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, The Witcher, System Shock 2, Might & Magic 4/5/6, and ToEE all ranked lower.

I almost think it was placed there to troll people.

Was a fun list to look at. Any list that has Wizardry and Might and Magic 2 on it can't be all bad. Also, Battle Brothers made the list so that's cool.

Archangel said:

Dude, you are really making us work to understand what you are talking about. Proofread and format those sentences please.

Click to expand...

Sorry late at night combined with phone autocomplete messed up that post, it is fixed now, can you take a look at it and let me know what you guys think?

Tactician said:

If anybody can share out of the top 101 list which of those games have excellent questing, as in multiple ways to solve Quests, and going by obsidian’s three pillars: dialogue, stealth or combat resolution for Quests. I consider that one of my most important aspects of RPGs, that I like.

Examples of games that I really liked quest mechanics/writing in, is Arcanum, Fallout 1 and 2, Fallout New Vegas and Deus Ex.
Games I have, and I'm either playing or going to soon are Shadowrun dragonfall, Pathfinder kingmaker, Hero U, Serpent in the staglands, age of decadence.

I have Underrail and I played the first build I found the writing for quests to be pretty bland and there wasn't a ton of options. I don't know if the newer builds quests are better, anybody have any info on that?

I would guess that Divinity OS 1&2 would have good questing and environmental interactivity which I like.
Of the others which have the best multiple ways to approach Quests and good Quest writing, not just fetch quests?

Click to expand...

I would say to try out Gothic 1 and 2, age of decadence and the banner saga

Sent from my SM-G975F using Tapatalk

Archangel said:

Of course, one should not get butthurt that what they really like is not on the list. Nobody can tell you what you like. Nobody but you can decide that Skyrim is your best game ever just like no IMDB list can tell you that you are wrong for loving Avatar over any other movie.
But one also has to respect opinions of others and accept their view on things and reasons behind those views.

Click to expand...

Just when I thought I was out, you go and pull me back in! Hehe

Did I hear someone mention stats? IMDB? Ok, here we go:

The closest the game industry has to IMDB is the much ignored Metacritic ratings, in particular the user ratings which copy the 'out of ten' premise of IMDB. You are right though that it's not really ideal, because it's used so infrequently and because game players haven't yet mastered the art of not giving everything either a 0 or 10. I have no idea why games induce the inner fanboy so much more than movies, but my best guess is that because film critique is taken seriously whereas gaming critique tends to boil down to who's paid what to whom

Anyway, I looked at all the codex top 20 on Metacritic's user ratings and Arcanum doesn't really hold up against the really big hitters:

11 games from the codex's top 20 score better than Arcanum.

The games that score the same as Arcanum are: Fallout: New Vegas, Gothic and, because I also looked up the games I thought had been cruelly missed out, it also scored the same as King's Bounty: The Legend.

Which is about right IMO, they're all games which have some specific novelty about them while not necessarily having that magic sauce to be an individual giant.

The giants from the codex's list being games that scored 9.0 or more, such as BG2, Witcher 3, PS:T, Fallout 2, Dues Ex. With games like Gothic 2, Morrowind, VtMB and BG biting at the heels at 8.9.

Some other interesting stats from there:

Avernum: Escape From The Pit scores the same as Knights of the Old Republic 2, The Banner Saga scores the same as Age of Decadence.

-------------------------------

Now, I have issues with Metacritc as well, of course, but I find no complaint in the comparisons I've made above, even if the scores are ludicrous, the like-for-like comparison actually works for those I've highlighted from a more objective/academic critique standpoint.

Tactician said:

If anybody can share...

Click to expand...

You might be better off starting a thread in the General RPG Discussion Board rather than bury your request via a derail to this topic. You might even get some recommendations that aren't related to a random poll

HellRazor said:

And I know its all subjective, but I personally don't see how anyone familiar with these games can say with a straight face that Grimoire, Might and Magic X, Wizards and Warriors, Heroine's Quest, Space Rangers 2, etc. are better RPGs than Skyrim. Hell, a good argument can be made that a few of the games on the list are barely even RPGs at all.

Click to expand...

Well, as you point out it's subjective and "better" might mean better graphics,
better writing, better character building, better combat mechanics etc. So in the end (to me) the question which is better is synonym with "which did you enjoy more?". And yes, both Space Rangers 2 and Might and Magic X would beat Skyrim on my list.

TomRon said:

Well, as you point out it's subjective and "better" might mean better graphics,
better writing, better character building, better combat mechanics etc. So in the end (to me) the question which is better is synonym with "which did you enjoy more?". And yes, both Space Rangers 2 and Might and Magic X would beat Skyrim on my list.

Click to expand...

Yep, M&M X was way better than Skyrim. As for the rest of his list, the only one I tried playing is W&W and I didn't care for it much, but I'd still probably rather play it than Skyrim.

I'm another person that would agree that Might and Magic Ten was superior to Skyrim. I don't even have a ubisoft account, and I enjoyed the heck out of that game.

Carnifex said:

I'm another person that would agree that Might and Magic Ten was superior to Skyrim. I don't even have a ubisoft account, and I enjoyed the heck out of that game.

Click to expand...

How did you play it without an Ubisoft account?

I put over 150 hours into MMX and the expansion. Good game, but I don't think I'll ever replay it. It got way too grindy towards the end.

Ahhh, a friend of mine brought his laptop over and let me borrow it for a few weeks, and didn't mind me using his account. I thought it was great, but I doubt that I'll ever replay it, mostly due to the hassle of using another platform.