Darkwood perhaps shouldn't be there, maybe, but it's my favorite indie game at this current point in time.
Also Doom should perhaps be there instead of Duke 3D. Fucking impossible to decide. So many games I wanted to list.
Maybe one day I will resurrect my top 100 list.
Can't have Arx Fatalis but not Ultima Underworld. I like Arx Fatalix, but everything in it, Ultima Underworld didn't just inspire, it did a lot better.
Thief games are overrated here. It's not that they aren't good, but they are not as great as the hivemind would have you believe. This is coming from someone who played them when they originally came out.
I’m not even debating the Thief games being the greatest games ever. I’m just specifically pointing to the bit where New Vegas is somehow a better pick than Thief 2.
Thief games might be better at what they do than New Vegas, but New Vegas is an open world RPG, which puts it much higher than a stealing/sneaking oriented stealth game. There is a reason why stealth games are relatively few in number, sneaking around and stealing stuff is not as fun for most people as fighting, getting better gear, participating in dialogue, exploring, and everything else that a fully fledged RPG offers.
Stealth games on average probably do better than most RPGs, especially when RPGs were still truly RPGs as opposed to action games with skill trees or something.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best selling “RPGs” of the 21st century and it’s largely just a stealth game with a few unrelated side activities.
Uhh, I completed Cyberpunk without using any stealth. It's an RPG, with multiple ways to play it. And dialogue. And driving. And a bunch of other stuff that Thief doesn't have.
Thief games are overrated here. It's not that they aren't good, but they are not as great as the hivemind would have you believe. This is coming from someone who played them when they originally came out.
I’m not even debating the Thief games being the greatest games ever. I’m just specifically pointing to the bit where New Vegas is somehow a better pick than Thief 2.
Thief games might be better at what they do than New Vegas, but New Vegas is an open world RPG, which puts it much higher than a stealing/sneaking oriented stealth game. There is a reason why stealth games are relatively few in number, sneaking around and stealing stuff is not as fun for most people as fighting, getting better gear, participating in dialogue, exploring, and everything else that a fully fledged RPG offers.
New Vegas is an open-world RPG whose only above average elements are plot/dialogue and C&C. Combat sucks and level design is mediocre. Exploration is serviceable but far from the best we've seen in the genre.
Thief not only has superb stealth mechanics, it also has some of the best designed levels in the history of gaming. They're so good that if you took them and copypasted the most barebones RPG character progression system you can imagine on top of it, it would win the Codex RPG of the year contest by a huge margin. Yet, it doesn't really need that, the variety of tools and approaches for doing stealth alone are already more than enough to feel motivated to check every corner. Why would I want to get +1 defense with a new armor or a bunch of crafting materials when I can steal nice treasure and use it to get some nice arrows and gadgets?
Might also add that Thief did interactive narrative elements much better than most games that came after: by having the player overhear enemy grunts talking and find hand-written letters instead of putting half the lore in emails and recordings you find in dead bodies*
*more of a rant toward SS than FNV.
Meh, like I said overrated. What can be so great about level design when you are only sneaking around and looking for shit for mission goals? And come on, how many levels in first 2 Thief games where you are just crawling around some mines or caves, dealing with annoying undead.
The first two Thief games also have some pretty fantastic first person melee combat despite the whole point of the game being to avoid combat. They’ve got better melee combat than any Bethesda game has ever had despite Bethesda’s games being combat centric, and the Elder Scrolls series being a fantasy series with sword fights being the major way you’ll likely do combat. I’d say that until Breakdown came around in 2004, the Thief games had the best first person melee combat of any game around.
The melee combat was so good in Thief it was a little mind boggling that they removed it in Thief: Deadly Shadows.
By the time Bethesda was up to Skyrim, and the sword combat and stealth still sucked, it was pretty aggravating. Its like: You stupid motherfuckers, Thief came out like 13 years ago, just rip this shit off you fucking hacks.
The melee combat you couldn't use (on harder difficulty)? With animations so shitty, you can't tell what the enemy is doing until it's too late? Let's not use Bethesda as a watermark for melee combat please.
Can't have Arx Fatalis but not Ultima Underworld. I like Arx Fatalix, but everything in it, Ultima Underworld didn't just inspire, it did a lot better.
Fake news. There are many things Arx did better than UW. Controls, sound design, visuals/art direction, some of the RPG systems, sense of realism, actually having full screen viewport, soundtrack consisting of unique tracks per area not just the same tune on repeat, and then some. There are also indeed many things UW did better too, but 11 years of technological advancement (1991-2002) really provides contrast here.
UUW/Arx are games where gameplay is literally figuring shit out. To proceed through levels, you have to solve many "puzzles" or figure out how to unlock the level. This is the central core of these games, unlike any other lineage. And in this aspect, UUW is miles ahead of Arx. All the puzzles in UUW were brilliant, whereas in Arx, they were a mixed bag, some were great, some were shit.
