Charming thread. So much so I signed up just to post a missing (angsty and entirely too long to be fashionable) rant about a radiant MMORPG no one bothered to play. Born in 1980, I've been playing games since before they had *graphics* (I'd love to buy the chap who mentioned Gemstone 4 a beer and/or a tube of denture cream - it is almost single-handedly responsible for sparking my lifelong love of those all-too-rare RPGs in which you craft your character's persona and motivations and are invited to act them out in ways that don't feel contrived, these having fallen out of favor with the rise of "RP"Gs that misunderstand the fundamental nature of role-playing and instead feature gameplay comprised of shoving a ludicrously-coiffed adolescent ponce through a series of thrilling menus). You have all done an exemplary job in assembling something resembling a comprehensive list of legitimate GOTD contenders; I've played many of these and adored them as you have, shamefully missed more than a few, and (despite all the realistic boob physics and retina-rotting bloom effects) would much rather find myself seated at a mistreated Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga cocktail cabinet with a roll of quarters and a warm beer than ever again set foot near some. Alas, my GOTD (indeed, GOAT, and seeing the acronym now I realize why it is never written as such) hasn't been mentioned, and the reasons weave a tragic tale well worth repeating. Ludologists and game historians, bear with me; trolls, TLDR, head over to a ZP thread and see if you can finally craft that perfect screed that will render Yahtzee incapable of making you out to be the semi-literate problem children you are.
First, though, a word about WOW. Several of you have made very compelling if conspicuously guarded arguments that WOW deserves mention based solely on its effect on the industry and our larger culture; that it has been a transformative influence is beyond dispute. May I preemptively nominate the Black Plague for Cultural Influence of the Previous Millennium for similar reasons? Or Zynga, for that matter? One poster even made the argument that all those coins jangling in Blizzard's pockets perked up the ears of the other publishing titans and thereby ushered in the Age of the MMO, but this has the tenor of a teenage girl covered in symbolic glitter giving a lecture to a Bram Stoker fan on the true nature of vampires - some of us remember things like MUDs, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, and Everquest and were just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to the future we were already inhabiting. That the form the granting of our wish took turned out to be WOW is concrete proof of both the fundamental avarice of humanity and the surety of a malevolent trickster God. I find it very telling that in the whole of this thread I can find no declaration that WOW is anyone's unqualified "favorite" game of the decade (the only stated premise, mind), but a host of industry-insidey wankery about how much it "changed" video games abounds. Not to be insensitive, but you can also string together a lukewarm case for the positive consequences of World War II, just don't try it with too many Jews and Japanese around. WOW is to gameplay what homeopathy is to credible medical science - things that are actually fun diluted and diluted and diluted again until you've spent six months of diligent monotony and a small fortune just getting to the point where you're allowed to fight a meaningful boss or an actual human being without an absurd handicap, and all you have to show for it in the real world is crippling scoliosis and a daughter seeking more reliable parental figures in a rotating cast of heroin dealers. The "pay us $15 every month or your cherished character DIES" business model is utterly ruthless and involuntarily forces developers to make design decisions that are the mortal enemies of fun and excitement (no doubt often accompanied by a purse-string puller making a stretching-out, "spread it thinner" hand motion), but once you understand things like "engagement wheels" and do the math with some degree of precision it's probably relatively easy for the kinds of people who commission these things to weigh "make a billion goddamned dollars" against "condemn millions of people to a life of virtual slavery and demand they pay us for the privilege". This thread isn't about what game influenced *gaming* the most, it's about what game influenced *you* the most; what game did the best job of validating games as a credible art form, not what game sold art out with the most efficiency and drove the entire industry into a capitalistic morass with the most kickass hang time. No one says WOW is their "favorite" game because in the back of every serious WOW player's mind is a whispering sound trying to tell them that if they'd just succumbed to drug abuse and alcoholism like a normal person at least they might be getting laid more consistently.
Please pardon the rancor; no one hates a drug like a recovering addict. I acquired this distasteful worldview after quitting a second multi-year raiding stint with a generally awesome guild I helped found essentially because Blizzard forgot to give my class a third skill tree. I'd always hated the facile, grindy mechanics but tolerated them out of a conceptual love for the MMO; suddenly stone-sober and in increasing danger of doing something meaningful with my life I grew desperate for a new fix, but this was 2009 and the only MMOs in view were all obviously patterned on the monstrosity from whose belly I'd just recently escaped. I limped along playing Borderlands and Spelunky until mid-2010; incidentally, both are serious contenders for my GOTD but fall short - Spelunky because it's too procedural-y (and therefore frequently bullshit), and Borderlands because it's not procedural-y enough (and therefore increasingly vapid). At some point my MMO-starved brain coughed up a remnant of a memory of a game I'd read about years before; typical swords and sorcery with the noteworthy distinction of being focused on PvP, and with a Squenix pedigree, to boot. I dimly recall howling in despair when I initially discovered the game was Not For Americans (this was, not so coincidentally, probably shortly after quitting my *first* multi-year raiding stint in WOW); I vowed to check back on localization news regularly and proceeded to promptly forget everything about it including its name. The Internet being indistinguishable from magic given a few pointed Google queries, back in 2010 I soon discovered the game had only some weeks prior been launched in America under the title Fantasy Earth: Zero, and for the convenient initial price of *zero dollars*. I downloaded the client immediately, canted an eyebrow at the dated-even-in-2006 graphics, promptly screwed up something the game had made absolutely no effort to warn me away from, and got yelled at by at least one veteran for my heinous error. I then played it virtually every day for the next six+ months to the exclusion of all other games.
The gameplay in FEZ was and continues to be wholly unique in my 20+ years of gaming - upon joining one of five distinctive nations, the player is roughly thrust into the resulting web of conflict and expected to contribute in 50v50, objective-based PvP wars over individual territories laid out on a world map. Facing down a player 20+ levels your senior and equipped with painstakingly perfected gear was daunting, certainly, but only guaranteed to be suicidal if that player had mastered the truly FPS, no-goddamned-lock-on-quasi-turn-based-WOW-bullshit controls, was of an unfavorable class in the rogue-beats-mage-beats-warrior-beats-rogue RPS triangle, stupidly ran off fixing for a fight instead of traveling in a pack, and cared more about pounding poorly-equipped noobs than *winning the goddamned war*. For those not content to "grind" out 20 levels at a marked but not ruinous disadvantage in thrilling PvP, there were roles like placing strategic "obelisks" to lift fog of war and directly damage the opposing castle, assuming the form of huge beasts summoned mostly to destroy those obelisks, mundanely farming crystals to fuel these operations while frantically trying to persuade your ragtag army to respond to the minute-to-minute situation in less stupid ways, or, for the truly hasty and belligerent, shelling out $20 to essentially make your unmolested recruit of a character 90% as effective as a capped one. It was an MMORPGFPSRTS with only token PvE content, and if you didn't fancy the RPG element in a fierce PvP context you could buy your way out of that for Steam sale money. No two wars ever remotely resembled each other, and the few times a war dragged on past the 45-minute defender-wins-by-default buzzer everyone on both sizes was *shocked* because they couldn't spare a glance at the clock for the preceding half an hour. Forgetting that the netcode was designed for the LAN-like broadband environment of Japan and didn't transition to silky smoothness in the networking hinterland that is America (and, inexplicably, that the hosting company proscribed ping caps and more than a single server on the west coast), every element of the game was tight, fun, engaging, varied, and taught me such valuable game design lessons it could've qualified for course credit at Full Sail. But even all that doesn't necessarily make a GOTD - what makes FEZ my favorite game of all *time* is it made me *care*.
Motivation is a funny thing; game companies ostensibly seek profit and gamers seek entertainment, and the pursuit of the former all too often interferes with delivering the latter. It's rare for a game these days to deviate too far from the safe, familiar carrots and strings: a surmountable challenge, a statistical upgrade, a shared moment of frivolity to forge or strengthen friendships. Too few even bother trying to make us feel something, and even fewer turn on the hope that they can make us actually *care* about something. Faced with the choice of prideful furries, befuddled lolis, downtrodden goths, belligerent sapheads who probably secretly like wearing ladies' undergarments into battle, and wise (if unfashionably old) wizards, my choice was clear - Yelsord was my home. My fellow citizens were respectful and clear-headed in a ratio that surprised me as a former WOW addict - there absolutely were troublemakers to root out, obvious idiots to discredit, powerful allies who didn't always engender trust, and even the odd well-meaning shameless self-promoter who inadvertently threatened to single-handedly drive the whole nation to calamitous ruin, but, like it or not, we were all on the same side. Anyone saying this is an accurate description of Alliance vs. Horde should be laughed out of the thread - Arathi Basin and 3v3 Arena matches for overpriced baubles barely count as PvP at all, and I strongly suspect no one in their right mind was ever even slightly alarmed at the news that one of the bajillion Alterac Valley instances full of people from two battlegroups over was about to fall to the enemy. WOW did instancing so well it even separated all the geosorted servers into guilds whose only meaningful interactions were spitting at each other in the streets of Dalaran. FEZ was different - no other game has ever given me an urgent sense of shared purpose and camaraderie beyond the confines of a guild, simply because the last game to place the stakes this high (the flawed yet thunderously awesome Shadowbane) died with a whimper before I managed to get anywhere with it. The stakes weren't quite so high as to allow a nation to be altogether defeated, merely shamed, but Yelsord did occasionally teeter on the brink of losing too many players to field an effective army, and the nation-building metagame that eventually revealed itself to me was as glorious and terrifying as the proverbial burning bush. Firm in my conviction that Yelsord's small yet focused population could brook no serious attrition, and fearful that the same might be true for the game itself, I set out to provide new players with the instruction manual the game so sorely needed, identify corrupting influences and deal with them before they infected the nation, even forge political ties with those nations least likely to attack us. None of this had a UI on it, mind you; it was emergent on a scale that would make Peter Molyneux wet his pants. By the end of it I barely even bothered fighting just to turn some map markers a cheerful blue, I only fought in wars that had significant strategic, political, or morale-boosting value weighed against sitting in town telling newbs how not to infuriate everyone including themselves. I was more statesman and teacher than fighter or even strategist, and this in a game that had no artistic aspirations other than to make squabbling over land entertaining. A chain of causality that was evident to few others made the game *about* something, and even if that something was contrived and artificial, it was meaningful to me in a way unmatched by participating in a server-first boss kill or a single-handedly three-capping a TF2 round in the face of stiff resistance. A virtual nation, perhaps, but my virtual *home*. For Yelsord!
Tragically, my fears about the health of the hosting company's finances were well-founded. I knew it meant trouble when they shuttered another game with a small but dedicated playerbase, and not too long after that the announcement was made that FEZ would be shut down in the North American market. The reasons were never articulated, and all speculation quashed by preemptively nuking the forums I had poured hundreds of longwinded posts into. My instructive duties rendered laughable in retrospect, I wandered like a ghost through the increasingly barren cities for a few days, and found that if I tried to wring any further drops of enjoyment out of the game I tasted only bitterness. FEZ ran out the clock on its contracts for another month and quietly folded in ignominy; it was open to players for a little over a year, slightly more than half of which I saw. The game continues to thrive in the Japanese and Korean markets, their concurrent player nadirs likely exceeding our all-time peaks; each day that has passed since I have entertained the notion of purchasing a Baby's First Kanji book and living out of a shoebox with an Internet connection in some Tokyo slum just to get the old feelings back. More than a few players have expressed similar feelings; I wasn't alone in my passion, though being nearly so was the root of the whole problem. Fingers were pointed, the ineffectual hosting company pilloried more out of spite than a sense of justice, but the problem lay not wholly with them but largely with us, the shallow and easily distracted North American gaming market. We were faffing about with the latest Realistic Brown People Subjugation Simulator or gleefully building pillars of charred emergency vehicles and prostitute bodies in games not even pretending to have a moral compass or busy making voxel cocks in Minecraft (an incandescent, right-place right-time concept I'll grant you, yet with insipid gameplay and an engine seemingly optimized for punch cards, and anyway it's foolhardy to place a game that relies mostly on user-generated content for appeal on a GOTX spectrum), and we let a game that might have mattered slip away unnoticed, the polygon count of the tits on display not sufficient to investigate the gameplay.
I hold out hope that someone out there absorbed the same lessons I did from FEZ and all these other world-class video games and goes on to fuse them into an MMO I will one day also care about; historical personal data suggest that my interests would be better served by taking up stamp collecting and heavy drinking. In my head lives the spiritual successor to FEZ and many of these other fine examples of video games' promises fulfilled, but I've only just begun a journey that may one day see me a skilled programmer, and (having never charged a monthly fee for something) I have no impossibly large pile of money with which to motivate even one of the scarily smart programmers out there building revolutionary procedural worlds in their bedrooms. The future of video games is nevertheless a bright one with all these recent examples of unadulterated genius, and if the art form ever manages to shake off the shackles of the media content generation machine without suffocating in a money-poor environment we might see some stuff that surprises even us. May we all have another decade of gaming that consistently tops itself, and may you never fall in love with a game that can disappear like a wisp of smoke in the wind.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. Can I have an impossibly large pile of money? I promise I'll pay you back!
TLDR: Fantasy Earth: Zero. Never heard of it? That's why I had to write 3000 words to explain what it is and why it's my GOTD, particularly since you can't play it anymore, jackass.
