It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you>, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.
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.
Obisdian’s Fallout: New Vegas might be the best of the Bethesda-era Fallout games, but it still got dragged through the ugly hedge backwards a dozen times over. There’s no higher resolution, sharpened texture pack or post-process filter in the world that can save this pudding-faced monstrosity from its blobby brown fate.
Time for extreme measures. E.g. getting a neural net to re-texture the entire game with feverish new auto-generated assets, devised by insane software after it was fed a broad selection of real-world paintings. I have never wanted to play a latter-day Fallout game more than this.
Fallout 76 might have turned out a faintly radioactive dud, but Fallout fans after a fresh serving of post-apocalyptic roleplaying and big choices could do a lot worse than Fallout: New California. It’s practically a whole new Fallout game, and free to boot. Here’s how you can get it, Wot I Thunk of it, and some tips on extra mods to make this return trip to the desert a memorable one.
Fallout 76 may be on the horizon, with Bethesda preemptively warning players of ‘spectacular’ bugs, but fans hungry for a more traditional, solo apocalypse are well served today. Fallout: New California might technically be a mod for Fallout: New Vegas, but it’s closer to a whole new game. Set out in the New California Republic twenty years before The Courier got shot in the face, there’s a new map two thirds the size of New Vegas, and a branching, voiced story that developers Radian-Helix Media reckon can take between six and thirty hours to finish. Below, the trailer.
The radioactive wasteland of any Fallout game is a dangerous place, and twice as deadly for those who go in early. Those who pre-ordered Bethesda’s multiplayer spinoff Fallout 76 on PC (or PS4), can dive into post-apocalyptic West Virginia on October 30th, two weeks ahead of its November 14th launch date. Expect bugs, server issues and occasional nuclear explosions – par for any beta, really. Below, Fallout 76’s intro doing double duty as a new trailer.
Listen up, you re drumming on my time now. What s the tune? It s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show of course. This week we are talking about music in games, and what makes a good game soundtrack. The bleeps and bloops of Pac Man? Or the orchestral panache of Oblivion? A lot of people requested this topic, so we ve also done something special a music quiz! Can you guess the game based on a few seconds of music? Even if you can, I doubt you ll score higher than Katharine, who it turns out is, uh, quite interested in videogame music. (more…)
While Fallout 76 isn’t out until November, you can experience a taste of post-apocalyptic multiplayer survival today in a new mod for Fallout: New Vegas. Modder “funkySwadling” has blessed the Mojave Wasteland with the sort of folks you might meet online: jerks camping newbies, jerks spamming terrible sounds and shouting hateful epithets, and groups of players geared to the nines who’ll be tickled by your puny weapons. The Fallout 76 Experience continues the fine tradition of mods for old games parodying newer games in the series, and I… hated the bit I played, in the way I’m supposed to? (more…)
It is looking like a very fine year indeed to be a Fallout fan. Even if you’re not on board with Fallout 76 taking the series online, we’ve got two full-game-length mods on the way, both due out before the end of 2018. Fallout: The Frontier is an unofficial expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, and has you heading to the frozen north to aid a crew of New California Republic deserters in a massive new map (as big as the editor allows) against a well equipped enemy force. Check out the dramatic and explosion-filled new trailer within.
While the recently announced Fallout 76 might be diverging from series standards, it looks like fans of traditional dialogue and roleplaying-heavy Fallout adventures won’t be entirely left out this year. Originally announced in 2010 as Project Brazil, Fallout: New California is effectively a whole new Fallout game built on top of the New Vegas engine by modding crew Radian-Helix Media, and it’s due for release on October 23rd. Within, a quite dramatic announcement trailer featuring some decent enough amateur voice-work and a whole lot of shooting.