GGTL: "The Belgian artist Rene Magritte has a valuable lesson to share with us all about the nature of video games: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", or "This is not a pipe"."
Interview with Stephen Russell, Actor for (Nick Valentine, Codsworth, My Handy) in Fallout 4 which is a vast open world role playing game set in the apocalyptic wastes of Boston, the Commonwealth. The career goes further with other Bethesda games from Starfield to Prey to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Replaying Skyrim after 13 years is a reminder of the progress made in western RPGs over the last decade, but also what's been lost.
RPGs are often huge, sprawling endeavours. With limited playtime, we have to choose wisely, so here's the best western RPGs available today.
"I started playing games yesterday" the List... Meh!
How about a few RPGs that deserve some love instead?
1 - Alpha Protocol - Now on GOG
2 - else Heart.Break()
3 - Shadowrun Trilogy
4 - Wasteland 2
5 - UnderRail
6 - Tyranny
7 - Torment: Tides of Numenera
And for a bonus game that flew under the radar:
8 - Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
Not only glorious jank, but the idea that the story can completely change depending on what you do, or say, or side with, makes it one of the most forward thinking games ever. The amount of story permutation is the equivalent of a Hitman level but in Story Form. And it wasn't just that the story changed, no, it was that you met completely new characters, or missed them, depending on your choices. Made Mass Effect feel static in comparison.
Alpha Protocol was absolutely glorious, indeed. And it was, and still is, more Next Gen than most anything out there these days. In this regard at least.
Pity.
*edit*
oops, meant to post in a different article. -_-
Very funny article but I feel you've fallen prey to an all too common misconception about the work of Magritte. Of course many people consider this famous piece to be Magritte's attempt to snap the viewer out of their automatic confusion of the symbolic for the actual and force them to confront the disconnect between actual reality and the incomplete, biased attempt to map reality that most of us carry in our minds. In truth, Magritte was just trying to paint a nice picture of a duck but due to the fact that he was a supremely shitty painter people wound up thinking it was supposed to be a pipe. In frustration, he added the text to the painting to stop people making the mistake. This trend continued in his work from his next piece, 'No, it's not meant to be a horse. It's a table' to his masterpiece, 'It's not Batman smoking a cigar, dickhead, it's a fucking fox. It's clearly a fox, look at the tail'.
"Ceci n'est pas une pipe", it's a picture of a pipe.
You are not the dragonborn, you play as the dragonborn in a video game.
I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV.