Look! A ranking of the 50 best RPGs on PC. I know, you never asked for this, but here it is. It is 100 percent correct, we double-checked. The RPG is a broad and deep sea and fishing out the best games from its characterful waters is no easy task. But we are capable fishers on the good ship RPS, and know when to humanely throw back a tiddler or fight to heave up a monster. Enough of this salty metaphor. Here are the 50 best RPGs you can play on PC today.

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While it still bears some reputation as a scrappy little browser-game toolset (and that’s no bad thing – it enabled much of the GMTK 2018 jam recently), ubiquitous game development platform Unity has spread to all corners. While I> don’t have a single creative bone in my body, the Humble Unity Bundle contains a pile of Unity tools and assets to build your dream game. Even if you’re not the creative type, there’s some good Unity-based games in here too, including ninja sneak ’em up Shadow Tactics, teen horror adventure Oxenfree and moody tearjerker The Last Day Of June.

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In the mid-to-late 2000s, publishers abandoned the CRPG genre an acronym describing the very specific genre of video games adapted from tabletop RPGs to be played on computers which a decade earlier had been a cornerstone of PC gaming. They were more interested in accessible, console-friendly series like Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls, and PC-centric RPGs all but died out.

Then, around 2012, RPGs made a comeback, largely thanks to the rise of crowdfunding and an endless well of nostalgia. Since then we ve been treated to heaps of good ones Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera and there are plenty more in the works. But there s no guarantee that CRPGs are back for good. Some, such as Torment, haven t sold well. The future of crowdfunding remains uncertain. And asking fans to commit 50 hours to a single story is more difficult than ever, given the volume of great games that release every month. So how can developers ensure that the genre stays relevant?

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It’s Summer Games Done Quick time again! You know what that means. The final seal has been broken, the rivers are turning to blood, and High Dread Azagorath is free to destroy the land. But while people wait, they’re doing speed-runs. And in celebration of that, I thought I’d take a dig through the archives for a few particularly impressive and interesting ones that take that whole idea of a fifty hour epic and beat it down so quickly, the hero’s hometown doesn’t even have time to finish smouldering.

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We already knew Wasteland 3 [official site] was coming out and that it was set in the frozen hinterlands of Colorado, because we have an incredible repository of knowledge and wisdom. But we didn t know exactly what would be waiting for us there. A short trailer accompanied the game s crowdfunding launch on Fig today and it reveals what we should have guessed all along. The only thing waiting for us in the frozen north is death by a cannibal s axe. But there are some other details. Come see.

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I ain’t looked too close at Torment: Tides of Nutella [official site], even despite having its alpha installed on my PC, because if I’m gonna do this thing, I want to do it cold and I want to do it complete. But lately I realised that I knew barely a thing about inXile’s spiritual sequel to revered-by-the-sort-of-people-who-revere-cRPGs cRPG Planescape: Torment, and had nothing more than a loose expectation of similarity. Turns out this latest video was something of a solution for me: it focuses on describing and showing off Numenera’s strange new world and weird technologies, as opposed to dwelling specifically on the player’s journey through it.

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inXile Entertainment’s RPG Wasteland 2 revived a long-dead post-apocalyptic world with the help of crowdfunding, and now they’re trying to return there. The studio today announced Wasteland 3, and it’s no surprise that they’re crowdfunding it again. They want to take the heroic Desert Rangers to frozen Colorado this time, giving them new toys like vehicles and an interesting take on cooperative multiplayer. They’re taking their crowdfunding to a new locale too, planning to launch a Fig campaign in October.

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At Gamescom, after a whirlwind tour of just a few of Torment: Tides of Numenera’s [official site] many worlds, I sat down with inXile CEO Brian Fargo to talk about the past, present and future of his company, and of RPGs. As well as discussing Torment, I wanted to talk about Fargo’s career as a whole, which spans 34 years, and covers the creation of the original Wasteland and Fallout, along with many other games, as well as three enormously successful crowdfunding campaigns in recent times.

He told me that the crowdfunding of Wasteland 2 had felt like “a referendum on [his] history” and that he’d like to explore original ideas once he has rebuilt trust with new versions of Wasteland, Torment and The Bard’s Tale. Mostly, though, we talked about why making RPGs has retained its appeal over all these years, and how the business has changed since the early days of Interplay.

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Goshdarnit, inXile, not you too. You were the ones who gave the people the elaborate, old-school, spiritual-sequel RPGs they’d long desired, not the ones who chased down unrelated games with vaguely similar names to their own. I know, I know: absurd legal complexities mean that sometimes firms are forced to strong-arm other firms into changing the names of things, otherwise they risk losing their long-held trademarks. But that doesn’t change the fact that this has been abused in the past, and to many of us simply looks like The Man bullying the little guy.

In this instance, the Wasteland 2 devs have, after attempted amicable resolutions failed, done a legal frown at one man studio Dan Games, developer of a shooter named The Alien Wasteland. Or ‘Action Alien,’ as it is now unhappily named. They do claim they will help to promote the game if Dan so wishes, however.

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News that inXile’s spiritual Planescape sequel Torment: Tides of New Model Army [official site] won’t, in fact, release its first beta during 2015 comes as little surprise, given there are only four and half minutes left of this year. Even so, it’s good to have confirmation that a sizeable chunk of the soul-searching RPG will be with us “early next year”, with the delay in order that we get “a more polished and complete Beta Test” that should offer around 10 hours of adventuring and existential crisis. … [visit site to read more]