1997, Game of the Year

[Mnementh]

SvennoJ said:

Mnementh said:

It is a hard decision between Diablo and Doom 64, both are great games (although the walk speed in the village in Diablo was infuriating). I have to give it to Diablo, it is the start of an important series, it is one of the more well-known rogue likes (as in: the devs actually wanted to make a graphical rogue clone), it has also spawned a subgenre. And this first game nails the atmosphere and wasn't that egregious with the loot stuff, which expanded sours the game. But in this first entry the random loot is somewhat reasonable.

You make a good point about the loot. Diablo 2 was better in a lot of ways but it already had me question the amount of random loot. That only got worse with clones like Titan Quest and Torch Light. Adding more ways to carry out more and more loot and it's even in the marketing "dive into an epic journey with endless loot". Sure you don't have to pick up everything but it sure would be a lot nicer to have sparse meaningful loot and coins. I really don't see the appeal of carrying out tons of crap to sell one by one or in stacks. Heck games even have options now to sell all the crap in bulk. But still got to carry it all.

Baldur's Gate 3, no matter how much I enjoy it, falls into the same trap. Why is there so much crap to pick up. It doesn't add to the immersion one bit, just makes a bloated inventory where you spend a lot of time searching for the few useful things. Also picking up things from a table full of clutter is a pita on console. You can move the cursor yet that also moves the camera. I imagine on PC you can use the mouse without the screen moving.

The charm of these older games is that they are a lot more focused than modern games. Too many options, too much clutter is my biggest complaint about modern gaming. TotK is guilty of it as well, so much stuff. I need to go sell a bunch of crap now in BG3 as I'm up to 5 or 6 radial wheels in combat lol. I don't know what all this stuff is for, nor do I ever have time to use or try it all. I often feel paralyzed by the amount of choice on offer and can't play more than an hour at a time because of it. I long back to the 'simplicity' of the original Baldur's gate, which incidentally had a bigger party size as well. Anyway that's for 1998 :)

I'm more inclined now to play the original Fallout and Fallout 2, but where can you get that nowadays? It seems the GoG version has been censored :/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/fallout

I am actually not against random loot per se. But if I have to stop every ten minutes, to sort my inventory for crap and useful, it is too much. Actually, a good loot frequency makes it so infrequent, that I actually look at it the moment it drops, instead of collecting it until the inventory is full to look at it in bulk. I like being happy about dropping loot and looking if it fits my character. But I stop looking if I know that the next loot drop is only seconds away. Borderland suffers the same problem, the first game has an acceptable loot frequency for me, but even the second game already does it too much (but has more fun story and characters, which still keep me engaged).

And Fallout is censored? Hmm, reading it Bethesda opted to remove kids and change the language. Booh Todd Howard! Apparently there are links shared to mods that reenables that stuff.