On top of these achievements, Larian have also proven (again, really, after all most of the Infinity Engine games did the same) that it is possible to create an uncompromising, deep, old-school RPG experience while including full campaign coop, a lesson I hope many other developers will take to heart.
Even over the course of 70+ hours and a very combat-heavy final stretch, this ensured that the encounters never got old or repetitive.
Its combination of a polished action point-based free movement system with highly meaningful and novel environmental interaction and a huge variety of spells and skills allows for almost limitless tactical possibilities. I do not say this lightly, or merely to underscore just how good it is having played a good chunk of them, I truly cannot think of any RPG which does turn-based combat better than Divinity: Original Sin. But that s not the whole story: in the process of doing so, they also created what might well be the best turn-based combat system in any RPG ever. With Divinity: Original Sin, the fine folks at Larian Studios managed to fulfill their ambition of providing world interactivity on a level with Ultima 7, which has always felt a decade ahead of its time in that regard. As you might be aware, Might and Magic is owned by Ubisoft these days, and, as the story goes, it is only due to the near super-human persistence and passion of some of their employees-and the success of 2012 s Legend of Grimrock-that the project ever got off the ground. I am still amazed by the fact that this game was even made, and in the shape of a true old-school sequel and not an ill-advised attempt at rebooting the franchise. It combines rewarding exploration and dungeon crawling with great character development and combat systems, and had me glued to my screen throughout its entire duration. Certainly, this is not a choice I d have ever expected to make at the start of the year, but M&MX is the complete package. As a grid-based open-world turn-based first person party RPG, it s a representative of what might be the rarest RPG subgenre of them all. However, if I had to choose, it would come down to Might & Magic X: Legacy. In a year filled with amazing games in my favorite genre, it s hard to select a single one to stand above the rest.
As such, I want to close out the year by providing a quick look at each of my personal highlights, and an even quicker overview of some other worthy candidates. Even genre aficionados might have had trouble keeping up with the deluge of great games throughout the year-these are generally not short games-and it seems all but impossible for the casual fan. While the genre has not died entirely over the past decade, it was kept alive on a sparse diet of shoestring-budget indie titles, and the very rare larger highlight, such as 2007 s Mask of the Betrayer.Īll of this changed in 2014, and it s not looking to stop any time soon. What you won t hear is any year from, say, 2004 to 2013. I like to imagine that when historians of the medium of gaming look back on 2014, they will see it not as the year of half-baked AAA games, not as the time when microtransaction profits surged further ahead, but rather as the first year of the CRPG renaissance.Īsking a fan of the CRPG genre-that is, old-school computer RPGs-about when it reached its peak, you ll likely get a large range of answers, from the late 80s up until the turn of the century. Today, he's celebrating his favorite genre.
He's previously analyzed the PC ports of Dark Souls II and Valkyria Chronicles for PC Gamer. Please read the full Community Rules.Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Soul's DSfix.
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