Which is your favorite?

I'm still coming to terms with the fact another decade is about to end. Another 10 years of my life are behind me and if you were to go back in time and tell 2010 CJ where he'd be in 2019, he'd probably say, "Wh?o cares? What are tomorrow's winning lottery numbers, time traveler?" Now that I think about it, if you can travel through time, please go back and answer 2010 CJ's question.

One thing from the past decade I'll always treasure are the magnificent games I got to play. Games like Super Mario 3D World, Bayonetta 2, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Spider-Man, Burial At Sea, and so many more. I will keep those memories forever. I'll also hold a ??speci?al place in my heart for the list below, the titles that, in their own unique ways, defined the past 10 years of gaming and set the stage for what we should expect in the next 10.

So, presented in alphabetical order, here are the 11 games that best defined the past decade. Click each image to find out why it ma??de the list.

The post Here ar??e the ??11 games that defined this past decade appeared first on Destructoid.

The Do-Over

Back before we were able to connect consoles to the internet, if a developer released a broken ga?me, something overrun with bugs or controls that didn't work just right, there was nothing to be done about. That was it. The game printed on that cartridge or CD would be the only versi??on ever made. So if a fighting game character was OP, it stayed OP until the next iteration of the game saw release.

With the introduction of updates to game development, this problem could be avoided. Bugs missed in the testing phase could be squashed after a game had released, meaning the game you bought at launch would theoretically only get better as developers continued to work on them. But the promise of post-release updates led to a troubling trend in the industry: more and more, developers and publishers would push out products that had no business being on store shelves. Games like Assassin's Creed Unity, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Fallout 76, Anthem, and SimCity are among the most notabl?e titles o?f the past 10 years to buckle at launch.

And then there is Final Fantasy XIV, Square Enix's MMO follow-up to the massively popular Final Fantasy XI. When it released in 2010, it was met with universal disdain as players and revi?ewers labeled it an unfinished, jumbled mess of a product. Less than three months after it launched, Square Enix removed original producer Hiromichi Tanaka from the project and replaced him with Naoki Yoshida, who had the near-impossible task of turning this turd of an RPG into something players would be willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for.

Less than three years after Final Fantasy XIV crashed and burned, A Realm Reborn emerged from its ashes and established itse??lf as the de?finitive MMO of the decade.

Rebuilding Final Fantasy XIV wasn't going to be easy, but it had to be done fast. While Tanaka had five years of development time with the original iteration of the game, Yoshida had to churn out his revision before the PlayStation 3 went off the market as FFXIV had always been promised for the console. Development started in January 2011. With the poor structure of Tanaka's version, Yoshida and his team had to start from scratch; new engine, new server structure. Menus had to be fixed, the battle system had to be greatly improved. Auto-attacking and dungeon instancing had to be implemented. Many of the improvements that would be there on day one for A Realm Reborn were added in patches to the ori??g??inal version of the game that was kept alive by a small but faithful following.

More than just remaking the game, salvaging Final Fantasy XIV meant changing the conversation surrounding it. Yoichi Wada said XIV had "greatly damaged the [Final Fantasy] brand" and with Dragon Quest X then recently announced as an MMO, XIV's failure could have had a ripple effect on the perception of? ??that title.

In 2013, Yoshida began providing updates about Version 2.0's development to fans ?through Letters from the Producer Live segments. These live presentations would often last well over two hours and they would cover everything from upcoming content to possible changes the team was kicking around. The extensiv??e videos provided a detailed roadmap to tell dedicated players what was in store for them

The hard work in rebuilding the game and the image of the brand paid off in summer of 2013 when Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. It had just about every change fans wanted from the original title, a new storyline, a battle system you could actually enjoy, and too many other improvements to count. The conversation surrounding XIV did a complete 180, but the work didn't stop there. This relaunch couldn't just be great – it had to be the best. So the team kept updating it, adding new quests, storylines, characters, classes, enemies, and more at a pace that would keep players glued to Eorzea. With three well-received expansion packs under its belt, it's hard to argue against this being the best Japanese role-playing game of the last 10 years, even surpassing its own follow-up in Final Fantasy XV.

While I may be late to the party, my months in Final Fantasy XIV have been nothing but pleasurable. The game is an absolute delight and so is the player base. Square Enix's candid approach to making A Realm Reborn was refreshing and the audience followed suit. It still may be millions of subscribers behind World of Warcraft, but the quality of the storytelling, gameplay, and community has only grown since the reset in 2013. Today, Final Fantasy XIV is where you'll find the be?st JRPG stories in the industry, ?as well as some of the best dungeons and boss battles of any MMO available.

The problem with games being broken at launch isn't going away anytime soon. Be it developer inadequacy, publisher meddling, or simply having to meet an unrealistic deadline so stockholders will be happy, we're always going to see buggy, rushed titles on store shelves. With Final Fantasy XIV, Square Enix thoroughly penned the manual on poor-game-launch crisis control and showed the industry that you can be successful and change the narrative surrounding your horrid mess of a title if you just open up to pla?yers and work earnestly at fixing what's broken.

_{[You can read all of our ??Game?s of the Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: Final Fantasy ??XIV: A Realm Reborn appeared first on Destructoid.

Don't look up...just don't look up

Released unceremoniously in 2014 as a teaser for an unnamed horror game, the "Playable Teaser," as it would late??r be known, quickly became one of the most discussed gaming experiences of the year.  The premise is relatively simple but undeniably creepy. A repeating hallway that changes. Radio broadcasts reporting husbands murdering their wives and children interspersed with messages seemingly directed at the player.

Each pass through the hallway built up tension. The process made you feel like you were trapped in a Hell, possibly of your own making. Then, after you get through it all, the sink baby, Lisa, the eyes staring at you in the red light, when the door finally unlocks, you find out the whole thing was a teaser for Silent Hills and that Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro were working on it. Oh, and they were trying to get Junji Ito on board too. T??his is one of the &??ldquo;if I had three wishes” kind of scenarios for that dream team.

This entire experience was simply marketing for a game, albeit a complete novella. Hideo Kojima scared the shit out of all of us and in the end gave us the greatest gift a horror game fan could ask for. Of course, we all know that Silent Hills would go on to be canceled but at the time, being given such a dreamy promise after being terrified was one of the most satisfying feelings I have experienced in my entire gaming life. A lot of folks think that loot boxes are the greatest tragedy to befall gaming this decade. For me, it’s the cancellation of Silent Hills.

After Konami canceled the project, it made the widely unpopular decision to remove the P.T. demo from the PlayStation Network. As the industry continued its push toward an all-digital future, players were given a first-hand look at the inevitable doomsday scenario such a future brings. P.T. suddenly became the most sought-after game the market and there were folks sel?ling gladly PS4 systems on eBay with it installed for upwards of $1000.

The fallout from the P.T./Silent Hills debacle continues still today. Konami, a publisher with some of the most celebrated franchises in history, had its stock with the gaming community plummet in the aftermath. If that wasn't bad enough, Kojima, one of the few true auteurs in the industry who had been with the company since 1986, wanted out. After a much-publicized exit from the publisher, he started Kojima Productions and, with his celebrity friends in tow, created Death Stranding.

P.T. may be gone but it's not forgotten. You can see the influence of it in games like Allison Road and Layers of Fear. For those not interested in those "inspired by" projects, we have fans recreating the experience and releasing it on PC. Hell, in January of 2019, a fan released it with VR and controller support added. I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world to get me to go through that. The influence that P.T. had can be felt in gaming and will continue to have a profound effect on developers for years to come. While I will always wonder what could have been with Silent Hills, I am eternally grateful for what we have.

_{[You can read al??l of our Games of the Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: P.T. appeared first on Destructoid.

Gotta not get hit by a car

I remember the first time my mom mentioned Pokémon Go. The game had just had its awful, broken launch, but it worked pretty well in the remote area she lived in. She called to ask me about it because all of the employees at her store were playing it on their breaks and on the job when they thought she wasn't watching them through the store's CCTV. At this point, my mom was aware of what Pokémon was due to having me as a son, but probably not familiar enough wit??h it tell the difference between a Squirtle and a Pikachu.

So she called me to ask me about the game and when I explained to her what it was, she replied, "There are Pokémon all over the store. I saw them on the phones." This is an absolutely perfect "mom" description of what Pokémon Go is. Yes, it's the game that puts little pocket monsters in her store, in parks, at universities, on the highway, and everywhere else Niantic programmed them to appear. Pokémon were? everywhere, and so were trainers of all ages who cam?e together to catch 'em all.

It's a rare occurrence for a mobile game to absolutely dominate the zeitgeist. There are popular apps that rake in millions of dollars every year, from Candy Crush to Arena of Valor, but no other smartphone title of this past decade brought together casual and hardcore players from countries around the world. The novelty of the experience -- walking around your city or town hunting these creatures -- was so simple that even people who'd never played a Pokémon game bef??ore would at least see the appeal of it. For those who had spent years collecting all the 'mo??ns on their Game Boys, GBAs, and dual-screen devices, it afforded them the opportunity to become a trainer in ways they could only pretend to before.

On paper, Pokémon Go seems like the most obvious idea for a guaranteed success, but we can't gloss over how unlikely its continued popularity seemed at launch. Sure, it was going to be big in the beginning because it's Pokémon and just about everything that franchise touches turns to gold. But it hit app stores in a rough way. It crashed a lot, it was feature light, and there wasn't much to the gameplay outside of catching 'em all. We scored it 3.5 because its launch was such a disaster.

But the game slowly got better, and as it got better, the promise of the technology developed by Niantic -- based on its original title Ingress -- became clearer. Pokémon Go was a game that made full use of every aspect of a smartphone, from its camera to its touchscreen to the tracking of your movement that we can only hope won't be used for nefarious reasons. It set a benchmark for what developers could do with burgeoning AR technology, and like all popular experiments, it paved the way f?or a variety of imitators based on some of the biggest intellectual properties in entertainment.

Pokémon Go may not get the headlines it did in its first few months. There are no more stories of people trespassing onto government property, getting hit by cars, being assaulted, having their phones stolen, or stumbling upon dead bodies while trying to catch that Raichu. But don't for a second think that means nobody is playing. It's not the fad people claimed it would be in the same way Pokémon isn't the fad many thought it would be in the '90s. Pokémon Go is a cultural landmark and currently the best example of how augmented reality can change how the world interacts with games and how those games interact with the world??.

_{[You can read all of our Games of the D??ecade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: Pokemon Go appeared first on Destructoid.

Open your eyes

I've been a fan of open world games since Claude first rampaged through the streets of Liberty City. In those halcyon days of the PlayStation 2, being able to go where I want to go and do what I want to do marked a striking change from the generations before that forced me to follow a straight line from beginning to end. Grand Theft Auto III hooked me, as it did millions of others, to this genre and I spent mu?ch of the aughts chasing down any and every open-world title I could find.

From True Crime: Streets of New York to The Godfather: Blackhand Edition, I devoured these games. But around the time I consider investing days of my life into Watch Dogs, I could feel my lust for the genre starting to wane. The awe of having a massive world to play in ha?d worn off and it became less about what I could do and more about what I couldn't. I couldn't go into this building. I couldn't climb this mountain. I couldn't drive through this tunnel. And perhaps most pressing for me, I couldn't finish the game unless I kept going through its story and completing its quests.

Then The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild hit and, like a fairy from a bottle, replenished my love ?for open world games.

It's difficult to find anything new to say about a game that's already been the subject of extensive think pieces and blogs since it debuted. It's been called one of the greatest games of all time, a masterpiece, and a paradigm shift for the genre. As competitors like the beautiful Horizon Zero Dawn still shackled progression to a set story path, Breath of the Wild gave players the only tools they'd need right at the beginning, and after a brief set of quests to show them the ropes, let them loose into a massive wo??rld with just one objective: beat the Calamity Ganon and free Princess Zelda.

Everything else, from the few dungeons to the Sheikah Shrines to the story segments, is optional. You can watch the credits roll without ever fully exploring the map or figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do with those dragons you occasionally spot soaring through the sky. True fact: I've played through Breath of the Wild twice and still haven??????????????????????????'t even seen a Molduga.&nb??sp; 

Without a required narrative to prop up player progression, Nintendo had to come up with new ways to keep the world engaging. For wayfarers like myself, it's easy to pick a direction and be satisfied with the journey and the destination. Hyrule is littered with Shines, Koroks, enemy encampments, and wild animals. For those who need more structure to their quest, Breath of the Wild contains just enough of?? a set-up to press the importance of conquering each of the Divine Beasts. Bu?t even with a checklist of tasks in place, it is entirely on the player to decide how they'll progress through the game and when they'll attempt to actually beat it. 

That complete sense of freedom was expanded to the world itself. Outside of the obvious boundaries of the map, nothing is off limits in Hyrule. If you want to climb a mountain in the distance, you can. The occasionally mocked descriptor of Breath of the Wild as an "open air" game proved true as players touched every point on the map wit??hout restriction.

On top of all of that, there are the physics engine and the rules by which Hyrule operates. These have kept Breath of the Wild in the conversation for years. One of the reasons we still talk about this game is players are still recording and sharing neat stunts they pull off when using the different features of the Sheikah Slate. From turning a mine cart into an electrified flying death machine to catching fish with a whistle, hardly a mo?nth goes by without someone on the internet sharing some epic trick they discovered while just ??screwing around in Hyrule.

Nintendo saw the path carved by other open world titles and decided to blaze its own?? way forward. And while it's still too early to say if its impact on the genre will be transformative, the bar has been significantly raised of what we should consider "open world." There is a new frontier for these types of games, and I hope developers realize they don't have to bind progress to the stories they want to tell; that they can put their trust in the audience to se?e a title through to the end on their terms.

And if that doesn't happen, at least there's a sequel to Breath of the Wild in development.

_{[You can read all of our Games of the?? Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that De??fined the Decade: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild appeared first on Destructoid.

The Souls of Souls

This is it. This is the last time we're talking about Dark Souls.

This decade. Got ya!

What can be said about Souls that hasn't been said already? Pretty much everyone is using it as cringeworthy lexicon  (I try to avoid it!) to describe any rewarding gameplay loop: thus is the power of Souls.

Although 2009's Demon's Souls did a fantastic job of rekindling (ha) the spirit of From Software's King's Field series, it was the original Dark Souls that really took that formula off of the mean streets of Boletaria and into the collective zeitgeist. The unrestricted design of the Firelink Shrine hub is often cited as the eminent goal of open world games, and we've had so many copycats and honorable spinoffs in the eight-plus years Dark Souls has been around. Instead o?f championing it in a rote way, I'm going to tell you how the series impacted my life for the last decade or so.

For me, directionless role-playing games are an escape. I can recall the very first time I ever played one: Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest I), acquired through a Nintendo Power magazine giveaway. The game's labyrinthine dungeons are still burned in my brain, and I remember being alone in a room, completely mesmerized by them. Flash forward to many years later during a particularly troubling family event, and I'm glued to Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, on a quest to both lose and find parts of myself those ??moments.

But by the time the Souls series came around, I wasn't alone anymore. I've since had the opportunity to share them with people close to me; a long list that has my wife at the top. We played through each of the Souls games together, side-by-side (with a killer two-TV/two-console setup!), helping each other through the tria??ls and tribulations as a unit. Although I had already experienced them all by myself in isolation, with the same rewarding spiritual journey at the end of the tunnel, these co-op sessions? exemplified a new, brighter chapter in my life.

Witnessing the pure magic of lit-up eyes of friends and family after they defeat a tough boss they've been stuck on has been one of my favorite single experiences of these past few generations. The Souls series forces you work for your rewards, which make those riches all the sw?eeter. I just ended up getting much more out of it than in-game loot.

_{[You can read all o??f our Games of the Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: Dark Souls appeared first on Destructoid.

The Coming Storm

Fortnite is a latecomer to this decade, only really breaking out in the halcyon days of last year once it became clear that Epic had something lasting on its hands, and not another also-ran riding PUBG's coattails. 

Looking back, it feels downright weird to remember the skepticism that greeted what would become the (current) biggest game in the world. It made sense at the time. In light of the lackluster reception for the original incarnation of Fortnite, now known as its Save The World mode, Fortnite's sudden growth into the burgeoning battle royale space felt like a grab of desperation -- a Hail Mary by Epic to save a lukewarm tech demo by messing around in the space carved out by PUBG and the ArmA mods that spawned it.

And here it i?s now. On your PC. On every major console. On your phone. And more than likely, on some current or future streaming s??ervice near you.

It's worth pointing out that Fortnite was hardly the first to come to market with many of its ideas. Then again, if the gaming industry has any lessons to teach, it's that originality isn't a prerequisite for success. Not even Minecraft,? another game in this feature series, can lay claim to having birthed its core concept.

What Epic did do with Fortnite was kick the doors wide open, practically everywhere it went. The mode we now know as Save the World had been in the works since 2011, switching Unreal Engine versions and art styles and still landing with something of a dull thud in 2017. Already feeling old before its time, the zeitgeist had moved on from horde modes and base-building to battle royale games like PUBG and its growin?g stable of imitators. Epic noticed it could get in on the action, and turned its considerable resources towards that end.

Besides managing to catch a wave at its crest, Fortnite Battle Royale contained a deciding factor Epic would use to make its game huge beyond recognition: speed, though not so much in the game itself as in hitting the ground running. Battle Royale was reportedly cobbled together in a matter of weeks, and its combination of an approachable, cartoony aesthetic with considerably more forgiving core play and most importantly, a zero-cost barrier to entry, proved to be the magic trick that juiced rapid growth. It also helped that the game's building mechanics, at the time sloppily held over from Save the World, ended up setting Fortnite apart from the growing crowd of also-rans. Matches twisted on more than a player's skill with shooting. Securing that Victory Royale hinged on their ability to build complex structures under pressure, constantly adapting to differences in height and opponents that could construct their own cover on the fly. Eventually, building skills like that would give rise to the game's own Creative mode, connecting Fortnite back to its Minecraft inspirations and opening even more space in the ga?me proper fo??r play that doesn't involve combat or competition.

Before long Fortnite was seemingly everywhere, its spread aided by viral memes like boyfriends using bush camo to text their girls back and the occasional boost from curious celebrities trying their ha??nd at it. Copyright-skimming dance animations and skins baited players into its rotating item shop, and eventually playing on the generic "default" skins became a sign of either great confidence or, sadly, a way to bully kids that were too poor or new to the game to buy the hot new skin.

And then there was the Battle Pass. Again, Dota 2 pioneered the concept, but Fortnite's tying the Battle Pass rewards to both in-game progress and its seasonal content model made for a potent combo. Players could pay their money for a Battle Pass, but only the least sensible whales could afford to buy their way to all the rewards. To not miss out on the season's offerings, players, particularly lower-skilled ones, had to make Fortnite practically a second job to grind out every bit o?f value from the pas??s. 

The Battle Pass, the item store, and the seasonal model all added something that many "service games" of an earlier era didn't have: Impermanence. Where you could eventually experience every bit of World of Warcraft's content (bar a Cataclysm or two) if you played for long enough, Fortnite's seasons were one and done. Rarely, if ever, did they return. Epic would double down on trying to create "appointment gaming" with more in-game events, from a rift in space that altered the map to a meteor that wiped out a key location to a kaiju battle to a live concert to Thanos and the Avengers, to the end of the world to Star Wars. If you wanted to get the most out of Fortnite, it soon became common knowledge that "you had to be there." Almost weekly major updates kept?? people coming back, and weaponized "FOMO" proved as powerful a compulsion to stay engaged as any gambling-like gacha trickery.

The scheme is working, almost terrifyingly well. Almost every game aiming to be a going concern, including my personal "main," Destiny 2, appears to be employing or about to employ a Battle Pass-like system, either on top of loot boxes or in place of them (a wise tactic considering growing hostility to the loot boxes among lawmakers). Regular updates and seasonal content drops are now an expected part of the offering. One can only hope that future games angling to learn Fortnite's lessons won't resort to the kind of awful crunch development Epic reportedly does to maintain Fortnite's blistering pace of updates, though.

Even PUBG, the game Fortnite was widely accused of ripping off, implemented its own "Pass" about 18 months ago. To paraphrase a certain evil space wizard (who may also appear in Fortnite, come to think of it): Now Fortnite is the master. Rather than define the last ten years of games, we may end up remembering it for how it'll influence the next ten years, for better and worse.

_{[You can read all of our Gam?es of the Dec??ade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: Fortnite appeared first on Destructoid.

Go make your own fun

It's hard to say what the gaming landscape would look like today if Infiniminer never existed. The game, developed by Zach Barth, present??ed players with a randomly generated world filled with voxel blocks they were supposed to break for the sweet, sweet minerals inside. It was developed in Barth's spare time and achieved a small amount of repute with PC players who discarded the main objective in favor of making their own objects and buildings with the blocks found in the world. 

On its own, Infiniminer wouldn't even be the footnote in gaming history it is today. Barth stopped development on the title quite quickly after it launched. But the reason it's still talked about and why it's the lede of this piece is because one of its fans was Markus "Notch" Persson, who would take the conceit of Infiniminer&n???bsp;and turn it into the most popular video game in the world.

Minecraft was announced not long after Barth moved off of his title and onto other projects. Like any creator, Persson was adrift in a sea of ideas and influences around the time he was introduced to Infiniminer. The building blocks of the game spoke to him, and in a blog post, Persson wrote he knew this was the game he wanted to make after playing Barth's original. After producing some test footage of the project to positive feedback, Persson launched the first playable version of Minecraft in 2009.

At launch, it was pretty rough and ugly. The low-res voxel graphics didn't do much to push graphics cards, but players didn't seem to mind. In the TigForums thread for the original game, users quickly grafted onto the idea Persson was pushing with his take on the Infiniminer formula, and gave their own opinions on what he should do next. Like with other indie projects, the forum allowed players to interact directly with the dev and in the early hours after launch, Persson laid out his plans for what he wanted Minecraft to become.

By the time it officially launched in 2011, the game was already a household name. By the end of the decade, it was ported to nearly every gaming device on the market, including Raspberry Pi. For many young gamers, it became their first video game, filling a role usually taken by Mario Kart or Pokémon. And while the survival mode is no doubt still ??an attraction for newcomers and long-time fans alike, it's the boundless freedom of the creative mode that has had an asteroid-sized impact on the industry.

Since the dawn of the medium, video games have mostly been about having fun with other people's worlds and rules. There have been sandbox-style experiences before, like Garry's Mod, but popular titles before Minecraft forced players to adhere to someone else's idea of what the game should be. Creative mode chucks those restrictions out the window and tells players to make their own fun, their own rules, and their own fantastic worlds. Using simple building mechanics, players could create and share anything the map would hold, from giant castles to cities to working calculators.

Minecraft became of digital symbol of individual expression and its dominance in the industry has influenced other developers to open their titles up to the same level of player freedom. From Fortnite Creative to the beautiful Dragon Quest Builders to the endless copycat titles that appeared on consoles the game didn't, Minecraft touched a nerved with gamers who were tired of playing by other people's rules and wanted to live by their own. It tapped into the mindset LEGO has been profiting off of for decades and put it? into a video game anybody could play. It is without a doubt the most important and influential game of the past 10 years.

Persson bid adieu to Minecraft in 2014 when he sold it to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. It is now a wholly Microsoft operation and the Redmond, WA company has serious plans for it. Minecraft Earth is currently in beta on mobile and next year will see the release of Minecraft Dungeons across major consoles and PC. While people have said for years that Minecraft was dying, it's only gr?own more popular. Across all formats, it boasts more than 100 million monthly players, includ??ing in China where the game is free-to-play. 

Whether or not it'll be able to remain as popular as it is today in the next decade doesn't really matter. This Infiniminer clone changed the industry and its approach to player interaction. As gaming continues to evolve with new technology and ideas, Minecraft's longevity stands as a reminder that sometimes what people want ??more than a??nything else is just to be able to do their own thing.

_{[You can read all of our Games of the Decade cho??ices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: Minecraft appeared first on Destructoid.

Farm your farm, then farm some more

Simulation games mean a hell of a lot to me.

Ever since a young age, no matter what was going on in my life, I could lose myself in a good simulator. The Sim series hooked me quickest of all, particularly some of the more out-there marvels like SimAnt that were doing things no one else was.

But one day Harvest Moon was stocked in my local rental store (RIP Power Video!), and my life changed forever. It didn't really keep that magical train running forever, but Stardew Valley picked up the torch it had dropped ?so many years before it.

There are so many reasons why Stardew Valley deserves to be remembered as one of the greats of this past decade. It proved that you didn't need to monetize a game to hell and back to be successful. Along with Undertale and others, it showed the power of a one-person studio amid a sea of giants. But unlike several other solo acts, Stardew Valley has been consistently doling out massive, AAA-level updates for free for years on end.

The story of Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone is both inspiring and monumental. Achieving a computer science degree in 2011, Barone worked another job to achieve his dream of becoming a game developer. Not content with the direction of Harvest Moon, Barone decided to follow his passion and create his own game: in the end, his project is arguably better than the series that inspired him. See that image above? That's a portion of my farm that I spent over 200 hours building in tan??dem with my wife, after the multiplayer update hit. I hav??e another solo farm with a playtime that well exceeds that.

Stardew's latent superpower is how it balances casual play and hardcore nuance on the edge of a knife. If you wish it so you can make as little money as you want, explore to your heart's content and complete an easier endgame path that merely requires you to b??uy your way to victory. Or, you could opt to painstakingly collect objects (many of which are restricted to various seasons or well-hidden off the beaten path) and finish the game's community center: the choice is yo??urs.

Nearly everything from the soundtrack to the cha?racter designs facilitate laughter and ear-to-ear smiles. But more so than any game of the decade, I found myself collaborating with other players. The community really opened up not just in terms of the expected PC modding scene, but with an actual "neighborhood" feel; with open arms discussions and a general sense of positivity. You just don't get that kind of wholesomeness in gam?es anymore, either from the publishers up on high or down in the trenches.

Every year or so I'll get the call to play Stardew Valley for an obscene amount of time, joining Minecraft as one of my top go-tos. I couldn't wait to show Stardew Valley to my wife, and one day, I'll show it to my kid: hopefully we'll all experience it together. I don't thi?nk I'll ever stop playing, no matter what decade it is.

_{[You can read all of ??our Games of the Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: Stardew Valley appeared first on Destructoid.

A celebration of excess

A single game with staying power is a difficult achievement to obtain in this industry. With dozens of titles launching each week, most of them in the Switch eShop, the spotlight tend?s to move quickly as new hits surpass the current crop of favorites. It's a process that repeats itself on a yearly, monthly, or even weekly basis. A game will trend on Twit?ter one day, then it'll be as if it never existed the next.

Few games can buck that trend, can break the wheel. With more than 115 million copies sold worldwide since it launched, Grand Theft Auto V has done just that. Since it debuted on the PS3 and Xbox 360, it's been one of the top 20 selling games every year. And with good reason. Grand Theft Auto V is not only one of the best, classic-styled open-world games ever created, but its companion game, Grand Theft Auto: Online, has evolved into the persistent, crime-ridden world?? fans of the series have want?ed.

After writing the rulebook for the open-world genre, Rockstar decided to make some revisions to it for GTAV. Using the power of the then current generation systems, it set out to give players a world with the scale of San Andreas but with details that could only be provided by an unimaginably large production budget. Though since surpassed by Rockstar's own late-decade efforts, the scale of Los Santos was something to behold on the PS3 and Xbox One. Even when it was dirty it was beauti?ful, with every neighborhood feeling alive with personality and culture. It is a living, breathing world, one that encapsulates the paradox of the American Dream Rockstar so persistently attempts to mock. And tying that expansive open-world together was a st?oryline and heist system that broke new grounds for the franchise.

If prior games in the series took their influence from old school gangster movies, V found its inspiration in Hollywood heist films. The Sting, Usual Suspects, The Killing, and many more films shaped the genre and Rockstar didn't shy away from taking generously from these resources. Protagonists Michael and Franklin embodied the type of anti-heroes Rockstar had cultivated in prior games while Trevor was pretty much a stand-in for the more sadistic fans of the series, those who like to turn on cheat codes and just watch the world burn. They had nothing in common, but like any good heist film, that's what made them the perfect partners for the centerpiece of the GTA V experience.

While a majority of the missions found in the game follow the formula Rockstar wrote two decades ago, it's the heists that make GTA V memorable. Sure, the franchise had heists before, but nothing of this caliber. Planning a heist like you were a sadistic Danny Ocean is the most involved mission process the series has seen. Getting a crew together, choosing if you want well-versed criminals to join the team for more money or sticking with newbies to? the world of crime for dependability, meant players could experiment with how to proceed ??with each heist, breaking these missions away from the cookie-cutter tasks that make up the rest of the Los Santos experience.

The past decade was home to many impressive open-world games from the Saints Row series to Ubisoft's uneven Assassin's Creed franchise. Grand Theft Auto V on its own may not be enough to be one of those titles that defined the decade, but the inclusion of Grand Theft Auto Online sets it apart from most of the other open-world games that blew up big over the past 10 years. Where regular GTA titles tied progression to a linear storyline that had a definitive beginning and end, GTA: Online let players loose to make their own fun without end. If you wanted to be a race car driver, you could spend all day mastering Hot Wheels loop-the-loops in the sky. Want to be a professional gambler? As of 2019, you can so long as the mode isn't banned in your state or country. Even a job as menial as a driving?? instructor is a possibility (and one of the most necessary jobs in the game given how nobody obeys traffic laws). Oh, and there are heists. Lord are there heists.

Though it was grounded at the beginning, GTA: Online has morphed into an impossible amusement park. There are still raids, missions, and street races, but there are also werewolves, rocket cars, and an ugly-ass SUV known as the Freecrawler. Perhaps the defining aspect of GTA Online is that it took the foundation of GTA IV's online mode and turned it into a hang-out game, a way for adult gamers to connect with distant friends and strangers outside of social media chat groups and forum threads. The rise of social gaming is perhaps the most important development of the past 10 years and GTA: Online was at the forefront of it.

The success of Online didn't come without any sacrifices. Rockstar's continued devotion to the game pushed any possible single-player DLC to the wayside. The lack of something as compelling as The Ballad of Gay Tony in the world of GTA V was a point of contention for fans who had no interest in taking their crime sprees online. With V easily being the most well-written game in the fr??anchise, we're only left to wonder what type o??f stories could have been, and what type of heists could have been added.

These two companion titles rewrote how Rockstar approached game development. While it put out several titles in the seventh generation of gaming, its output in the eighth generation consisted of mostly ports of its older titles to new hardware. Grand Theft Auto V represented an all-hands-on-deck approach for the company, tying together its various studios worldwide on a single project with Rockstar North taking the lead on Online updates. If it failed or if it ??only equaled the success of its predecessors, it's hard to say what Rockstar would have and could have d??one.

But Grand Theft Auto V succeeded more than most people?? could have anticipated. While many of its sales can no doubt be attributed to people rebuying the game for PS4, Xbox One, or Windows PC, it's undeniably been the unstoppable force of the decade?. 

_{[Y??ou can r??ead all of our Games of the Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Game?s that Defined ??the Decade: Grand Theft Auto V appeared first on Destructoid.

Boom, bust, and zombies

Over the decades, games and ideas come and go. At?? the end of last decade, plastic instrument music games were riding high, but these days they're all but gone. To?day, hero shooters and battles royale are the hot ticket, but who knows how long those will be around?

Telltale Games experienced that arc of boom and bust. And while the studio released its first game in 2005, this story begins in 2012 with The Walking Dead.

Adventure games were not a new thing at the beginning of the decade; indeed, the genre is one of the oldest in all of video games. But Telltale was at work evolving the genre, moving from more puzzle-focused titles like Sam & Max and Nelson Tethers to narrative-focused games with an emphasis o??n branching storylines and impactful player choices.

There were a lot of factors that contributed to the success of The Walking Dead. Remember, this released around season two of the AMC series, when fans were frothing at the mouth for the property (like the walkers therein) and not yet beaten down and burned out on it (like the hu?mans).

But Telltale's take on the comic book series did more than just please existing fans; it cultivated ne??w ones. One factor that helped it achieve that was its episodic format. It was easy enough to ignore high praise for a single game, but?? when that praise is sustained over months, peaking every time a new episode is released, it became nearly impossible not to try it out, to see what all the buzz was about.

Plenty of video games can make the player feel something, but more often than not, the feeling is one of power, success, or achievement. Dread is perhaps less common, but it's easy enough to find games that elicit that response. For many players, The Walking Dead was one of the first games to bring out not only sadness and regret, but? also mirth in ??the face of its dark story.

The story of Lee and Clementine is one most players will never forget, and unique ?to the medium, each player's story is just a little bit different than anybody else's. Another part of the continuing buzz came after ??an episode's release, when friends could compare and contrast how their individual stories are going.

The Walking Dead was so successful that it sent Telltale into overdrive. The studio created some of its best work in the wake of this game, like The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands, and it secured huge IPs to work on like Game of Thrones and Batman. It inspired games from other studios to follow its formula like Life is Strange and Oxenfree.

Sadly, the success of The Walking Dead also led to Telltale's eventual shuttering. It was such a huge hit, and its formula so well defined, that the business plan outpaced the creative energy at the studio. Secure rights to a popular IP, stick it in this aging engine, and the writers and coders can keep up with a grueling monthly or bimont?hly r??elease schedule, right?

It turns out, no. Not right.

Telltale's story mirrors that of the game industry at large in the twenty-teens: it finds an idea that works, and it burns through that idea while it's hot. It flames bright while it can, but the fire is unsustainable, and the people who end up getting burned worst are the ones working on feeding the fire. Telltale is now a smoldering pile of rubble where a game studio once was, and its downfall began with the highest highs of The Walking Dead.

_{[You can read all of our Games of the Decade choices here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Def??ined the Decade: The Walking Dead appeared first on Destructoid.

Excuse me for...dropping in.

[Editor's Note: What a decade this has been. It's too soon to say how it will compare to those before it, but the past 10 years have been phenomenal for the video game industry. We've seen the meteoric rise of the indie developer and mobile gaming, the birth and death of the toys-to-life concept, and the emergence of gaming as permanent mainstream entertainment. With the proliferation of Twitch, we have our own celebrities, lifestyle brands, and professional gaming leagues.

You no longer have to play games to enjoy the culture, but hundreds of millions still do because this past decade has given players some truly phenomenal pieces of entertainment. Many games released between 2010 and 2019 will be enjoyed well for years to come, but to mark the dawn of a new decade, Destructoid is looking at those games that were not only fun to play but were the games that defined the past 10 years. Whether they introduced genres or perfected what was already there, over the next week we'll be highlighting those titles that best exemplify what gaming was in the last decade. And we start with a title that almost ended up as something completely different.]

The origins of Overwatch can be traced back to 2007 when Blizzard, flush with cash from its monster hit World of Warcraft, began work on its second MMO. Dubbed "Titan," the project would be a new IP for the company and would focus on characters fighting across a sci-fi version of Earth. Unlike WoW, this game would be a class-based, first-person shooter. The existence of "Titan" was confirmed by Blizzard as early as 2008, but most details about the project were never made public. The game was said to be ambitio??us, with more than a decade worth of support planned for it, but the development team struggled to get the project and all of its ideas to coalesce. After a reported reboot of "Titan" in ??a last-ditch attempt to save it, the game was officially canceled in 2014.

Out of its ashes and ideas arose another game, one that just might be superior to whatever "Titan" was shaping up to be. A small number of developers working on the project were given a short deadline to think of something new. With assets from the canceled project and an admiration for Team Fortress 2, Jeff Kaplan and his team developed the pitch for Overwatch, a hero shooter featuring an eclectic s??et of characte?rs fighting it out on a sci-fi version of Earth. 

Overwatch was announced less than a year after "Titan's" cancellation was confirmed. The trailer announcing the project -- made with that impeccable Blizzard animation -- whet the appetites of millions of fans. An open beta prior to launch attracted millions of players. Upon release, it was met with critical acclaim and had more than 10 million players moving payloads and protecting points by June of 2016. In 2019, Overwatch's player base topped 50 million players.

The popularity of Overwatch and its characters extended well beyond the game. The lore of this world of superhuman heroes fighting against the Omnics became great fodder for video shorts, comics, short stories, and all the other bits of backstory the game left out. We were introduced to queer characters, learned of Pharah's stone-soup genealogy (to justify the wide variety ?of ethnic costumes the developers created for her), and witnessed the tragic origins of character like Mei, Reinhardt, and Bastion. Even though the game did not contain a single-player campaign, Blizzard, through character banter and these outside story sour?ces, shaped a world millions of players could invest themselves in.

Of course, none of this would have mattered if the game wasn't any good, but Blizzard's mix of characters and abilities meant experimentation and improvisation was encouraged and rewarded. Being able to switch characters after each death meant players could respond to the situation at hand and tu??rn a match around on a dime. The expanding roster and frequent updates to characters -- oh how I miss original Symmetra -- also meant the metagame was constantly evolving, with new techniques and strategies being deployed by players who sunk hundreds upon hundreds of hours into it.

No other multiplayer shooter dominated the conversation the way Overwatch did during the past 10 years, and it was a conversation that kept changing. Originally, it was aimed at those shooter fans who'd been on board since Blizzard first announced the project. But in late 2016, it was clear there was a new direction for the title. As new characters were added, buffed, and nerfed, Blizzard saw the opportunity to establish Overwatch as an esport, not just one that features different tournaments, but a legitimate le??ague, with teams, se??asons, and eventually stadiums. 

Esports were already immensely popular by the time the Overwatch League was announced. Blizzard had more than enough cl?out and money to make it work. And it did work. The first season of the Overwatch League was successful enough that more teams were added in season two. For fans, this presented an opportunity t?o see strategies and techniques used by the pros, but it also changed Blizzard's approach to updating the game.

What started out as something designed around fan input morphed into something dictated by the professional players. Characters would see buffs and nerfs to make them more palatable to league play. The uniqueness of each character slowly wilted away as the game began to emphasize damage over the other classes. Blizzard kept instituting changes to prevent unstoppable combinations, ultimately leading to the decision to split teams into an equal number of Tank, Damage, and Support characters. Changes weren't always appreciated, but the thing all fans know about Overwatch&n??bsp;is not?hing is permanent and the experience is a dynamic one.

There is no telling where Overwatch is going to go in the next decade. It recently launched for Nintendo Switch and a sequel was announced at BlizzCon where it was revealed PvE elements would be added to the game and owners of both versions of the game would be able to play the PvP modes with one another. But no matter what happens with the sequel, the foundation Blizzard created with Overwatch is not only st?rong enough to support millions of fa??ns who enjoy its gameplay, characters, and beautiful maps, but also a sports league that could one day be the future of professional competition. And all of this wouldn't have happened if the people making "Titan" were able to finish the project.

_{[You can read all of our Games of the? Decade choices&nb?sp;here as they arrive.]}

The post The Games that Defined the Decade: Overwatch appeared first on Destructoid.