Wildermyth - PC Gamer's RPG of the Year 2021

MAHak spotted PC Gamer's RPG of the year 2021:

Best RPG 2021: Wildermyth

This year's best tabletop RPG was digital.

Gather around the table to enjoy the epic tale of our favourite RPG of the year. For more end-of-year awards, head to our GOTY 2021 hub. We'll be updating it throughout the rest of the month.

Robin Valentine, Print Editor: I don't think any videogame has ever more successfully evoked the feel of a tabletop RPG. A few hours in Wildermyth is like a supercut of a fantastic year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign. With the procedural systems as your dungeon master, you follow the lives and adventures of entire parties of heroes, each organically growing and developing in all sorts of unexpected directions. And they really are unexpected--while it's perfectly possible for a warrior to just find a magic sword and kill a dragon with it, it's equally likely they'll be cursed to slowly transform into living crystal, or make a pact with an ancient tree, or upset a witch who turns their head into a raven's.

They even age, fall in love, and have children; eventually they'll retire, if they survive the adventurer's life. They're never really gone, though--your favourites become legacy heroes who can return rejuvenated in subsequent campaigns, like pulling out your favourite old, dog-eared character sheet for yet another dungeon run.

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This is the game I promoted the most to my friends in last few months, but I really didn't expect to be GOTY RPG with Pathfinder, Trudograd or Encased in the same year.

I really enjoyed this game and it deserves more attention. But RPG of the year? Gimme a break.

Wildermyth is not my RPG GOTY but its a very good game & my 2nd fav this year

Wildermyth is imho something unique.
Not only from its graphics.
It has, what a lot of newer RPGs lack of.

I keep hearing such accolades for this game, it's on my acquire list for sure!

Mine too! And so is Wrath of the Righteous, Encased, Solasta, NieR Replicant, and Mass Effect Legendary. Good year for RPGs!

I'm not much of a fan of procedurally-generated RPGs, but at least they didn't pick an action RPG title.

Pathfinder has been done really dirty. Sure it had bugs at launch but it’s one of the mechanically deepest CRPG ever with a damn good story as well.

Yep, Pathfinder certainly deserved that title. Sure, it had (and to a lesser extant, still has) bugs, but it was certainly one of the most complete and ambitious c-rpg ever realized.

PC Gamers, anyway… In 2020 it was Assassin's Creed Valhalla, so it could be very different from one year to the next. It's certainly not a reference for me.

It's all very subjective and hinges on one person's review. Wildermyth was given a 90 (and by whom? Sin Vega, so it's really all about subjectivity and the mood of the day), while Pathfinder got a 76 by someone else. They seem to have a lot of freelance reviewers from all over the place, which doesn't make the scores very consistent.

To be fair, Wildermyth seems to be a very good game and the remarks made on Pathfinder were relevant. The AP Owlcat have chosen certainly puts a constraint on the style of the story, and the game was not ready on release, so at the end of the day it had to count in a (relatively meaningless) single score. But such a huge gap?

Not sure if the PC Gamer reviewer finished more than just 1 campaign but he definitely forgot to mention that you start to see same events and maps pop up as you play more which breaks the immersion/initial ilusion quite a lot.

Hubby and I just started 3rd campaign and more than half the events poped up so far were the ones we experienced in other 2 campaigns. Maybe it wasn't a big deal to the review but it certainly is diminishing fun for us.

Also, we are expericing quite a few bugs/glitches, some co-op specific but some in general. Again, I didn't see any bugs mentioned in the review.

So yeah, definitely subjectivity in play

Subjectivity and perhaps lack of time, I guess they have to rush if they want their article to be picked up by known sites before the competition propose theirs.

Thanks for the warning about glitches and bugs, I'll put this one a bit further out in my "must acquire list".

After reading so much good about this game I've finally picked it up on sale from Voidu. Pretty good price.

Daniel.

Originally Posted by Carnifex
Thanks for the warning about glitches and bugs, I'll put this one a bit further out in my "must acquire list".

For what its worth I experienced no bugs in single player, so it may well have to do with the coop mode. If you're not planning on playing coop, I don't think you have much to worry about.

Not had any bugs in singleplayer either.
Can't say the same for pathfinder

Originally Posted by forgottenlor
For what its worth I experienced no bugs in single player, so it may well have to do with the coop mode. If you're not planning on playing coop, I don't think you have much to worry about.

I would think the combat map glitch isn't co-op related - we had a few instances where we couldn't move our character past some point like there is an invisible wall blocking us. This almost costed us a character because we had to go around a longer way to the enemy while it was blasting us from the distance.

Other bugs we experienced are likely co-op related - vignette bugged out often, kept flicking on its own real fast but it was the same page repeated. The person experiencing had to press escape while the other advance the story vignette and level up all our charactee before we were back at the world map.

Originally Posted by purpleblob1
I would think the combat map glitch isn't co-op related - we had a few instances where we couldn't move our character past some point like there is an invisible wall blocking us. This almost costed us a character because we had to go around a longer way to the enemy while it was blasting us from the distance.

Other bugs we experienced are likely co-op related - vignette bugged out often, kept flicking on its own real fast but it was the same page repeated. The person experiencing had to press escape while the other advance the story vignette and level up all our charactee before we were back at the world map.

I never experienced anything like that, but I know they are still updating the game, so maybe its a newer map which I didn't play.