On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.

Rift

Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.

Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.

Rage

Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it. I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.

The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim

My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.

What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.

This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011

I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game. So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.