Whenever we sit down to argue our way through a list of the best games, our first step is deciding what “best” even means. In this case, we’re identifying which RPGs are fun right now. It's the same approach we take without our overall list of the best games to play today. We don’t ignore a game’s impact completely—innovation and influence just has a lesser weight under our criteria.
The RPG genre is tough to boil down: by the most literal definition, every game is a role-playing game. This list represents our best definition of the canonical RPG—games that likely emphasize story; that let you inhabit a customizable character through skill points, inventory, and dialogue decisions; that include complex, controllable relationships with companions or non-playable characters.
Drawing these kinds of lines helps us provide a better service to you, we hope—though we've made some exceptions where we think it's worth it. Here is Top 20 Best RPG Game PC 2018:
1. Divinity: Original Sin 2
Outside of tabletop games, there are few RPGs that boast the liberating openness of Larian's humongous quest for godhood. If you think you should be able to do something, you probably can, even it it's kidnapping a merchant by using a teleportation spell and then setting fire to him with his own blood. Almost every skill has some alternative and surprising use, sometimes more than one, whether you're in our out of combat.
You can enjoy this game of madcap experimentation and tactical combat with up to three friends, to boot, and that's where things start to get really interesting because you're not forced to work together or even stay in the same part of the world. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to work against each other. The player is always in the driving seat, and with four players, collisions are inevitable. Just remember: if you freeze your friends and then start poisoning them, at least apologize after.
2. Grim Dawn
If you’ve rinsed Diablo 2 for every magical trinket and are looking for a modern fix, here is your game. Grim Dawn is a gritty, well-made action RPG with strong classes and a pretty world full of monsters to slay in their droves. It’s the distant brooding son of Titan Quest, sharing some designers and mechanics with that fine 2006 Greek myth ARPG. Like its cousin, Grim Dawn lets you pick two classes and share your upgrade points between two skill trees. This hybrid progression system creates plenty of scope for theorycrafting, and the skills are exciting to use—an essential prerequisite for games that rely so heavily on combat encounters.
The story isn’t bad either, for an ARPG. Don’t expect twisting plots and decisions with consequences—this is very much a game about single-handedly destroying armies—but there is a neat faction reputation system that spawns harder mobs and villainous nemesis heroes as you become more hated by the criminals, cults and monsters that rule the wilderness. The local demons and warlords that terrorize each portion of the world are well sketched out in the scrolling text NPC dialogue and found journals. Ultimately, it’s about the monster-smashing and sweet loot, though, and Grim Dawn delivers on both effectively.
3. Legend of Grimrock 2
We loved the original Legend of Grimrock and the way it embraced the old Dungeon Master model of making your party—mostly a collection of stats—explore the world one square at a time. The one drawback is that it was too literal of a dungeon crawler. The enemies might change, but for the most part you kept trudging down what seemed like the same series of corridors until the game's end.
The sequel, though, focuses on both the dank dungeons and the bright, open world above, resulting in a nostalgic romp that's immensely enjoyable and filled with even deadlier enemies and more challenging puzzles. As with the first outing, much of its power springs from the element of surprise. One moment you'll be merrily hacking through enemies with ease, and the next you might find yourself face-to-face with an unkillable demon. And then you'll run, and you discover that there are sometimes almost as many thrills in flight as in the fight.
4. Arx Fatalis
Arkane’s goal with its first game was to create a dungeon experience as detailed as Ultima Underworld, right down to the magic system, which required you to memorize runes and draw them in the air with your mouse. Stealth is critical, as is the crafting system that takes Underworld’s “everything is important” ethos and expands it. Arx is slow and deliberate, forcing you to consider encounters from different angles: should you use force on the snake women, or sneak past and avoid conflict?
Many of the design seeds that show up later in Arkane’s Dishonored are planted here, but there are a lot of old fashioned mechanics we’d love to see more of. The mouse gesture magic system seems awkward to use, but we love tracing a rune and watching our foes crumble in the aftermath. We’d love to see Arkane revisit the dungeons again, bringing what it’s learned from making Dishonored (and the sublime melee combat from Dark Messiah of Might & Magic) to an Arx Fatalis sequel.
5. Path of Exile
This excellent free-to-play action RPG is heaven for players that enjoy stewing over builds to construct the most effective killing machine possible. It’s not the most glamorous ARPG, but it has extraordinary depth of progression and an excellent free-to-play model that relies on cosmetics rather than game-altering upgrades. It may look muddy and indistinct, and the combat doesn’t feel as good as Diablo 3, but if you enjoy number crunching this is one of the brainiest RPGs around.
Path of Exile’s scary complexity becomes apparent the moment you arrive on your character’s level-up screen, which looks like this. As you plough through enemies and level up, you travel across this huge board, tailoring your character a little with each upgrade. Gear customization is equally detailed. Path of Exile borrows Final Fantasy VII’s concept of connected gem slots. Every piece of armor has an arrangement of slots that take magic gems. These gems confer stat bonuses and bonus adjacency effects when set in the right formations. Ideally you’ll want to build synergies between your gemmed-up gear and leveling choices to create the most powerful warrior you can. Doing so requires plenty of planning, but it’s an engrossing slow-burn challenge.
6. Darkest Dungeon
You might begin Darkest Dungeon as you would an XCOM campaign: assembling a team of warriors that you've thoughtfully named, decorated, and upgraded for battle. How naive! Inevitably, your favorite highwayman gets syphilis. Your healer turns masochistic, and actually begins damaging herself each turn. Your plague doctor gets greedy, and begins siphoning loot during each dungeon run. A few hours into the campaign, your precious heroes become deeply flawed tools that you either need to learn how to work with, or use until they break, and replace like disposable batteries.
With Lovecraft's hell as your workplace, Darkest Dungeon is about learning how to become a brutal and effective middle manager. Your heroes will be slaughtered by fishmen, cultists, demons, and foul pigmen as you push through decaying halls, but more will return to camp with tortured minds or other maladies. Do you spend piles of gold to care for them, or put those resources toward your ultimate goal?
Darkest Dungeon is a brilliant cohesion of art, sound, writing, and design. The colorful, hand-drawn horrors pop from the screen, showing their influence but never feeling derivative. It's a hard game, but once you understand that everyone is expendable—even the vestal with kleptomania you love so much—Darkest Dungeon's brutality becomes a fantastic story-generator more than a frustration. "Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer," as its narrator reminds.
7. Mount & Blade: Warband
There are few games that get medieval combat right, and fewer still that add a strategic, army-building component. Fostering an army of farmers into warriors is great, but we love that Mount & Blade gives us the agency to be a hero figure on the battlefield and shape the outcome of a battle ourselves with our marksmanship or fast riding. The metagame of alliance-making, marriage, looting, and economics underpinning these battles makes Warband a satisfying game of gathering goods, enemies, and friendship. Even when the base game wears thin, Mount & Blade’s mods and multiplayer give you more to do, with some even moving the action to a galaxy far, far away.
8. Neverwinter Nights 2
We loved BioWare's original Neverwinter Nights from 2002 (and especially its expansions), but as a single-player experience, Neverwinter Nights 2 was in a class all of its own. Whereas the original had a fairly weak main campaign that mainly seemed aimed at showing what the DM kit was capable of, Obsidian Entertainment managed to equal and arguably outdo BioWare's storytelling prowess in the sequel when it took over the helm.
The whole affair brimmed with humor, and companions such as the raucous dwarf Khelgar Ironfist still have few rivals in personality nine years later. And the quality just kept coming. Shades of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past reveal themselves in the masterful Shadow of the Betrayer expansion's focus on two halves of the same world, but Obsidian skillfully uses that familiar framework to deliver an unforgettable commentary on religion.
9. Gothic 2
Few games are as staunchly open-world—and unforgiving—as Gothic 2. The first time we played it, we left town in the wrong direction and immediately met monsters many levels higher than us, and died horribly. Lesson learned.
It sounds like Gothic 2 is too punishing, but we love the way it forces us to learn our way through its world. Enemies don’t scale with your level, as they do in the Elder Scrolls series, and you’ll have to pay close attention to quest text and NPCs to find your path. Once you do—and overcome the awkward controls—there’s a huge, sprawling RPG at your fingertips, and while you may have felt weak and powerless at the beginning, you’ll be a true badass by the end.
10. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Pick a direction and run. You’re almost guaranteed to discover some small adventure, some small chunk of world that will engage you. It’s that content density that makes Skyrim constantly rewarding. A visit to the Mage’s Guild will turn into an area-spanning search for knowledge. A random chat with an NPC will lead you to a far-off dungeon, searching for a legendary relic. You could be picking berries on the side of a mountain and discover a dragon. Oops, accidental dragon fight.
And if you somehow exhaust all of Bethesda’s content, rest assured that modders have more waiting for you in Steam Workshop—that lively community has kept Skyrim in the Steam top 100 since its release, and given us endless ways to adventure through a great world. Some on the PC Gamer team keep a modded-up Skyrim install handy, just in case they feel like adventure. That’s some high praise.
11. Pillars of Eternity
There's very little about Pillars of Eternity that's actually innovative; in fact, its whole Kickstarter-funded existence is based on appealing to the nostalgia for aging Infinity Engine CRPGs like Baldur's Gate II. That usually matters little, though, since Pillars of Eternity pulls it off so damned well.
The graphics lean a little too heavily on the 1990s, but the writing itself is masterful. Obsidian Entertainment uses it to weave a wonderful (if bleak and usually humorless) narrative that brilliantly touches on everything from religious conflicts to social struggles. It doesn't hurt that Obsidian infused almost every step of the world with its own story and smidge of lore, and a new patch introduced hours of additional voice work that make the experience even more enjoyable.
It's also brutally difficult in parts, and even its easier modes demand a dance of pausing and barking out orders to multiple party members that many contemporary RPGs shy from. That's not such a bad thing, though, as Pillars of Eternity is a stark testament that such unforgiving designs still have widespread appeal in this age of accessibility.
12. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
Designer Paul Neurath originally conceived of a dungeon simulator that would turn traditional role-playing conventions on their head. Called Underworld, he and his team, the future Looking Glass Studios, built a game that rewarded real-world thinking to solve puzzles and please NPCs. Ultima developer Origin Systems was so impressed by the three-dimensional engine (you could look up and down!) and first-person combat that it bought the rights to the game, and suddenly the Avatar was trapped in the Stygian Abyss instead of some faceless schmuck.
Characters that are normally enemies are friends in Underworld, and we love that you may not be able to tell. Attacking a goblin might be a bad move, because he’s just as likely to be your friend. The first time we popped popcorn with a campfire and an ear of corn, we knew we weren’t in any old dungeon crawler. Underworld was a technological marvel in 1992, but while the graphics are dated, the feeling of exploring the Stygian Abyss is just as exciting today.
13. Divinity: Original Sin
Divinity was a Kickstarter success story that still somehow took us by surprise. Unlike most RPGs, it’s designed with co-op in mind—you even control two protagonists in the single-player version, roleplaying different motivations through conversations. Larian designed encounters thinking that someone could always disagree, or ruin things for you, or even kill the NPC you need to talk to—meaning that quests have to be solvable in unorthodox ways.
The writing in Divinity is consistently top-notch. Sure, sometimes you’ll have to destroy a goblin riding a giant mechanical robot, or talk to a dog to solve a quest. But that dog may have a heartbreaking story for you, and maybe you’ll cry just a little bit like we did. Larian commits to Divinity’s world, and that commitment pays off. This is the kind of freeform, epic, party-based RPG we haven’t had since the days of Ultima, and it’s exactly what we love from an RPG.
14. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
While BioWare’s first KOTOR is a Star Wars classic, KOTOR 2 takes the franchise in a bolder direction. Instead of focusing on the Light or Dark sides of the Force, the Jedi Exile of Obsidian’s sequel deals in shades of gray. Alliances are made, then broken, then remade in the aftermath. Choices you think are good just turn out to betray other characters. The end result is possibly the most nuanced take on The Force in the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe, and definitely its most complex villains.
Like many Obsidian early games, KOTOR 2’s truncated development meant that whole areas had to be cut out. A fan-made mod restores much of that content, including a droid planet, and fixes lots of outstanding bugs, showing yet again that PC gamers will work hard to maintain their favorite games.
15. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
It’s all about atmosphere—from the goth clubs where you meet contacts, to the back alleys where you scavenge for rat blood, to the haunted Ocean House Hotel (one of the best quests in the game). Bloodlines’ ambitious use of White Wolf’s Vampire universe means it looks and feels different from the other sword and sorcery games on this list.
Unfortunately, that signature Troika ambition also means lots of bugs and some mechanics that just don’t mesh well. The endgame includes some particularly sloggy dungeons, but no other game truly drops you into a Vampire world. This is truly a cult classic of an RPG, and the fanbase has been patching and improving the game ever since release.
16. Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls
Let’s face it: the real-money auction house was a bad idea, one of a few in the original Diablo 3 release. Blizzard nixed the cash auctions right before Reaper of Souls’ release, but it’s the addition of Adventure Mode that turned the game around from disappointing sequel to crowning achievement for the series. Instead of rehashing the game’s acts, Adventure Mode’s task-based milestones and randomized areas make the game feel fresh for much longer. It’s a standout mode, and it’d be hard to imagine playing Diablo 3 any other way.
But RoS added another feature that changes the way we love our action RPGs: guild support. Having friends to talk to as you grind through a dungeon, even if they’re not with you, makes the game far less lonesome, and it’s that kind of small touch that justifies Blizzard’s always-online philosophy. Adding all this to the already-tremendous feeling of wiping out hordes of baddies with a well-timed ability change, RoS is the defining action RPG for us. It’s a game we’ll be playing for a long, long time.
17. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura was astoundingly buggy when it came out, and many of its battles were as laughably imbalanced as its title. Patches and mods have alleviated some of that pain over the years, but even then they weren't powerful enough to hide what a great mix of fantasy and steampunkery thrived under its surface. As we said in our enthusiastic review in 2001, "If you can’t find something to love about this game, dump your computer in the garbage right now."
That assessment holds up. Arcanum was dark 'n' gritty before some such tendencies became all the rage, and its character creator allowed players to create everything from gnome gamblers who brandish self-explanatory Tesla-guns to outcast orcs lugging along rusty maces. Toss in non-linear progression and multiple solutions for quests, and you've got a winner that holds up 14 years later.
18. Fallout: New Vegas
While Fallout 3 was successful, it was a different beast entirely from Interplay’s classics. Obsidian’s take on the franchise moves the action back to the West Coast, and reintroduces elements such as reputation and faction power struggles. Obsidian expands on nearly every aspect of Bethesda’s take, making the game less about good or evil, and more about who you should trust. It also adds much of the humor that we loved from the classic games: How can you not appreciate a game that gives you a nuclear grenade launcher?
New Vegas’ “Hardcore” mode makes survival in the wasteland more interesting, limiting the power of RadAway and Health Stims. It makes the game harder, but also more rewarding. If that’s not your thing, there are plenty of additional mods and tweaks available, including game director Josh Sawyer’s own balance-tweak mod. What we love the most about New Vegas is how it adds the Fallout feeling back into Bethesda's first-person RPG framework.
19. Dark Souls 3
Name any similar-looking RPG made in the past five years, and chances are good Dark Souls will be named as an inspiration for its design. Still, Dark Souls 3 proves that no one does it quite so well as From Software. The spark of originality that was so compelling in Dark Souls 1 isn't quite as apparent here, the second sequel in just five years, but what remains is an impeccably designed combat-heavy RPG. It's far more responsive than its predecessors, demanding faster action and reaction without sacrificing the deliberate play Dark Souls popularized. Button mashing will get you nowhere but dead.
Dark Souls 3 is the most approachable in the series thanks to frequent warp points, simplified online co-op and beautiful (and hideous) art that beckons you to explore every nook and corner. No game series manages to reward you so profoundly for scrutinizing its lore and unfurling its secrets, and Dark Souls 3's faster, tighter controls and animation make it the most fun Souls game to play.
20. Dragon Age: Origins
Capturing that old Baldur’s Gate feel was goal number one for Dragon Age, and it comes pretty close. Ferelden evokes much of the Forgotten Realms without feeling like a rehash, and your relationship with your team has that old BioWare magic. The darkspawn feel like the kind of world-consuming threat that demands our attention, even if most of them are faceless hunks of evil for us to cut down. We love how Dragon Age treats magic in its world, in particular the quests that force us to choose how to best handle abominations, the result of a renegade mage succombing to demonic possession.
But it’s the combat that feels most familiar, and most fun: the satisfying tactical depth of pausing your combat, issuing orders, and reacting to the results works like a modern Infinity Engine game should. It’s sad that BioWare will never make an RPG like this again—Dragon Age 2 was too streamlined, and Inquisition’s more open world—so in many ways, this is the last hurrah for the old BioWare, and a fitting end for its classic design.
Reference:
https://www.pcgamer.com/best-rpgs-of-all-time/
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