The D20 Beat: 2018’s RPGs

With 2018 ending in just a few days, the folks over at VentureBeat bring us their list of the year’s top RPGs. The list includes Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, inXile Entertainment’s The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep, Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech, Owlcat Games’ Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and plenty of other role-playing titles. Here’s the intro, and you take things from there:

When I think about 2018’s role-playing games, I don’t see lots of bombast and flash. Blockbuster studios often stayed away. Square Enix’s main offerings this year weren’t triple-A releases. You didn’t see anything from BioWare, and Bethesda’s Fallout 76 sure doesn’t feel like an RPG to me.

Instead, we got smaller (in graphical flash, motion capture, and other blockbuster bullet list items), tighter games. I’d argue that these were more intimate tales. We got a new Dragon Quest, a new Pillars of Eternity, and a new Bard’s Tale. Pathfinder got its first proper turn-based PC RPG, and Monster Hunter: World gave us that triple-A flash. Pokémon made its Switch debut in a smaller, even cuter package.

And we saw a host of excellent indie releases and ports — far too many for one person to play.

Many of these were good, if not excellent games. My favorite release of 2018 is an RPG, and my children got more joy out of watching me play such games than I could believe. We might not have something with the production values of The Witcher III or Final Fantasy XV, but dang it, we got soul. I’ll take that over fancy-smancy graphics any time.

Let’s take a look at the game I felt worked and those that didn’t.