Ok, so I used to love computer and console games (mostly rpg and strategy) but have been away from gaming for the past couple years (traveling, actually). I just bought a new PC and am looking for recs on what games I should pick up. I DON’T like online/mmp games.
Some of my old PC favorites:
Baldurs Gate games
Planescape Torment
Knights of the Old Republic
Fallout 1 & 2
Thief 2
Civ series
Age of Empires
Heroes of Might & Magic 3 &4
Warcraft series
Help!
Fallout 3, Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights (1 and 2) should tickle your RPG bone. There’s a KoTOR II which is pretty good. Since you like strategy games you might give the Total War series a shot. Rome and Empire are the best of the lot IMHO.
Seems like you’re into RTS games and RPGs. Based on that, I’d recommend the following.
RPGs:
Mass Effect. Without qualification the best RPG to be launched on the PC for the last two years. While technically it was a 360 game first, Bioware sat on the PC version for half a year while they brought it up to our picky, picky tastes. Us PC fellows got improved visuals, extra content, improved GUI, improved pathfinding and so on and so forth. The story is top notch, the voice acting is beyond and above, the visuals are (still) amazing and . . . well, it’s a Bioware game. I’m being redundant. If you liked KOTOR, you’ll love this.
The Witcher. Highly underrated and slanted, mostly because it shipped with a lot of bugs and long loading times. Patches have since not only fixed these problems, but also added extra content. It’s now available in an “enchanced” edition, which features all these files on the disc. But if you settle for the slightly cheaper normal edition, the patches and extra content is available as a free download.
The Withcer has a well developed story, excellent combat mechanics, gorgeous graphics (if your rig can handle it - which goes for Mass Effect as well, I might mention) and superb voice acting. (Well, after they scrapped the original tripe and re-recorded most everything for the enchanced edition.)
RTS:
Empire: Total War. (Warning - 2007+ machines only, and I’d say high-end ones at that.) It’s big, it’s back, it’s naval and it’s wearing Civil War era uniforms and fighting with muskets. It’s an RTS that unabashedly thinks big and delivers. The action is split between two zones - your strategical map, in which you manage your empire by raising levies, managing taxes and so on. And then there’s your tactical map, on which your battles unfold in real time, with you acting as the Big Hand In The Sky. Absolute fantastic game.
Oblivion
Civ4 (get the complete version with the expansion packs)
I second Civ4. I believe the expansion pack version comes with ‘Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization’, which is just a lot of fun if you’ve ever wanted to play around changing the history of the world.
RTS Suggestion that takes a pretty dang modern computer: Supreme Commander. It’s massive (theoretically up to 16k total units on the board, although realistically my 2008-built midrange computer peaks at about 4k), realtime bullet physics, and challenging as all get-out. If you ever played old-school Total Annihilation, this is what that looks like with today’s computer power.
One of the best RTS games of recent years (IMO) has been Sins of a Solar Empire. Supreme Commander is also good, definitely the new Total Annihilation. They don’t seem to make games like AOE2 any more, AOE3 was a big disappointment for me.
X3: Terran Conflict has a little bit of everything. RTS, RPG, action, space and economy sim. Mount and Blade is an RPG cross RTS, the battles are a lot of fun.
Bioshock is one of the most immersive RPG/FPS games of recent times. I don’t usually play FPS games but I played this one to the end.
The Witcher is one of my favourite, recent RPGs. Other good ones include Drakensang, Fallout 3 (with mods) and Mass Effect.
Titan Quest is practically a Diablo II clone with updated graphics and set in ancient Greek/Egyptian/Babylonian times. It has a similar item system, skill trees and randomness.
The Last Remnant is a SquareEnix game. It feels a little like Final Fantasy 12.5 but without the depth you usually associate with FF games. The PC version is a lot more polished than the Xbox360 version, which was a bit of a mess.
I’ll second Empire: Total War. My computer is mostly a 2005 machine with a slightly newer video card, and Empire runs rather slowly on the lowest graphics settings (it won’t even let me set the quality above “medium”:eek:). Despite this drawback, it is fun, fun, fun!
That scenario alone makes the expansion well worth it. After that go to CivFanatics.com and download:
CIV Gold: The Nature of Man - ever wanted to kick the crap out of Hitler, Mussolini or Bush?
Wolfshanze’s Revolution - Mostly regular Civ 4 but with a lot of good twists like revolts and cultural boarders that move because of combat victories.
Civ Gold - regular civ with 90 extra nationalities, history is my trivia topic of choice and even I’ve never heard of some of these before.
I can’t seem to find it right now but the mod Clash of Kingdoms 3.2 is kickass as well. A massive world map with 50 some odd nations (many of them new) realistically set up in 1205 AD. (Rhye’s is fantastic but can be kind of constricting and predictable after awhile).
Great suggestions! Thanks all!