Firefall it was… too bad its gone 
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Borderlands 2
Its the game i have most hours in.
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Ooh, you have Breathedge? Can you see if you can multi-thread it’s rendering thread through game executable patches? This game is heavily gimped by requiring super strong single thread performance and is basically why I need a 10920X overclocked. My 4960X can’t handle the game in DXVK at all, hitting 28fps on a 1080 Ti.
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A Hat in Time defined classic platformer love letters by faithfully taking all the best parts of older platformers and combining it into a single game.
A very close second is Dust: An Elysian Tail
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I have no such performance issues, 1080Ti easily gets 60FPS at 1200p, and that’s in a VM via Looking Glass.
Then it’s my damn processor. It’s too weak for the game. (Yes, a 4960X is too weak for a modern game) Can you in the very least investigate trying to multithread it?
I have an ongoing discussion of weak Unreal Engine 4 performance on the 4960X here:
This means I’m definitely getting a 10920X to get better performance. If the 4960X is uniquely bottlenecked, no way am I staying on a bottlenecking CPU.
For Reference, the 4960X I have only does 330 CB R20 single core:
Friendly reminder that this thread is about video games and our favorite of the decade, not Linux and performance issues and benchmarks
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Bioshock 2, hands down my favourite game ever 
Runner ups would be Mad Max, GTA 5, Arkham Knight & Cities skylines,
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(Seems somebody beat me to mentioning it first, been writing this reply over the last few hours interspersed around dinner and a session of another game. Also: “Short and sweet”… No )
This is somewhat difficult. Really I can’t immediately think of anything that I care that much about…
Actually, wait, no. What the hell am I saying.
Firefall.
I miss it. I really do. So much.
Through its development it took a lot of turns. Many were good like adding vast new amounts of (Sorry, I have to interrupt myself. Literally while I am typing I am overcome with emotion. Memories of all the little sound effects, the wayfinder arrows on the ground, thumping parties… Fuck, fuck me. Well, anyway) content: new raids, new continents, new quests; but many were also bad; that same new content disappearing completely, events breaking, incomplete-able quests.
I was there since the Alpha and got to see most of it. Some parts I wasn’t there, decently long stretches I was too busy with other parts of life for and I regret not playing it more, though maybe having played it less lessens the remorse form losing it.
In the end, the “new” [reintroduced after being removed] stuff in 1.7 was a clusterfuck of bugs and bad voice acting and 1.7 still lacked a lot of was once present in earlier versions, but no matter what happened it was still a stellar game. Though also to be fair while 1.6 changed weapons, skills, and perks a lot; the content up to that patch felt pretty solid, my favorite classes were still fun - if not way better in the Firecat’s case - and almost all the quests worked.
But of course it’s not about how the game ended up. It’s about my experience playing it over the years. What I felt over time.
And overall, throughout everything:
- The movement and shooting mechanics were polished to a serene luster and remain to this day basically unique. While it was class dependent, and I’m a bit biased from primarily playing the most frantic [IMO] class, Assault/Firecat, the movement was just so dynamic and fast. Fast. Vertical. Few shooters felt as good as Firefall. Tribes comes to mind, and, well, they both have jetpacks.
- The level design was spectacular and heavily conceptualized around the idea of verticality. (On this and previous something like Anthem looks like a joke to me in comparison).
- The classes felt engaging. Firefall took the classic MMORPG ability system and refined it into a smaller pool of active abilities that in the end was basically like what you might find in a MOBA or modern hero shooter, think like the later Overwatch; and a separate pool of customizable perks. This felt good for the same reason the highly refined ~4 ish ability systems in those games also feel good.
- The style had character, lots of it. It felt special. It was colorful in a time of drab. The music was nice, sound effects were lively and memorable. The industrial design had such a great mix of futuristic and cartoon playfulness that would only later be seen (at least by me)again in things like Overwatch or Subnautica.
- Actually playfulness overall was a big thing it had, baked into the core of its design. Something like, Borderlands 1, which it got compared to very early on for also being kind of cell shaded, might be goofy but it also feels dirty and with humor derived for death and irony. Firefall was lighthearted. Like a breath of fresh air. Something that inspired that kind of child-like wonder and that kind of joy that you feel in your chest (if that makes any sense) that I might have felt as a kid playing Insomniac games like Spyro or R&C. (Actually that reminds me, anyone remember Insomniac’s Overstrike, and how it got turned into a drab shooter Fuze? It took until Overwatch for something playful like that to come out. Name similarity a funny detail.) But anyway, yeah, Firefall not being drab and/or serious in a time where everything was or thought it needed to be, it was nice.
- The Events were dynamic feeling and made the continents feel like they were always alive with conflict. People were always running around and very busy with the game.
- The community was probably one of the most welcoming and ready to cooperate MMORPG communities I have ever known. It was fantastic to just jump into a raid or quest with some rando. And people actually wanted to do the quests, and engage with quest mechanics. It wasn’t like what I encounter in things like Blade&Soul where people will NOT dungeon with you unless you are already at max gear and ready to grind at maximum speed just for gold and no joy all.
In a lot of ways actually I think it’s probably more than my game of the decade, but maybe, all time. Looking back I now determine it to be a combination of many of my favorite elements for games in totality, though it’s hard to know if there is reverse influence there. A few games before and after Firefall had parts of the whole that made Firefall such a cerebral experience for me, but none even come close to having them all.
The speed and the movement/shooting of Tribes Ascend. The styling and “feel”/childlike wonder of Subnautia (not to mention the bigass space ship wrecked in the water!)
The being a proper MMO with persistent open world servers (opposed to being match[making] based or instanced coop like Anthem/Destiny/Warframe) of well, MMOs in general. I just… don’t like match based. Either single player or full massive, none more of this middling crap for me outside of playing with a few specific friends, and thats playing to socialize which is an entirely different reason to game. In a MMO the people become part of the world.
I could say more about Firefall but at this point I feel like I’ve been thinking about it for too long and have started to lose the plot slightly.
Runners up or honorable mentions?
- X3 Terran Conflict / Albion Prelude, pick either, they might as well be the same. I’ve decided to put only one of this type of space sim here. Elite Dangerous isn’t it because procedural generation leads to a game a galaxy wide but an inch deep. EVE isn’t it because EVE for the longest time lacked first person manual flight controls and even then, they aren’t that good. X3 at least has some character, each zone is hand designed, and there are quite a few of them anyway. And the flight model? It’s my goddamn favorite flight model… EVER. It’s soooo smoothe. In no other game do I fly with a stick in my offhand and target/interact with the UI with a mouse in my main hand. It’s weird, but oh so fulfilling. In time, X4 may come to be the better game but I just don’t have the history with it yet to put it here instead. X3 also has the wonder, in this case of space and scale. You’re going around, exploring dangerous, dynamic space that changes with or without you. Buying space stations, building economic empires. Automating traders, controlling the flow of goods. Supply and demand. Ai ships moving around based on complex behaviors. In those ways it retains much of the scale and sense of change it would otherwise feel like it lost due to being single player. It’s a world to get lost in, for a really, really long time. Probably my most strong runner up just for that “get lost in” factor, but despite that, I manged to completely space on its existence at first, didn’t even think of it somehow. Takeaway is immersion, controls, scale, depth.
- Freespace 2 (… 1999) Blue Planet: War In Heaven (2010). Few things stick with me. This did, emotionally. It’s a factor of writing, mainly; and then setting, scene. It’s a mod for Freespace, but with all new assets, story, everything. I just, never expected to sit down to a combat space sim, a fan sequel to FS2, and be faced with something so viscerally philosophical. Part IV is yet to be released. This is, actually what came to mind first for this thread. Takeaway is “why am I crying”.
- The aforementioned Subnautica. Few games give me actual joy and a new and unique sense of wonder instead of just contentment, or compulsion. Subnautica had it in spades, I could only wish it was larger. Single player can sometimes be kind of limiting like that. 8191 meters deep, but never wide enough. Takeaway is wonder, fulfillment, immersion.
- The aforementioned Tribes Ascend. Tribes for me was an introduction to a kind of gaming I had up until that point basically ignored. That kind being competitive shooters. Quake multiplayer, UT, Counter-strike, TF2, CoD, whatever, despised all of it. But Ascend? I sat down I played that game 48 hours straight. It was the movement, the mechanics. That said it’s a minor entry. It is also dead and gone , but I do not miss it. In the end, match based still wasn’t for me, shooter or not. Takeaway is movement, controls.
- Planetside 2. This game despite everything somehow manged to consume the most amount of my time. The only “competitive” game I’ve ever put a lot of time into. I say “competitive” with the quotes because to me; because of the persistent world, the people feel less like human, prideful, aggressive opponents and more like highly advanced, efficient bots. Except of course, those that you are communicating and cooperating with. So to me, it sort of feels like, well party based PVE. Imagine… a FPSMMO that is actually successful. See, you just have to get rid of the RPG part. Unfortunately though it often feels like a slog, or I often feel as if “why do I even play this game anymore”, sometimes it even upsets me. At least, there is always something new to do. A new unique situation to asses. Takeaway is time-waster.
- Deus Ex Human Revolution. This one is really just a personal story, not much about the game itself actually makes it that special to me. I mean, still very good, one of those highly polished story games like Metro 2033 or Mass Effect series (in fact I would put those three together specifically in a tier just for that, immersive story world building). It came at a time when I went from really old hardware to modern hardware, from treating PCs like just another means to an end but instead an awesome thing in of itself. This is when I got three mismatched monitors and a crappy DP to VGA converter just to run Eyefinity any damn way I could. And this is the game I played, the WSGF Eyefinity perfect scoring DE:HR. It was kind of a paradigm shift for me. I’ve always tried to play games in eyefinity since. Takeaway is 5760x1080 U L T R A W I D E.
- Annnd Undertale. Yeah. What? So it’s a meme now. Well it’s time for me to put on my hipster beanie because I actually knew about this one even before release, before its explosion into the forefront of internet culture. And you know, if you ignore all that, just look at it as an isolated thing, it’s pretty earnest in what it tries to be. To be fair, I didn’t learn about it because of a gaming reason, I was on a small image board and someone was drawing porn of one of the goat people (what do you expect?). They talked about the demo and it seemed pretty interesting. When it eventually came out I was in a pretty bad place personally, emotionally. And this is another one that really affected me. It’s mainly a factor of decent writing, of telling a story involving loss from the perspective of a child. I might tell myself to not even feel loss as an adult, but I can’t erase the memories of what it felt like as a child. So those things, those things still get to me.
Fuck it, might as well round out everything. Noita, FTL, Receiver (Reciever 2 HYPE), and Duskers also all get on the list for being incredibly unique and executing on that well.
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Holy shit, man. I had never heard of this. This might have been when I had fallen out of the whole MMO scene though. What a damn shame, that looks breathtaking.
Dude, your setup with Deus Ex sounds just like mine lmao. I had an Asus desktop from Best Buy that I had upgraded nearly everything (GPU, PSU, CPU, RAM) and I had a 32" TV and 24" monitor connected lmao. I wonder if I can find the pictures.
Nostalgia af, man.
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You make several assumptions about Battlefield maps and tactics that are largely false.
Just because the map is static (and they are on conquest, but not entirely. Things do change) doesn’t mean the tactics are the same every time. It’s far more chaotic than you think.
Ah I, forgot one. Just one. I’ll, edit it in. How easily I forget my own emotions…
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Mankind Divided is very phat. And the Add in DLC is worth it.
The micro-transactions are somewhat useless. They don’t add anything in game that you can’t already do. It’s more for aesthetics, contrary to popular belief.
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The game I’ve played the most of and spent the most money in would definitely be planetside 2. It’s always been clunky and broken but it’s had some amazing fights. Find another game that lets you fight combined arms 300 vs 300 vs 300 in one base/hex, its one of a kind.
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Doom is a very pleasent reminder of how shooters are done right.
GRIP because combat racing.
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I would say ArcheAge.
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The good:
CSGO and Titanfall 1
The bad:
Arkham knight and Battlefront.
The infamous:
ISDefense
Hoping will be finished someday…:
Descent
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Thread: favourite game of the decade 2179 - Star Citizen Early Access Epic Store Exclusive…
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Portal 2 is technically from this decade
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