Guessed by @UnderwaterFunktown
Down, down, down, by the river...
This may not be a new entry into the list and I'm not sure I even played it at all this year, but Baldur's Gate 3 feels like a new entry because of how much its lasting impact has affected my opinion of it. I played this game early in 2024, meaning I got most of the year to process my feelings on it and think about its place in these rankings, yet with another full year to think back on it, I've only gone and ranked it significantly higher.
There was just something so special in how this game, despite putting millions of players through a mostly similar path, manages to make your individual experience through that path feel so uniquely yours. It's hard to describe what made this game so special to me, because my feelings are inherently attached to the journey I went through, the character I created and the choices he made. For that same reason, I've found the game hard to revisit - as interesting as it'd be to see the outcome of different choices, those will always feel like "what if?" scenarios to me, whereas my original playthrough feels canon.
In the end however, the reason why that experience felt so personal and amazing for me is the same as for everyone else: this is a gigantic game with an absurd amount of content, all of which is extremely well thought out and impactful. There was not a single moment in my 200-hour playthrough where I said "ah, it's another one of these". That never happened. Every single area, every single character, every single quest, every single combat encounter felt unique and meaningful, every single thing felt significant to the main story. And when there's so much endlessly compelling stuff to do for that long, the result is you get attached.
And so, Baldur's Gate 3 won the hearts of everyone. Though we all had our different experiences through our different choices, we all built up the same attachment to our own experiences through the compelling adventure this game puts us through.
Anyway, I feel like I wrote a lot of the same things on last year's post about this game, though in better words back then. Baldur's Gate 3 was a journey I'll remember forever.
