Idle Thumbs Asks: What Is the Best Video Game of All Time?

[Badfinger]

In the vein of Eve, I have realized this conversation would not be complete without World of Warcraft. It's not a direct connection, but so many of the seeds sown by games like Minecraft and Portal are in World of Warcraft. On top of that, it's a game that's continued to best itself (usually) for an entire decade.

[Jutranjo]

In the vein of Eve, I have realized this conversation would not be complete without World of Warcraft. It's not a direct connection, but so many of the seeds sown by games like Minecraft and Portal are in World of Warcraft. On top of that, it's a game that's continued to best itself (usually) for an entire decade.

 

WoW came out in 2004, Minecraft alpha was 2009, Portal was 2007. Maybe the newest expansion's building a stronghold takes from Minecraft (or Warcraft 2/Warcraft 3) but I don't see what Portal and WoW have in common.

[Jake]

WoW was a seminal game, and that's hard to remember because at this point it feels like it's the generic template everything after it was traced from. It's approach to MMO design and all-levels accessibility was scary in how effective and new it felt at the time.

I remember there was a GDC talk that year from the Everquest team I think, called "how to get a million subscribers to your MMO," because after months of struggling they finally achieved it, which was impressive.... Except between the announcement of that talk, and its presentation at GDC, WoW launched and eclipsed that number terrifyingly quickly.

[Bjorn]

I was still into MMOs back when WoW launched (mostly SWG at the time), and man that was a weird time. It was like every single person I knew jumped ship and was into WoW. There's just nothing comparable in gaming that I've ever seen in the way it dominated a space the way it did.

[feelthedarkness]

Ultima 7!

 

I loved a lot of game from the 80s arcades through now, but I can't think of a bigger personal "aha" than playing U7, just how big, and functional the world was. The possibilities of looking in a hollow tree stump in the middle of the woods and finding a not that led you to something. The world was huge, but it always felt like its space led someplace.The ability to make bread, or kill and animal to heal and keep your party fed. The ability to just grab somebody's chair from their room, and put it on their bed, and have the resident get mad at that (or not). 

 

It also had a narrative that struck me as really neat in terms of looking at spirituality/philosophy in a neat way vis a vis it's own history of "Virtues."