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PC Gamer: 50 Most Important PC Games of All Time

BlackAdderBG

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No Warcraft II ,Heroes of Might and Magic II/III,Diablo II and the original as they had quite different impact(D2 mostly for the multiplayer part).

No, I'm not seeing any of these games deserving to be on the list. Warcraft 2 is just a step between Dune 2 (the game that created the RTS genre) and Starcraft (the pinnacle of RTS games and became a very long-lived e-sport phenomenon).

HoMM is just an enhanced version of King's Bounty, which in turn is just a well-made strategy game. Diablo 2 achieved nothing with its multiplayer (or singleplayer) that hadn't been done before, it's just a good game.

The picture in US may be different as PCs and games came shortly after communism fell ,so everything before 1990 I don't have any perspective on.But I can tell you what were the hottest games people were buying 3-mothnly salaries worth computers just to play them.Dune 2 did jack shit here in Bulgaria,in all internet cafes in mid 90's it was Warcraft II 8 FFA or 4v4 ,it was Doom of the RTS games and in my opinion paved the way for Starcraft.As for King's Bounty no one even head of it until much later ,HoMM is still one of the biggest PC games in Eastern Europe and had greatest impact on gaming as people were buying PC just to play Heroes hotseat.
I'm open so hear if that was not the case for US or western eurpoe ,but these two games had very big impact around here.
 

A user named cat

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I never see a gothic game whenever these lists are made even though they technically came before Morrowind.

Tell us, what did the Gothic games accomplish of note?
Essentially Radiant AI before Todd and crew came along to coin the phrase, then jerked off game journos with lies before implementing a broken version of it in Oblibion and beyond.



Gothic could also be credited for numerous third person ARPG stepchilds it spawned like Kingdoms of Amalur, Two Worlds and Divinity 2.
 
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Not bad...it only has room for 50 titles so there will be a lot of obvious absences, to be "fair" you'd need something that looks like a phonebook. There is some stuff that is good but not really that influential and and some stuff that just happened to sell a lot, but as far as Top X lists go it's decent.
 

CreamyBlood

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I never see a gothic game whenever these lists are made even though they technically came before Morrowind.

Tell us, what did the Gothic games accomplish of note
well the article points at morrowind being important because it brought us to a true 3D world and exploration but Gothic did it first.

And Gothic did it much better. But as unkillable cat asks, was it 'important'? Unfortunately I don't think many people care about Gothic as there really aren't any games like it. Skyrim doesn't count.
 

Raapys

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I think games like Witcher are more inspired by Gothic than e.g. Morrowind, especially seeing as TES games were never proper third person.
 

sullynathan

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I never see a gothic game whenever these lists are made even though they technically came before Morrowind.

Tell us, what did the Gothic games accomplish of note
well the article points at morrowind being important because it brought us to a true 3D world and exploration but Gothic did it first.

And Gothic did it much better. But as unkillable cat asks, was it 'important'? Unfortunately I don't think many people care about Gothic as there really aren't any games like it. Skyrim doesn't count.
then again, was morrowind that important? How many games outside of Beth games were influenced by Morrowind? Forgive me for my ignorance but I can't think of many.
 
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Cool list and some good comments, but the lack of Alone in the Dark is disappointing.

Kudos to mentioning Dota though.
 

Outlander

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007): popularised not only regenerating health (after which point it became universal, whereas before Halo was the only main game to use it), but also the modern-military setting and a perk system in multiplayer for AAA FPS games.

I thought old CoD 2 already 'featured' health regen.
 

sullynathan

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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007): popularised not only regenerating health (after which point it became universal, whereas before Halo was the only main game to use it), but also the modern-military setting and a perk system in multiplayer for AAA FPS games.

I thought old CoD 2 already 'featured' health regen.
If we really want to be technical, Halo had it first and popularized it and also made its way to PC
 

Zboj Lamignat

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HoMM is just an enhanced version of King's Bounty, which in turn is just a well-made strategy game.
Eh, KB should definitely be on the list. It led directly to HoMM series, which is still going strong after 20 years and I'd wager around the turn of century was definitely the most played classic (meaning not rts herpa-derpa) strategy in the world. Around 2000 even women and decliners who only knew shooters and run of the mill rts crap loved to play some HoMM III. It also obviously influenced AoW and Disciples, which became pretty successful and acclaimed series on their own and a lot of less known games.

The list generally lacks strategy games imo.

I also agree that Fallout was not influential. It's a great game, but until the whole shitstarter age it only had two spiritual successors: one a direct sequel and the other a failure called Arcanum. Baldur's Gate games were more influential, though their influence was obviously mostly bad and destructive.
 

Unkillable Cat

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The picture in US may be different as PCs and games came shortly after communism fell ,so everything before 1990 I don't have any perspective on.But I can tell you what were the hottest games people were buying 3-mothnly salaries worth computers just to play them.Dune 2 did jack shit here in Bulgaria,in all internet cafes in mid 90's it was Warcraft II 8 FFA or 4v4 ,it was Doom of the RTS games and in my opinion paved the way for Starcraft.As for King's Bounty no one even head of it until much later ,HoMM is still one of the biggest PC games in Eastern Europe and had greatest impact on gaming as people were buying PC just to play Heroes hotseat.
I'm open so hear if that was not the case for US or western eurpoe ,but these two games had very big impact around here.

The list is not gunning for "most popular" titles, or titles that changed gaming cultures in specific parts of the world. On that note though, I'd LOVE to read such lists from specific regions of the world, so thanks for that insight.

This list is trying to look at the industry for the PC platform as a whole, and see which games were important in the growth and evolution of the platform to where it is today, irregardless of geographical location. The things that benefitted everyone, not just those guys or that bunch.

The HoMM games are awesome (up until 3 anyway) and Diablo 2 is loads of fun and both franchises sold well, but so did loads of other franchises that no one bothers to bring up in regards to this.

Gothic could also be credited for numerous third person ARPG stepchilds it spawned like Kingdoms of Amalur, Two Worlds and Divinity 2.

Except Gothic itself is a stepchild of two other games: Tomb Raider and Ultima 9. Gothic took their basic concept and ran with it, improved upon it in almost every way and released a underappreciated gem of a game...with the emphasis on "underappreciated", which is at least one reason why Gothic doesn't feature on this list. (Taking this one step further...how about King's Quest 8?)

well the article points at morrowind being important because it brought us to a true 3D world and exploration but Gothic did it first.

Thinking about this, I see that Morrowind's reason to be on the list is very thin. Ultima Underworld created a 3D environment which greatly rewarded exploration, but Morrowind is not the pinnacle of that...Morrowind manages "true 3D" and is far larger in scale, but it's not the undisputed champion in these fields. Then there are MMOs like Everquest and WoW which take the whole thing a step further.

Cool list and some good comments, but the lack of Alone in the Dark is disappointing.

An interesting suggestion...but it falls short in the same manner as King's Bounty. It spawned a highly successful franchise (on a console, though) and is the originator of a sub-genre of games, but unlike Dune 2, AitD is only an average game, more of a "proof of concept" than a game IMO.
 

Unkillable Cat

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I finally had a chance of reading the article, and right off the bat I notice one glaring problem (and confirms for me that PC Gamer can't write their way out of a wet paper bag): There are a lot of non-PC games on the list. More specifically, everything pre-dating Microsoft Flight Simulator should not be on there. Those games were NOT developed on PCs, they are not PC-specific titles. They influenced computer games in general, but since the article is gunning for "PC Games", they should stick to that. That means that the first 10 titles on the list should not be there. Yes, even Wizardry 1. (It isn't until Wiz 5 that a PC version is among the first-released versions of the game, and Wiz 6 is the first game in the series that could be called "a PC game".)

That's 20% of the list invalidated in one go. *golfclap*

I'm done with this, the derp is strong with PC Gamer.
 

MicoSelva

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I have to admit, this is a pretty good list. I also like the format a lot with comments of various developers, etc. Overall, a rare :incline: from PCGamer.
 

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