Dishonored seemed to come out of nowhere.\u00a0 I’d never heard of it until this spring, when Garnett Lee mentioned it on the Shacknews podcast as a game he’d seen behind closed doors that was really going to blow people away.\u00a0 Over the course of the year information began trickling out about the game.\u00a0 First an exciting cinematic trailer.\u00a0 Then some gameplay.\u00a0 Then more gameplay.\u00a0 Suddenly everyone was talking about it.\u00a0 Part of what made it seem so fun was that it was such a rarity: a big budget game with a new world to explore, and we hadn’t been exposed to it until shortly before it was released.\u00a0 Before any of us had even played the game it seemed so exciting just because the circumstances surrounding it were so unusual.<\/p>\n
And how about the game itself?\u00a0 It mostly succeeded, although not quite.\u00a0 The first few levels of the game (after the tutorial area) felt fresh and open and vibrant.\u00a0 They seemed full of possibility.\u00a0 They were big, open spaces (or had the appearance of it, anyway) with big, open gameplay.\u00a0 You could run into enemies head on, though your pistol was not very effective; you could use your magical abilities to confuse or frighten your foes (even possess them!); you could use the fun new Blink ability to shoot up to the rooftops and evade your foes entirely, looking for the perfect line through the rooftops where no one could spot you.<\/p>\n
And then, somewhere along the journey it loses its way.\u00a0 Levels become closed off.\u00a0 Stealth becomes less viable and also less fun.\u00a0 Deaths seem to come frequently (at the urging of Rock, Paper, Shotgun I played the game on Hard, so maybe that contributed to that aspect of the game).\u00a0 I came to realise how unrewarding the stealth often was.\u00a0 While Metal Gear Solid turned stealth into a game of cat and mouse, where the chase was often half the fun, Dishonored said you were either hidden or fighting; fleeing was often useless and never fun.\u00a0 And then there’s the plot, which was neither entertaining nor enlightening.\u00a0 The game increasingly falls back on a tired bag of game design tools, like audio logs, diaries, and one of my least favourite game experiences: getting captured halfway through the game and losing all of your powers.<\/p>\n It sounds like I’m pretty down on the game, but I think that’s because it showed so much promise.\u00a0 Parts of the game are brilliant.\u00a0 Parts of the game could have used more work.\u00a0 But it was almost always fun, and those glimpses of excellence are enough to land this game in my list.<\/p>\n 4. Torchligh<\/span>t 2<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Diablo 3 may very well be my most played game this year, if measured by the number of hours played.\u00a0 That’s largely because it had cross-platform (Windows\/Mac) co-op, and I’ve played through it with my girlfriend with every character except the Witch Doctor.\u00a0 (Because the Witch Doctor is pretty terribly racist.\u00a0 Check out this page<\/a> to see how Blizzard portrays it.)\u00a0 While Diablo may have logged more hours for logistical reasons, Torchlight 2 is unambiguously the better dungeon crawler.\u00a0 In fact, measured purely in terms of gameplay, Torchlight 2 might be the best game I played this year.\u00a0 On a mechanical level it’s pitch perfect.\u00a0 It’s well balanced, lovingly crafted, and exceedingly fun from moment-to-moment.\u00a0 Now, I’m a guy who values other stuff in games too, like story, character, and setting, as you’ll see when you get further down the list.\u00a0 For that reason, Torchlight 2 sits a bit back on my list.<\/p>\n But while you’re playing Torchlight 2, oh what a game it is.\u00a0 There are so many moments in Torchlight where I find myself saying “Why couldn’t Diablo do this?”\u00a0 Some of them are simple, like the fact that resource management (health and mana) is far more tactical in TL2.\u00a0 Some of them are big, like the fact that boss fights last longer and involve more complex tactics, completely changing how you have to approach them (while in Diablo 3 bosses are all just damage sponges, and not even very good ones most of the time).<\/p>\n \u00a0 To some degree it’s hard to describe why exactly I like Torchlight 2 so much, especially in comparison to the other games on this list, about which I have an awful lot to say.\u00a0 The best way to describe it is to say that the moment-to-moment tactical decision making is just tremendously fun, and very involving.\u00a0 It’s a game that requires you to pay attention virtually all of the time.\u00a0 For a game about bashing things in the face, it provides a surprisingly large variety of ways to do it between different character classes and the viable builds within them.\u00a0 I felt like the individual skills I was using at any given time, combined with the varying tactics needed to beat different kinds of enemies, made the game feel far more active, more engaging than Diablo 3.<\/p>\n There’s variety in other places, too.\u00a0 The environments, drawn in a comic book style, are frequently a sight to behold.\u00a0 There’s a great mixture of sprawling outdoor environments and claustrophobic indoor environments, and which one you’re currently in affects the tactics that are viable.\u00a0 You almost always have several quests at any given time, and travelling around the map finishing them up is fun.\u00a0 The Phase Beasts lead to challenge rooms that frequently require the player to approach them in ways that a standard encounter wouldn’t.\u00a0 There’s just so much here that’s so cleverly designed.\u00a0 It’s a joy to play.<\/p>\n 3. Guild Wars 2<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Unlike Dishonored, which approached very suddenly and felt like a mystery, Guild Wars 2 is a game I’d been anxiously waiting for since April 2010, when ArenaNet released its Design Manifesto<\/a>.\u00a0 The ideas it contained, and those put forth by ArenaNet in subsequent press for the game, made it sound like they were turning the MMORPG genre into something fresh and exciting.\u00a0 They talked about breaking up the “Holy Trinity” of DPS\/Tank\/Healer, of making the game more social, of ridding it of the grind.\u00a0 Did they succeed?\u00a0 I think they mostly did.<\/p>\n Many of the games innovations seem so obvious it’s unclear why they hadn’t been done by someone else.\u00a0 Removing “revive” skills and simply letting any nearby player revive a fallen character makes it feel like you can rely on others in combat.\u00a0 Because experience is granted for reviving a downed character, strangers will often revive strangers they run across on their adventures; brilliant.\u00a0 Giving experience points to every player who takes part in a fight rather than just the player who first attacks a monster is a great way to foster cooperation.\u00a0 Making loot drops unique to each player cuts down on ridiculous fighting over who gets the goods after an enemy has been defeated.<\/p>\n In fact, if there’s one thing that I love most about the Guild Wars 2 experience, it’s that the game constantly finds ways to make players want to work together, even if they’re strangers and may never cross paths again.\u00a0 This makes the game feel genuinely massive and social at all times.\u00a0 The world events, not exactly an innovation but very well done in GW2, add to this too.\u00a0 There is virtually never a downside to working with other players to accomplish your goals and there is almost always something to be gained from it.\u00a0 I’m a huge fan of online games that cause players to want to work together by the very nature of their design (Left 4 Dead would be another excellent example), and Guild Wars 2 absolutely nails this.\u00a0 People will frequently talk about how online games prove that people are really selfish and destructive, but games like Guild Wars 2 show that it’s really all about what the design supports.\u00a0 Give people an environment where teamwork is more fun, and they’ll jump on the opportunity to help each other out.<\/p>\n There are other great things about Guild Wars 2, too, like the joys of simply exploring and the fact that the game rewards you for it, but as this is getting a bit long already I’ll leave my praise there.\u00a0 With all that said, you may be wondering why a game worthy of this much praise isn’t higher up my list.\u00a0 There are certainly faults in the game, like the fact that you more or less max out on power and unlock all of your abilities very early on, reducing the feeling of growth that is often pivotal to RPGs.\u00a0 And the combat, for all the tweaks they’ve made to the MMORPG format, is still not tremendously impressive. Also, while the game has great depth and many innovations, it’s incredibly poor at teaching you to play.\u00a0 I know we live in an age where MMO players scour wikis and message boards for strategies, builds, etc., but it boggles my mind that in 2012 a game like Guild Wars 2 could be released that doesn’t even explain something as important as the fact that your off-hand weapon gains different abilities based on what primary weapon you have equipped.\u00a0 Players shouldn’t have to find that out by accident!<\/p>\n Part of it too, is that for me GW2 partly succumbs to its excellent pricing model.\u00a0 Because there is no subscription to play, I don’t feel any particular sense of urgency to return, knowing that content will all still be there when I want it.\u00a0 Having written so much praise for the game though, I’m suddenly pretty keen to get back to it.<\/p>\n 2. The Walking<\/strong> Dead<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The Walking Dead is all sorts of things that video games usually aren’t.\u00a0 It’s episodic (released in 2-3 hour chunks roughly once a month for five months).\u00a0 It’s only $25 (I picked it up for half that during one of Steam’s sales).\u00a0 There aren’t a lot of guns.\u00a0 There are lots of female characters, and none of them runs around half naked with big, bouncing boobs.\u00a0 There’s a lot of dialogue, and it’s pretty smartly written.\u00a0 It may go without saying that I was pretty stunned when it won Game Of The Year at the Gametrailers\/Spike TV Video Game Awards.\u00a0 And while you’ve seen that it’s not #1 on my list, I still think it was well deserved.<\/p>\n One of the main complaints levelled at The Walking Dead is that it only offers the illusion of choice.\u00a0 Since the game is marketed largely as one where the player is frequently faced with difficult plot and character-related decisions, this could be seen as a pretty major blow against the game.\u00a0 But I think that attack it’s misguided at best and ignorant and mean-spirited at worst.\u00a0 All video games offer illusions.\u00a0 Video games are illusion machines.\u00a0 And the illusions that The Walking Dead offered me were some of the most enthralling illusions that I’ve ever been offered in a video game.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/dishonored.jpg\" "\\"dishonored\\"")
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