What is your favourite game and what is in your opinion the best designed game?

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Totalgarbage

Sergeant Knight
I'm genuinely curious about the thoughts of people in here. A very large chunk of people in here are Warband veterans and have played a large variety of games. For this reason, I respect your opinions' infinitely more than I would a random Redditor's.

My favourite game is either Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect 1. These games are my "first love" and are probably what made me interested in gaming in the first place. I just can't get over how all our smallest decisions throughout the games make vast differences in affecting the story and I absolutely adore the companions & their interactions in both games.

What I think the best designed game is actually Minecraft despite the fact that I don't enjoy playing it much. I don't care for the block game much myself, but the game's simplicity and the sheer freedom it gives to players is why I think consider it the ultimate sandbox game.
 
I will say that HighFleet is probably one of the best and tightest game designs in a good fifteen or twenty years. It isn't absolutely perfect but it comes real damned close to it. Almost every ties together and loops back around to feed into the core game experience -- which is really odd when you have a game incorporating a Imperial Russian dieselpunk aesthetic, Soviet missile era naval tactics and Japanese shoot 'em up all together. I'm really not a big graphics guy but I was impressed with the way the graphics helped reinforce the core game experience, even though they made my retinas bleed at times. Story was solid, the presentation was excellent and the game is just really well polished throughout.

Just an incredibly well-made game that 100% accomplished what it set out to do.
 
I can't give a definitive answer to either question because I've played and loved countless games since I was a kid and picking any game is essentially a betrayal to the rest lol. However, that's a boring answer so I'll just pick "a favorite" rather than a definitive favorite; I've got numerous favorites after all lol. And, by extension, try to answer a "best designed" one while I'm at it.

I suppose for a favorite (while intentionally picking from strategy games to be somewhat relatable to M&B fans), I could answer Romance of the Three Kingdoms 7. Not only is an open menu-based sandbox where you can play as a historical or created character operating as a wandering unemployed person, a common officer, city prefect, ruler's advisor, or the ruler himself, but do so with numerous features no other RTK game of the same style attempted since. For example, every city has a native specialty and new unit types are unlocked by combining technological development with whatever specialties your faction's acquired; a basic example is that, to make Horse units, you need access to horses which can be gained by your faction controlling a city that produces them natively. A more complex example is that, to make Cavalry units (a heavy upgrade to Horse), you need to forge Armor, Barding, and buy a Horse to make them. The Armor requires Iron and Leather while Barding requires... something else that I don't remember off-hand lol but, basically, you need to combine the specialties of multiple towns from different parts of China AND have enough technological development in the city actually doing the development to piece together what's necessary to make Cavalry units.

Furthermore, the game's also got my favorite aesthetic style and soundtrack in the series and incorporates parts of historical China that aren't accessible in any other title. Not to mention, it's got sea lanes connecting the northeastern sections with the southern Wu territory, making the strategic map slightly more complex as well. Overall though, I love RTK7 because it's a game with lots of freedom to do what I feel like to unite all China with numerous characters to ether play as, work with, or fight in the process.

As for design (of another favorite)... (a JRPG) Valkyrie Profile's the one that entered my mind because it's got my favorite dungeons in any video game in terms of both aesthetic design and actual layout. Not content with simple forests and ruins, the game's dungeons include puzzle mansions, magic towers with elevators and deliberately anachronistic features, a crashed spaceship filled with demons, a floating palace, and a living tower that literally eats you in its traps and digests you for you to escape. The dungeons of the game, especially the ones restricted to Hard difficulty, are the most demanding of player intelligence of any I've ever played and I loved doing whole back-to-back playthroughs as a small child. The downside was that dungeon designs in just about every RPG since have been comparatively underwhelming and uninspired lol.

Besides the dungeon exploration and puzzle aspects, it's got a great combat and RPG system, great music, art style, weighty story, a lot of freedom rather than the linearity JRPGs are typically associated with, and a few "hidden" systems that allows the player to effectively reverse engineer the game if they figure it out. I think what makes it rather well designed is that the "difficulty options" you're presented with upon starting a new game are less about how hard combat encounters are (the only thing that's effective is XP enemies give and starting characters levels being reduced to 1 on Hard) but rather the dungeons you have available to you. Basically, the only ones you can do on Easy are the relatively straightforward and simple ones while the ones unlocked by Hard are the most complex while the simplest dungeons are outright removed on Hard (you can't do everything in one playthrough since difficulty determines dungeon availability, for instance).

I wouldn't say RTK7 is as well designed as it could be simply because I know of a few ways to exploit the A.I. to make the game pretty easy whereas you have to have foreknowledge to trivialize Valkyrie Profile's difficulty. Otherwise, they're both extremely solid and addictive games by my own standards.
 
The mdickie mobile game School Days is easily the most immersive game I've ever played. It does what no other game does and hides all the stupid stats and levels from you, and the main game mechanic is wrestling. The only numbers you ever see are your school grades. It's legitimately a masterpiece of game design in so many ways. As someone who went to a pretty rough school, It's incredibly accurate.

The game controls like ass but i love it. More games should hide stats from the player and just make the gameplay intuitive instead. I can play for hours without having my suspension of disbelief broken once.
 
We've got an entire board dedicated to games other than M&B. It is appropriately named "Other Games" and is in the off-topic section. That's where this thread is going.

Divinity Original Sin 2 for me. I love games which allow for creative attempts to break them, and totally unrestricted character builds. Narratively it's not an outstanding game, but mechanically it is a masterpiece of turn-based tactics games. I've played through it with a party of four, two, and even a single character, always with different builds and playstyles. The first game is better narratively, but the action economy is less refined. It's also chock full of puns and references, never taking itself too seriously.
 
I have to mention Morrowind for the exploration and travel system, still have fond memories for that game.
And darksouls 1 for the level design and the way it controlled.
As a great runner up I can advise everyone to give outer wilds a go.
 
One's "favourite" game is an incredibly difficult question to answer, but one of the games I keep returning to and also my pick for best design is probably Mud and Blood 2. It pre-empted several industry trends in being basically a "roguelike" (although I hate that term) sandbox strategy built on uncompromising gameplay. It's an absolute masterpiece.
 
Many Total war games especially Med 2 Total war with it's plethora of quality mods.

CIV 5 with it's many features and all the data is stored in SQL server databases, so if you want to mod, it's very easy, just write SQL database commands.

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