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’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”.
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.