If you are including an Elder Scrolls game, Morrowind blows Skyrim out of the water. Both before and after mods, and before mods I'm honestly not sure if any ES title should be on the list.
Yes? And the Roman Empire had maybe 45 million people in it while Brazil has over 200 million. Serious question, do you think four times as important to world history as Rome? Absolute numbers often aren't important compared to position and relative percentages.
Half life's only lasting influence was the gravity gun, which a bunch of other games borrowed and improved on before eventually discarding as a gimmick. Portal didn't even do that much, and died unfinished with no legacy beyond "the cake is a lie" jokes.
Dark Messiah came out a few years later, and did everything half life did, and did it better, and added more stuff. It has physics, but they're integrated into the whole game instead of having a jarring delineation between physics sections and combat, you could actually use physics as a tool to fight and navigate (and like, as a regular thing, not just a "hey, here's a gun that shoots physics objects, good luck"). It was also an unbroken first person game, but you character actually had a personality and could make decisions, both in how the character reacted to the world and how you the player approached the game. You could play it as a magic based shooter, or a hack and slash, or a stealth game, or even a mix of the three. You could even make choices that would change how the game ended.
If you are including an Elder Scrolls game, Morrowind blows Skyrim out of the water. Both before and after mods, and before mods I'm honestly not sure if any ES title should be on the list.
And it absolutely does have a legacy. Any 3D puzzle game ends up being compared with Portal 2. Portal 2 is at the top of a niche genre.
But on the opposite end, that's obviously not the criteria people are solely concerned about, or else they wouldn't be recommending so many old games. Influence, fame, and prestige also matter.
By lazy games journalists with a shallow reference pool, maybe. But that doesn't prove a lot.
EDIT: Also, this contracts your previous claim about it being so much bigger than C&C. RTS is a much larger genre than 3D puzzle games, so the RTS fan base is much more widely dispersed across a larger number of titles, while the puzzle genre is much more concentrated.
Flight sims themselves are already niche before you even get into space flight sims.
You're also quite obviously biasing the game towards strategic simulators.
Sid Meier's Pirates! were also incredibly awesome and the latter needs a re-release so I can romance some more Governors daughters.
The nostalgia glasses on some people here are thick enough to make the blind see.
This is a list of PC games, Halo is a console game and even when Halo was brand new PC FPSes were kicking it's ass when it came to graphics, controls, gameplay, and storytelling. Halo would never be considered for a list of best PC games... to use it as a point of comparison for Half Life is blatantly biasing the situation, it's basically putting up the gold medalist in the 100 yard dash from the special Olympics up against the gold medalist from the actual Olympics and noting that the not handicapped one is better.The description of Half Life 2 as a 'flash in the pan' is extremely aberrant. Compare it to Halo 2 and I've met Halo-ites who somehow confused Halo 2 with Halo 3 on occasion.
If you are including an Elder Scrolls game, Morrowind blows Skyrim out of the water. Both before and after mods, and before mods I'm honestly not sure if any ES title should be on the list.
This is a list of PC games, Halo is a console game and even when Halo was brand new PC FPSes were kicking it's ass when it came to graphics, controls, gameplay, and storytelling. Halo would never be considered for a list of best PC games... to use it as a point of comparison for Half Life is blatantly biasing the situation, it's basically putting up the gold medalist in the 100 yard dash from the special Olympics up against the gold medalist from the actual Olympics and noting that the not handicapped one is better.
You want to compare Half Life to other heavily story driven FPSes? Alright, go play the original Deus Ex and come back to me and pretend that Half Life or Half Life 2 even BEGINS to have the level and quality of storytelling that Deus Ex does. Deus Ex also has non-linear level design that was superior to anything in the FPS genre at the time (and even a lot/most modern FPS). While I'll grant Deus Ex's influence on gaming is perhaps more limited than many of the other titles put forward, it's a masterpiece of storytelling and design that I think stands on it's own. And heck, the original Deus Ex's ending was so influential, what with it's choose your own ending from three different types of kinda bad ends that Mass Effect 3 basically lifted it's entire ending options directly from it (no seriously, compare the original ending options to ME3 and then look at the ending options in Deus Ex and you'll get some serious deja vu, except in Deus Ex those endings didn't suck and entirely fit the theme of the story and setting, unlike ME3).
At this point, Elder Scrolls VI probably won't be good and will disappoint.
As a PC title, Morrowind had far superior controls/UI design.
It's story was superior
its environmental design was better
its mechanics were both more varied and more interesting, its leveling system worked better.
If you are including an Elder Scrolls game, Morrowind blows Skyrim out of the water. Both before and after mods, and before mods I'm honestly not sure if any ES title should be on the list.
Hard disagree. Morrowind's main story is terribly presented. You're told the story, and it's nothing to write home about. At least in Skyrim you actually get to be there for it. The rest of Morrowind had few memorable characters, like that thief cat lady (too bad you couldn't marry her), or that Telvanni wizard with his daughter-wives, or that one benevolent wizard, but that's it. The writing of the quests weren't really anything to write home about (beside's the cat lady's questline).
With Skyrim, the writing quality didn't really get worse. It's just that the subpar quality of it is more noticeable now that it is voice acted.
.Hard disagree. Morrowind has stronger aesthetics, and the dungeons weren't just single corridors and felt more like actual places, but the Vyardenfell overworld was very boring. It was a very homogenous brown wasteland. Skyrim was much more varied, from the yellow plains of Whiterun, to the lush green forests of Falkreath, to the autumnal forests of Riften, to the rocky mountains of Markaarth, to the pleasant climate of Solitude, and to the snowy wastes of Windhelm
Only good thing about Morrowind's mechanics was the custom spell making. Otherwise, no I did not think clicking a guy 20 times only to hit him once to be very fun. Character creation penalizes 90% of players for not knowing the progression of their build or what they are going to do or where they are going to go ahead of time. Combat just downright sucks until you tediously grind/train your skills up to the 50s at the bare minimum. Skyrim pruned too many skills such as speechcraft but at least it isn't unfun to play for first timers. You walk out of the intro and you're free to experiment and find what works for you. You can even change your playstyle half way through a playthrough and still do okay. It isn't until you start reaching like level 70 or something that Skyrim's level scaling starts to outpace you and the game starts becoming unplayable, but by that point you have probably done all of the content in the game.
If you are doing Stealth Archer you have enough multipliers you don't even need to do too much Alchemy-Enchanting loop abuse to keep up post lvl 70What playstyle? Stealth Archer for the umpteenth time?
Hmmm... For 4X I think I'd nominate Age of Wonders: Planetfall, it's the only one I've ever played that didn't run into either of "I just got to the fun part and it's over?" or "I won this game 50 turns ago and it's another 100 before I'll actually win, Imma dip."So another BRILLIANT way of finding the sixteen best games.., would be deducing the best games of each genre (RPG, Shooter, Strategy etc) and/or subgenre (RTS, Grand Strategy, 4X etc) and seeing what turns out.
Before that, don't we need a tournament to settle on the top sixteen genres for the PC games to be in?Hmmm maybe I'll just make a new thread where we can each individually and objectively share our irrefutable top sixteen PC games and link back here to foment the discussion.
And 16 games because unlike 10 or 20 it makes for nice future tournament style profiling.