Ask Lemmy

Witcher 3

Action platform: Portal 2. It is polished to a mirror shine. I can't think of a higher "quality" game in the genre.

One of the best I have ever played which falls into adventure, puzzle, RPG, strategy , and open world is probably star control 2, the urquan masters. It has an amazingly well crafted story, the music is great, and a bunch of different aspects to the game play. This still is one of my favorite games of all time

I will not give you titles because the list can be long and hardly I can find a total winner. The best games even made are the one shipped completed without pretending of expansions to fill it, or DLC, or micro translation, season pass, and shit like this. So we need to jump back to 5 or 10 years to find something. I'm still waiting a new generation game that I like and that can achieve this.

Easy.

Disco Elysium for all categories.

From my own Steam stats: Portal 2 (276 h), The Talos Principle (161 h), Skyrim (158 h) and Torchlight (139 h).

But I bet I invested much more time in Doom, Doom II and all the expansions and mods.

And before that in Elite (for the 128K ZX Spectrum).

Mazewars on Mac as an early multiplayer FPS.

Black Tiger in the arcades was an excellent fantasy platformer.

Another World on the Amiga was a fantastically immersive cinematic platformer.

Wipeout 2097 on PSX was a futuristic anti-grav racer with a 10/10 for music, SFX, gameplay, lore, theme and graphics. Just exceptional.

...

In the current day, gaming is all about FLOSS games such as Cube2:Sauerbraten(FPS), 0AD(RTS), The Dark Place(stealth Thief remke) and Shattered Pixel Dungeon(roguelike) which are free forever and community driven, providing a much richer gaming experience.

So, an interesting point of detail, is a game "gooder" when it perfectly executes its formula after countless iterations, like FF6 did, or is it better when it innovates in a new way, bringing together new ideas into a magical, if occasionally rough-around-the-edges, novel new approach that others start copying, as Doom did?

Also, are we looking at them from the perspective of their time, where Pac Man was once the pinnacle of gaming itself, or from a modern, more objective perspective, where Pac Man struggles to provide the same value as BotW does almost half a century later?