What games are just objective masterpieces?
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Zelda Breath of the wild for me. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed Tears of the Kingdom but breath of the wild scratched a perfect itch for me. Especially master mode. Well over 1000 hours played.
I also maintain that Breath of the Wild was superior to Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently this opinion makes Zelda fans incredibly salty.
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My Picks...
Deus Ex (So many games try to be this and fail)
Cyberpunk (This one eventually measured up)
Alpha Centauri (Innovation mixed with familiarity and setting)
Fallout 2 (they're all good. Fallout 2 is special)
Kotor (Star Wars story telling in a beautiful way)
Baldur's Gate 2 and 3 (I'm stunned that 3 was a worthy successor)
Homeworld (One of the World's truly beautiful games)
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Super Hexagon
It's about as simple as a 'modern' game can be (I read there was even a port of it to Commodore 64.) but it's a finely tuned machine. When you lose - and you will, a lot - it feels like mostly your own fault and not the game's.
The difficulty levels very accurately start at Hard for the easiest one. There are 6 total levels, the next 5 difficulties are Harder, Hardest, Hardester, Hardestest, and Hardestestest.
With much time and luck I can beat the first level (unlocking the 4th). On a lost save I had unlocked the 5th level by completing the 2nd, and have only ever seen the 6th in videos from other people. I would have to beat the 3rd to see it myself, and that's not happening.
The criteria to beat a level is "last for 60 seconds".
I thought at first you guys were thinking of this, and I was puzzled. Then I looked it up.
Crivens, it's like a combination of Tempest and Flappy Bird, but since it's a Terry Cavanagh game it's also been whacked over the head soundly with VVVVVV.
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Metal Gear Solid 1-4. Ecco the dolphin?
Good one!
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Oh forgot. Best multiplayer game ever has to be Counter Strike 1.6, CS:GO and potentially CS2 in a few years.
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Baldur's Gate 3 is a good game and a worthwhile experience but you can absolutely make quite a lot of very valid critiques about it.
Yeah for a third person isometric RPG with non-linear branching storylines and deep thoughtful story, Disco Elysium positively blows BG3 out of the water.
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Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:
Historically, a "masterpiece" was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a "master", of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.
In that light, I'd say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn't mean it wasn't arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn't just have to be technical stuff -- It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.
Then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom belong to that category - run smoothly as fuck on one of the lamest consoles there is, and are beautiful and complex.
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Heres a list of some favorites:
Imperfect perfection: Morrowind
Perfect perfection: Starcraft Brood War
Objective perfection: Plants vs Zombies
Subjective perfection: Knights of the Old Republic
Perfect for its time: Gauntlet IV
Perfect timeless: Sonic 2
Perfect for its genre: LOZ Minish Cap
Perfect All-in-one: Shenmue II
Glad to see some love for Shenmue
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Then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom belong to that category - run smoothly as fuck on one of the lamest consoles there is, and are beautiful and complex.
...Just don't look at it too hard when you go to the Great Deku Tree in BotW.
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ketsui deathtiny
castlevania: aria of sorrow
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Yeah for a third person isometric RPG with non-linear branching storylines and deep thoughtful story, Disco Elysium positively blows BG3 out of the water.
BG3 has some very fun gameplay at times, such as the much-lauded variety with which you can deal with the Goblin Camp in Act 1. That's where it shines.
The writing is not really comparable. BG3 is in the "fine for a video game" territory. Disco Elysium's writing is art, both the narratives, the characters, the themes and even the prose itself.
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There hasnt been yet a game that could replicate the experience I ld had when I played Planescape: Torment
Was it the game, or was it the life you had while playing the game?
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I don't see them in the comments so: UFO 50 and OneShot.
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I also maintain that Breath of the Wild was superior to Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently this opinion makes Zelda fans incredibly salty.
It's the vibe. TotK just... Feels more industrial, and less clean and hopeful. BotW was just so pretty and you HAD to walk to places or glide the first time. The machines in TotK made it so easy to skip the nature that it felt less rewarding to play. Like, if you could just snap your fingers and have the perfect house immediately with no work, no effort, the house wouldn't feel as rewarding as one you built with your own skill.
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For be it's still System Shock 2
Have you played Prey? Only other game to scratch that same itch for me.
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I see Outer Wilds here but not Nioh 2, so I'm posting about Nioh 2.
Soulsian adventure with ninja gaiden blood, extremely high amount of endgame content, wild depth of character building, lots of avenues to increase your character's power with many "correct answers" to the question of "how should I make my dude stronger". Dropped a while before the most recent push for graphical fidelity with AI upscaling/antialiasing so it actually runs well on a large majority of steam hardware surveys machines.
It's hard early on, but provides the player with tons of options when it comes to progressing through stages and bosses, flexible movesets for each class of weapon and access to potent tools like Gun and turning into an enemy that killed you a dozen times the first time you saw it briefly. The endgame goes beyond replaying through the game into dungeons made of fragments of the stages and some more unique maps (The Abyss). There's a hefty amount of individual bosses to learn, and incentive to do some of the more fun fights in the game multiple times - a lot of which do not require a run back through a stage to get to them. The game does itself a service by breaking up gameplay into chunks with a world map you launch missions from, some of which are just a singular straight up boss fight.
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Prey, System Shock 2, Outer Wilds, and Undertale are fully-realized microcosms where the primary game is unfolding the complex origami of the setting. All of them absolutely beautiful to experience.
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Factorio.
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Holy shit somehow no one has mentioned:
Nier Automata
It counts as a masterpiece because of how well it blends game design, gameplay and story. I have played very few games as thoughtful, or that weaved the gameplay together into the story it was telling in such a meaningful way. I never thought once in my life that I would think philosophically about bullet hell but somehow Nier Automata has something profound to say and even manages to say it using bullet hell as a gameplay mechanic.
On top of all this, it also has a lot to say about classical philosophers, their works, and honestly deeply subverts things they had to say. It asks tough questions about their thoughts and ideas, once again, through gameplay. Numerous characters are named for classical philosophers: Pascal, Jean-Paul, Simone, Engels, Immanuel... (Yoko Taro obviously has feelings about how Jean-Paul Sartre treated Simone de Beauvoir.)
Further, Yoko Taro is doing something that a lot of game developers fail to manage to do: He is embracing gaming as a storytelling medium and eschewing the traditional three-act arc from film. Because gaming is not film. As Marshall McLuhan posited, "the medium is the message" and unlike other developers Taro's writing is aimed at the medium he is working in instead of leaning on the ropes and tropes of other mediums. (Referring back to above, tying the gameplay into the story, focusing on the medium)
It's basically impossible to not break down into tears at the ending.
Don't write it off because of the scantily clad anime women. Stay for the depth of the human condition. It is truly a masterwork in multiple respects.
I tried to play that game, expecting perhaps a DMC-like gameplay.
Instead I got a 2D plane scroller?
Then 2D sort of platformer?
Then some weird 3D action that I did not understand at all?
What the fuck is that game.
If I enjoyed combat more, I could give it another go. But it was just not for me.
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- Chrono Trigger
- Disco Elysium
- Sekiro
- Zelda Ocarina of Time
- Bioshock
- Portal
- Half Life
- Nier Automata
- Tetris
Flawed Masterpieces
- Minecraft (surprising)
- Dragon age Origins
- Team Fortress 2
- Fallout New Vegas
- Dark Souls
- Every Baldur's Gate
Masterpiece in my heart: Terraria