Not that these are bad games, but I feel like the weighting here is a bit heavy on older games.
The first game on the list released after 2004 is Fallout: New Vegas at #10 (and that’s still 2010).
The first game released this decade is at position #29.
That seems like it’s either got a fair bit of weight on older RPGs, or is saying that the PC RPG has really gone into a substantial amount of decline.
Ordinarily, I’d expect a ranking to tend to be loading towards newer games, if anything, because developers of newer games can see what people have done in the past and what worked, often have larger budgets, and have fewer technical constraints.
There are some old-game-favoring statements here that I’d maybe agree with. I wouldn’t call it an RPG, but:
#14 - Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech, 1999)
Cholo: The king of turn-based squad level tactics games, which no competitor has been able to dethrone in fifteen years.
I’m inclined to agree with that. I enjoyed that game, have looked for turn-based squad-based tactical games, and I can’t personally name a later game that I’d prefer to it. The later games in the series didn’t really live up to the bar it set. The newer X-COMs have too much fluff for me. Silent Storm has some technical improvements like bullet penetration and destructable structures, but isn’t as good a game.
There are probably 2 reasons why this list is biased towards old games:
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The RPG genre is a genre that basically died somewhere in the 2000s. Newer entries are mostly games by smaller studios that got kickstarted or went through early access. They are good but cannot really keep up with the nostalgia forthe old Fallouts and Baldurs Gates. Many modern games borrow a lot of RPG mechanics (e.g. Assassins Creed) but are not considered RPGs at least by RPGCodex users and so do not make it onto the list.
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RPGCodex is a weird place. The average user over there hates videogames and/or itself. Just look in the comments under this article.
Another potential factor, I guess, is that what “top” means is not fixed. When I see a “top list”, I think “what are the best games in the context of the time that the list is written”. Like, advice on what games one should play today.
But it’d also be legitimate to create a top list to just recognize the studios that created a game, ranking them taking into account in the context of their time. Like, there are certainly games here that advanced the genre. I’d have an easier time swallowing some of this if the ranking is to be taken in a “context of the time” thing.
I see a similar debate surrounding Citizen Kane in movie rankings. The movie is often featured very highly in some movie rankings, even at the top. However, a lot of people are not really that into watching it. Thing is, it introduced a lot of things that later movies then adopted, stuff that we kind of take for granted now. So if you’re looking to give credit to the movie’s creators, then it might rank very highly, but many people are looking for a ranking as to what movies to watch today, and don’t think that the movie ranks nearly as highly today.
Example:
https://www.cbr.com/citizen-kane-still-greatest-film-all-time/
Citizen Kane Is Still the Greatest Film of All Time
Entertainment enthusiasts love to debate what the best of all time in any given medium is, and in most cases, they conclude with the one that changed the game. When television fans discuss the greatest show ever, they usually narrow it down to The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad. All three were created decades after television existed, but they change the way people viewed TV shows. Citizen Kane released nearly 50 years after the birth of cinema, but it changed the way people watched and made movies. Other iconic films that changed the game were made around the time of Citizen Kane like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Casablanca, but Welles’ movie leaves the more lasting impression because it combines the Hollywood budget with the genius of a bold and young outsider.
Citizen Kane may not be as entertaining as some that came after it nor does it tend to be on the top of everyone’s personal favorite movies list, but when talking about the most respected and influential movies ever made, it’s always near the top of that conversation.
I think that maybe some of the problem is that we should just use different terms, to avoid confusion between the two types of lists. Like, instead of “top”, maybe “ground-breaking” for lists of the “innovative” category, and “best movies to watch today” for lists of the “what’s most enjoyable to watch in the present time” sort.
I would not recommend Wolfenstein 3D or Doom as a first-person shooter in 2024. But if one asked me for a list of the most influential first-person shooter games…well, they might be pretty high on that list. If I wanted games like that, I’d be looking for games that introduced ideas or technical improvements that were then widely-adopted. For example, regenerating shields are now very common in first-person shooters. They solve a gameplay problem that plagued early first-person shooters where a person would save a game with very low health reserves and get caught in a very difficult situation; players didn’t like that. I think that it might have been Halo that popularized that mechanic. Is the original Halo the best FPS to play in 2024? Well, it’s playable – I played it the other day, in fact. But it’s probably not where I’d direct a new player to the genre asking me for the best game for them to play. But sure, it was influential.
I remember that a lot of early computer RPGs followed many conventions introduced by Dungeons & Dragons from the time, like stat scales modeled on a 3d6 dice roll, skill progression decoupled from skill use (e.g. I can gain “experience points” from doing one thing that I can then apply to something else, which seems a bit unintuitive), the concept of discrete classes with equipment restrictions. Dungeons & Dragons was quite influential, introduced a lot of useful ideas, but some of its rules were designed around pencil-and-paper play – it needed to keep the math quick and simple. I remember being delighted by the fact that in the original Fallout, gaining a stat point really was something that you could feel, whereas in Dungeons & Dragons, it tended to be a smaller effect (and particular tiers were more important, where modifiers got changed). And it took some time for computer RPGs to shift away from those conventions. I think that games that introduced those different mechanics were important for the genre, but…that doesn’t necessarily make a given game itself something top-tier that I want to play in 2024.
Your Citizen Kane example is great, and another frequently cited victim of the same phenomenon is Seinfeld. In fact, the TVtropes article about it used to be called “Seinfeld is unfunny”.
That’s how I feel about the Beatles! A couple bangers, but most of their songs are incredibly mid-to-boring. At the time, though, they were revolutionary.
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There’s something seriously wrong with authors of this list. Read the reviews of The Witcher 3 or Baldur’s Gate 3. Divinity: Original Sin 2 (or 1) is nowhere to be found. Skyrim didn’t make Top 70 RPGs? The order of the list… They seem to be living in the old days, replaying the same old games and not accepting anything new. This looks more like some kind of manifesto than a ranking. And just for the record, I did play the classic Fallouts, Baldurs, Ice Winds etc.
I don’t see why you’re outraged over their reviews of The Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3. In my opinion, those brief reviews in this article are some of the most accurate and fair summaries of both of those games, highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of each in a way most people don’t. They conclude that both are worth playing, but also bring up commonly cited flaws in each.
Going off those two reviews alone makes me more inclined to trust their judgement, not less.
Mass Effect 1 at #49?? List is utter trash.
And, no, I do not believe that my creation of a “show” made from editing my full ME1 gameplay has biased me at all. 😤
Also, I think that this (and most Best X of All Time lists) would be better served by breaking things down to eras, rather than trying to rank “of All Time”.
The majority of the first 15 entries on this list are PC-only that require some difficulty to acquire let alone get playing well on modern machines. This isn’t a list where a younger gamer could just jump and start playing through the titles, from both the age of the graphics and the mechanics of the older titles to simply getting these games playing through something like Steam or GoG. Even playing Baldur’s Gate through its Xbox remaster has been hard for me because it just takes a completely different gaming strategy to play a game that old.
Breaking this list into like 90 to early 00s, mid-00s to mid-2010s, and mid-2010 to 2020+ would differentiate this list and introduce gamers to more relevant games.
Diablo II being 20 position under the first Diablo shows that the list is mostly nostalgia driven. Diablo II was peak “let’s take everything they loved and make it more of that for the sequel”.
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I can understand why most of the titles made it onto the list, but I can’t agree at all with the order of the list. The order was clearly made by some people who are heavily nostalgic towards older games. I’ve played Dragon Age Origins and The Witcher 3, and there’s not even a question in my mind that DAO is the better RPG out of the two. And, to me, also the better game (I can’t even understand how people find that the hours of cutscenes right in the beginning of TW3 is somehow fine). And don’t get me wrong, I love Dark Souls, but DS can’t be classified as a pc rpg unless you’re tripping. It’s an action game with rpg elements. I’ve also played Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, and those games are not that good if you remove your nostalgia glasses. And I played both of those when I was a kid, so you can’t tell me it’s because I didn’t experience them in their time period. The writers of this list seem to love clunkyness and perceived potential above all else. The clunkier a game, the better. As seen on that high of an evaluation of Kingmaker, another game I played, can see as cool, but can’t bring myself to truly respect when they made the stupid decision to make combat spells like web last for their real 10 minutes time even after combat has ended, so that I had to stare at my screen for 10 minutes while my stupid dwarf failed check after check to get out of the web, and I had to actually wait 10 whole minutes for the spell to end. As an actual DM for TRPGs for 20+ years, taking rules from tabletop rpgs and porting them to videogames 1:1 just shows a lacking understanding of game design. A game with such an obvious flaw makes no sense to be placed that high into the list.
