Monster Hunter World
Never played a Monster Hunter game before this. I have never been into the “Dark Souls” games with their brutal difficulty and timing based attack mechanics, and the Monster Hunter series has been sold in that type of vein, so I was leery. But I dropped nearly 100 hours into this game. The combat system is deep, the mechanics are as complicated as you want them to be, and the learning curb isn’t too terribly steep. There were moments where I was nearly at a controller breaking fury, only to reset, check my loadouts, buff up and re-engage only to be successful. They made one of the densest and hardest to understand game systems approachable, and added an open world aspect to the various maps, which made things feel more modern. Such a great game, and now I am a Monster Hunter person.
Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age
This is a great Dragon Quest game that rivals not only the best Dragon Quests, but the best JRPG’s in history. I think a lot of the negative feedback on this one is due to the difficulty being underwhelming, as well as a slow start and can be grindy. But, I also think that people might have been playing this wrong. The game can be brutally difficult, and doesn’t require any grinding (I haven’t done any?) as all encounters are basically avoidable. I have found that playing through the game, only taking monster encounters every once in a while has resulted in boss battles being decently challenging, which really highlights the excellent combat balance and strategy. Also, this game is gorgeous, and seeing the Toriyama art in beautiful HD on my big TV is awesome.
Slay the Spire
I don’t like card games. I don’t like hearthstone, I don’t like MtG, and in general I don’t like deck-building games. I picked up Slay the Spire in the steam sale, and it ate up my week off. It began innocently enough, just trying out the classes, and looking up some strategies, getting all the way through the third act to only die on the boss with 10% HP left… I have more to do. Getting a good deck together along with some key relics, you really see the balance of the game’s system shine. There is always a counter to your strategy, and covering for those weaknesses is what keeps you alive. I actually started dreaming and thinking in card battles, I think I overloaded my brain with this one.
Rimworld
This is as low on the list as it is, because I played dozens of hours of this game last year, and while it might be unfair, I feel like 2017 was the year of Rimworld for me. Though it didn’t make my top 5 then, (2017 was a strong year) it makes it now. Such an excellent game, a Dwarf-fortress lite set in a sci-fi world? Yes! Emergent gameplay? Yes! Acessible? Yes! (Though I would argue DF is much more accessible than people make it out to be) This game is great, and an amazing accomplishment for a 1 man team. This game needs better art though.
Donut County
Finished this over a weekend, not too long, maybe a bit short… but super charming. Loved the art style, characters, and the little world that was built around this. Fun mechanics, light puzzle solving, and very cute raccoons (trash pandas). Definitely worth checking out.
Honorable mentions: Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, House Flipper
I’ve played 3 2018 videogame releases, but I didn’t really like Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Star Control: Origins enough to want to give either of them points in the competition, so my sole vote for videogames is. . .
Yeah that makes total sense to me. Hand tallying on message boards really is the pits. I was happy to do the update so it works.
True. And you’re not required to draw the line in the same place i did. I just don’t think Rimworld needs to make “the” list for 5+years, kind of like Tom hinted at.
Especially since the browser load mechanics (which silently seem to discard/deactivate posts too far away from whatever you’re looking at currently) of Discourse make it really annoying to do a proper Ctrl-F find in the thread. I had to use the kind obnoxious forum search rather than the built-in browser one to hand-tally a game I was interested in the stats of.
My list appears to be relatively Qt3-mainstream this year:
Into the Breach
Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age
Celeste
Octopath Traveler
Dead Cells
I also played a ton of Slay the Spire (ineligible this year, I think I’m convinced, but would have been #2 otherwise), Artifact (much better than expected but I don’t think I really want it on this list), and Guild Wars 2 (which in a way is “new” every year!). Most of my Dead Cells time was in 2017, but it was good enough to make the list, and I think it’s the better way to be consistent with EA titles.
Right, and I drew it differently. Nothing magical happened to Rimworld last year other than they slapped a 1.0 on there so I didn’t add it to my list. It is definitely a top game for me though. So I agree there.
If you don’t follow procedure with EA games, it will be in detriment of the game itself, as some people will vote for it in one year, others in the next years and others in the release year (in the hypothetical case of a game that needed three years for release), so the votes will be split in three and in the end it won’t appear in the final top 10 of any year.
