The most important PC games of the decade

erek

erek

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Without Fallout 3 or New Vegas this list is illegitimate.

"We write all the time about the best games you can play on PC, but the end of the decade is an invitation to examine which games have changed PC gaming itself. This list of 25 is our memory of games that continue to matter for their themes, for their impact on the business or technology of games, for reshaping the relationship between players and developers, for having formed a new genre, or for failing spectacularly. Not all of these games released between 2010 and 2019—following one of the biggest trends of this decade, some PC games have had tectonic effects on our hobby long after their launch day."

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-pc-games-of-the-decade/
 
erek said:
Without Fallout 3 or New Vegas this list is illegitimate.
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QFT

Also, the story behind FFXIV is oversimplified (rant time). During early closed Alpha, they had the workings of a good gameplay system developing that only really needed tweaking and curtailing, but SE's development staff caved into the outbursts of a handful of very vocal testers from both sides of the pond and the systems kept evolving into less comprehensive and cohesive trash with every new iteration. This kept happening until the end of closed Beta when it was too late to make major changes for the better.

Open Beta seemed to go smoothly mostly due to the fact that the flaws in the systems weren't critical at early progression (aside from making systems over-complicated if you wanted to really get into them), but upon release they were overly apparent when you began to progress into end-game content and the difficulty curve spiked due to poor synergy of overlapping mechanics (too many/long movement transitions, animation locking for visual fidelity, weak consumable item properties, over-complicated/convoluted/non-synergistic class systems, over-complicated crafting systems with high-RNG ranges, ect.).

What it came down to was a lack of proper communication between the dev. team and whole community and an over-willingness of the dev. team to please those that spoke out the most.
 
I've played 2 of those (Skyrim and Witcher 3) and have 1 in my Steam backlog (XCOM 2). I have no plans to play the other 22 games on their list.
 
erek said:
Without Fallout 3 or New Vegas this list is illegitimate
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The list is pretty underwhelming, but the article says, "The most important PC games of the decade - 25 influential games that defined 2010-2019". Fallout 3 released in 2008, so it isn't a game from the past decade. New Vegas came out in 2010, though.

But, personally, I don't think Fallout 3 belongs on any best-of list, largely for the reasons explained in this 5-part analysis: The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 1 - and the fact that the same terribleness permeates nearly every aspect of that game's design.
 
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Sorry but that list is garbo, while yes some games do deserve to be there there are some absolutely crap games that offered nothing towards game development in any way other than being able to run on potatos. How Bad Company 2 is not on the list is a crime, the game was the birth of Frostbite that Dice ultimately used in BF3/4 to literally drive Call of Duty dominance of online FPS market off the cliff. The frostbite engine is by far the best physics and graphical game engine out and it is the only real engine that incorporates optimizations for high thread count benefits. That all started from Bad Company 2.

Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 should be on the list as well as ARMA 3, if i am also being Bias the Metro series should be on there as well.
 
List is pretty good but there are some odd choices. Not all the games have to be great to be impactful. A lot of games that deserve mention have been terrible for gaming as a whole. See TF2. But you can't deny the cartoon look and monetization via cosmetics (in the west) that has taken the industry hostage since TF2's launch.
 
If this is a list of games for the last decade, why are half of them pre-2010? Yes I understand that people still we're playing them beyond 2010, but come on. Might as well put quake 2 on there while you're at it.

And then I saw Farmville...excuse me while I clean the vomit off my phone.
 
viivo said:
Saw the Fortnite image and immediately closed the tab. Up yours, PC Gamer.
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Lol, the most popular game in the world for 2+ years, available on all platforms, with the most aggressive content delivery schedule ever seen... And you want them to skip it on an important games of the decade list? It's not a best games of the decade list.

Epic's update schedule alone makes Fortnite worthy of the list as it set an impossibly high bar that other online service games would be compared to.
 
Hi All

This list is completely subjective. Each of us here potentially has their own list. We just don't have a magazine to publish ours
 
list is important, not best. and yes subjective. even though i loathe Fortnite, no one can deny how it has shaped gaming, for better or worse.
 
jtm55 said:
Hi All

This list is completely subjective. Each of us here potentially has their own list. We just don't have a magazine to publish ours
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Actually, based on the criteria of importance to the industry, the list starts to fall out of being subjective and into objective. On that front, there is a lot of fail in this list.

4saken said:
list is important, not best. and yes subjective. even though i loathe Fortnite, no one can deny how it has shaped gaming, for better or worse.
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Agreed. However, I'd argue that many of those titles still do not belong on that list.
 
List is crap without iCarly 2: iJoin the Click!
 
I mean these are without a doubt the biggest and important games. No one is saying they’re the best. At least here.

We get it your preferred game isn’t here. Womp womp womp.
 
I guess it means I'm getting old when I look at a list like this, bristle, then realize everything I was thinking wasn't released this decade.
 
Ha! ..... Farmville.

farmville.jpg


Surprised Pokemon Go was not listed. While still locked in their cells, at least it got all those pasty couch kids out side for a while. And maybe they met real people along the way.
 
erek said:
Without Fallout 3 or New Vegas this list is illegitimate.

"We write all the time about the best games you can play on PC, but the end of the decade is an invitation to examine which games have changed PC gaming itself. This list of 25 is our memory of games that continue to matter for their themes, for their impact on the business or technology of games, for reshaping the relationship between players and developers, for having formed a new genre, or for failing spectacularly. Not all of these games released between 2010 and 2019—following one of the biggest trends of this decade, some PC games have had tectonic effects on our hobby long after their launch day."

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-pc-games-of-the-decade/
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Fallout 3 came out in 2008. Wrong decade.
 
Delicieuxz said:
The list is pretty underwhelming, but the article says, "The most important PC games of the decade - 25 influential games that defined 2010-2019". Fallout 3 released in 2008, so it isn't a game from the past decade. New Vegas came out in 2010, though.

But, personally, I don't think Fallout 3 belongs on any best-of list, largely for the reasons explained in this 5-part analysis: The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 1 - and the fact that the same terribleness permeates nearly every aspect of that game's design.
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HIndsight may be 2020, but Fallout 3 was pretty darned good at the time. And the opening segment in the vault is worth the price of admission.
 
OrangeKhrush said:
Sorry but that list is garbo, while yes some games do deserve to be there there are some absolutely crap games that offered nothing towards game development in any way other than being able to run on potatos. How Bad Company 2 is not on the list is a crime, the game was the birth of Frostbite that Dice ultimately used in BF3/4 to literally drive Call of Duty dominance of online FPS market off the cliff. The frostbite engine is by far the best physics and graphical game engine out and it is the only real engine that incorporates optimizations for high thread count benefits. That all started from Bad Company 2.

Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 should be on the list as well as ARMA 3, if i am also being Bias the Metro series should be on there as well.
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Frostbyte started with Bad Company 1
 
Games of the decade.

The Witcher 3 (Game of the decade)

Runners up,

Metro Last Light & Skyrim.



Suck it , PC gamer.
 
chameleoneel said:
HIndsight may be 2020, but Fallout 3 was pretty darned good at the time. And the opening segment in the vault is worth the price of admission.
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As a glittering gem of hatred, I'll state that the Bethesda Fallout games have always been steaming piles.
 
jfreund said:
As a glittering gem of hatred, I'll state that the Bethesda Fallout games have always been steaming piles.
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I dunno about anything after Fallout 3. But, if Fallout 3 wasn't named Fallout, I think it probably would have been a raging success. Rather than just a big success.
 
chameleoneel said:
HIndsight may be 2020, but Fallout 3 was pretty darned good at the time. And the opening segment in the vault is worth the price of admission.
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I know that many people enjoyed the game back then, and might still today. But when it released I couldn't bear to play it because I found it all way too cringey, including the intro vault sequence. I feel the same way about it today. And the inventory system... doesn't exist - it's just one big container that holds everything and is impossible to navigate. That alone renders the game semi-unplayable.

Coming across that article details the extreme absurdities of the writing was comforting to me in that is said what I felt at first contact with the game and what I'd criticized the game for being for years while facing backlash for it. I was also banned from Bethesda's forum for calling out their terrible writing and designs.

Bethesda need to hire an actual writer. The idiot(s) they had writing Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 shouldn't be writing for a profession because they lack even an amateur's skill for it.

Out of the whole gaming industry, Bethesda led the charge in dumbing-down gaming (Oblivion's quest markers and simplified writing being the first move) and in pioneering exploitative microtransactions (Horse Armor) and paid mods. The gaming community has historically turned a blind eye to Bethesda's scummery and fed their egos and encouraged them to continue in their terrible game designs and abusive business practices. It will be a long while yet before there is a full correction to public perception of Bethesda. They are a terrible company and they have historically been terrible at making games, since at least Fallout 3, though with signs of their loss of any capability for quality design detectable already in Oblivion.

I think that the gaming community at large values hype for hype's sake, and they treat it like a party and don't like anyone to rain on it.

Another example was DICE's selling-out with Battlefield 3 and all the dumbing-down and stripped stuff from that game compared to Battlefield 2. Nobody wanted to hear about it, but now DICE is pretty universally criticized for just doing exactly the same approach they did with Battlefield 3 - that of ever dumbing-down the gameplay, removing features, moving more towards a run-and-gun arena free-for-all. I made a post on Angry Joe's forum in the Bf3 days pointing out all the compromises DICE made for the console audience and how lacking Bf3 is compared to Bf2, and Joe banned me from his forum for raining on the hype parade. Now Joe makes a lot of the same complaints about Bf5, and has even apologized in a video of his for not seeing what people had been saying about DICE for a long time. All that DICE did in Bf5 and Bf1 was exactly what they did in Bf3: gravitate towards ever dumbing-down the experience and streamlining it into a pew pew fest with minimal other considerations. They're a sell-out studio that has always chased the sleazy dollar and thrown their own game under the bus to do it.

And so, the community at large has often refused to see what is in plain sight. The gaming community bears some responsibility for Bethesda's scummy practices because Bethesda was doing them all along and the gaming community was not caring about it and was defending Bethesda of those things.
 
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Far Cry 3?

It redefined the entire FC franchise and is, what I consider, to be the new "first" game of the series.

4 was cool.

5 is utterly amazing.
 
DejaWiz said:
Far Cry 3?

It redefined the entire FC franchise and is, what I consider, to be the new "first" game of the series.

4 was cool.

5 is utterly amazing.
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I haven't played any after the first. I'll have to give these a shot.
 
I haven't heard of most of those games but Mass Effect 3 is on there so I can't gripe too much.

Ending controversy aside, the first 98% of that game is just a masterpiece with an atmosphere and emotional connection I've never found in any video game in the nearly 40 years I've been playing them. Add in the extended ending and the Citadel DLC and I consider it the best game ever made.
 
OrangeKhrush said:
The frostbite engine is by far the best physics and graphical game engine out and it is the only real engine that incorporates optimizations for high thread count benefits. That all started from Bad Company 2.
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It may lack in physics comparatively but MT Framework has been pushing high thread counts since before Frostbite existed (Lost Planet 1 circa 2007), and pushed graphics quite well in the previous generation. Not to shit on Frostbite, but it’s hardly the only engine that does what it does.

I just wish that Frostbite and Framework MT were licensed out to compete with Unreal Engine. Fewer UE games would be good in my opinion.
 
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