1997, Game of the Year

[Mnementh]

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Mnementh said:

Two more or less important games missing, which I want to add are Outlaws and Doom 64.

Outlaws is a western shooter from non other than LucasArts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Agkdkr12s

More important though is Doom 64. Which is very different from the original Doom and I do like the atmosphere a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2W2LzDZHQI

As I wasn't a console player back then I didn't play it originally (didn't even now it existed at all), only now with the remastering. And I do like it.

Although another game from the year, which I indeed played back in the day, I do like also a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Kr5i5F43U

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.

This year has a lot of important games I haven't played yet and should. This includes Final Fantasy VII, but more importantly I am sure Final Fantasy Tactics is right up my alley. Also this marks the year the first Age of Empires released, which I haven't played. I also missed out on Zork: Grand Inquisitor. And Fallout I have definitely to play one day. I also heard MDK is a pretty cool game.

I have a lot of great and interesting memories of Diablo.  This is the era when people first started playing games online.  My first online experience was with Diablo.  While I found the single player experience to be extremely well designed and balanced, the online experience of Diablo was madness.  Almost every person I encountered was using hacks where they could generate as much loot as they wanted.  Now don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun, because I think that first time a person experiences internet play it's going to be fun.  However, the fun could only last for so long because the hacks kind of destroyed the gameplay.

A few months later I tried Ultima Online for the first time, and I thought it was much better, if for no other reason than the hacks were gone.  After a few months I quit UO, because of the PvP system, but I appreciated that it had a dynamic working economy.  It really took developers a few years before they had something of a handle on online play.

I am not big with online gaming. It is even uncommon for me that I currently play Baldur's Gate 3 coop with friends. But they are actually friends I also play Pen&Paper RPG with and BG3 is close to that experience in ways. Anyways, I played Diablo always offline, so I am more interested in the experience of atmosphere it build, and the first one is pretty good at that.