The Qt3 Top 10 Games of the Decade Voting Thread

I can concurr: my life has become a nightmare since @Chappers forcefully put one on my desk!

Some games just aren’t very long. I don’t need to play through Disco Elysium a dozen times to like it.

Heck, Outer Wilds by design takes less than 22 minutes to beat once you know how. It’s one of my favourite games of the decade, but I’m not going to run through it another 200 times to equal my playtime in the comparatively forgettable Fallout 4…

Fixed for you.

Yeah this game length thing is crazy. I played Stellaris for 400 hours because I really wanted a space grand strategy game, despite it being obvious fairly early that this was not the one. A Short Hike, on the other hand, is a near perfect videogame, which I finished in one evening.

But neither made my list, because my criteria include both love and importance. So Stellaris was neither and A Short Hike is only one of those things, I suspect. Whereas Bloodborne is both a landmark game of the decade, and my favourite game of all time.

Just a reminder that voting closes in about 3 days on this Sunday night.

Reasonably sure I can name the top 5. Not terribly unexpected.

That’s exactly my point - there is a dichotomy that has clearly show up in the thread between games people say are their top games and the games they play the most. Some of the answers have been fascinating - like people who say I just play games I don’t like more than the ones I do! Like, why play games you don’t like when you have games you like more!? It’s a very interesting quirk of human psychology.

Hey, I think somebody just called Richard “human”!

For me at least, influential doesn’t rate. I respect influence a great deal, but it’s not why I’m putting a game in a top 10 list. That is purely based on the experience I personally have with the game.

You just can’t measure (sorry, Tom) fun – or engagement, interest, beauty, obsession, hauntedness, whatever – by the pound. Alien Isolation is a deeply flawed game that I wasn’t even sure I liked when I stopped playing it, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it in the five years since. Its setting absolutely captivated me to a degree that has transcended the (imo problematic) game mechanics. Hearthstone is my GOTD and also probably has the most hours played for me, but I put it at the top because it was the first game since Age of Empires II that I made any concerted effort to play competitively, and because it additionally drew me into the worlds of streaming and e-sports in a way I’d never been before. Skyrim is less a game to me than a place – like Unreal, or Ultima III, or Half-Life, or many other games that have left an indelible mark on me. It’s a place I’ve spent many very enjoyable – many deeply absorbed – hours, and it’s a place I know I’ll go back to, for five minutes or fifty hours or something in between. A minute in Skyrim is felt more intensely than a minute in Hearthstone or Grim Dawn, at least in an atmospheric sense, but it also requires longer chunks of spare time, and is a harder game to just fall back into when you have a short amount of time. It’s also harder to play with other people around, and that’s a factor that has increasingly defined my gaming choices. The word “like” is a rather crude bludgeon to apply to these varieties of interest, response, and circumstance.

There are just a lot of different factors to take into consideration, and ‘amount of time played’ is far from the only one.

Of course, nobody is actually saying that. Nobody puts hundreds of hours into a game they don’t like.

A lot of the angriest negative opinion things in Steam try to prove your last point wrong, although I jest and it seems pretty clear those are just tantrums written by somewhat immature people.

I think you can put hundreds of hours into a game with which you have a love/hate relationship – our relationships to our MMOs are, in my opinion, very complex and not always healthy – but straight up dislike I have a hard time believing, unless you’re somehow doing it for the money (playtesting, esports, reviewing a game and somehow feeling obligated to stick with it for that long). Or yeah, I guess some folks might just really be into hate-playing… God bless 'em?

I can play a game that is very long and enjoy it decently enough, and then play a game that is shorter and enjoy it vastly more. Your posts on this topic are exceedingly dumb.

I have a really hard time understanding that love/hate thing for games, as although some around here define games as surfing the fine line of a player’s frustration, my personal trigger is so sensible I’d rather use my time otherwise (for instance lying in bed just thinking, I kid you not). Of course, that decision is one of the most personal there is, but the perspective of being angry for hours over a game is a terrifying one for me!

At this point, what is the increased convenience that consoles offer? Gone are the days of simply turn on and play. Installation, patches, front end menus, having to screw around with settings, etc.

And the PC has caught up. Gone are the day of fiddly controller support and special video adapters. You can plug in any common controller for PC games on your TV, hooked up with a simple HDMI cable. It’s not uncommon now to see setups with a PC tucked away under a TV just like a console with its wireless controller sitting on the couch. The “couch factor” is now reality for PCs.

At this point it’s pretty much just the momentum of the idea that consoles are easier and more convenient, carried over from the last 30 years when that was actually true.

All this apply if you are a single human living in your home, but as soon as another ape enters the equation, it gets trickier.
This also applies to control support, which is an incredible mess on the PC, being dependant on the goodwill of the game’s developer more often than not, and leading to exciting prospective multiplayer seances to be turned into QA reunions on behalf of the person who put this on Steam.

Finally, the fiddleness of refresh rates and such also yields to issues: after having experienced Bayonetta on the PC and thinking it was “meh”, I was blown away by how amazing the console experience was, all simply because of refresh synching and sound balance issues.

I am one of those people who has PC and PS4 Pro both connected to a TV and plays PC and console games from couch and actually finds PC gaming much more convenient (faster loadings, no fiddling with blurays…). But the fact still remains that PC is more complex and requires more fiddling and troubleshooting from time to time. With console, sure you have to sometimes wait for patches and updates but that’s about it. They are still much more moron-proof than PCs due to their locked down nature.

Oh geez: the swift death of Blu-Ray is another thing I pray for this next decade. Not physical media itself, just Blu-Ray specifically.

Not so much a meaningful technological advancement as an anti-consumer DRM scheme.

The amount of time people get to spend on games is amazing! Here’s my top 10 list of games played (not just those from the last decade) and my total playtime for these 10 games is less than what others spend on their nr 1 game. I’m jealous…

Grim Dawn clearly the winner though, even though it will have been left on overnight a couple of times. That game just has so much replayability!

but I guess my

Yeah that was pretty dumb.