ranzware
2024 has been a strange one. If you look at what actually launched this year, it’s a perfectly decent roster of games: Helldivers 2, Balatro, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Shadow of the Erdtree, Sins of a Solar Empire 2, Stalker 2, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Path of Exile 2. Lots of good things in this list. A few of them even all-time greats. But for me, it overall felt pretty subdued. Boring, even. At least until this last part of the year, when we’ve enjoyed a run of interesting stuff.
This left me with plenty of time to delve back into my library of older games. Not much older, for the most part, but at least games that didn’t come out in 2024.
First of all, there’s all my live service diversions. As always, I’m a sucker for MMOs and their ilk, so I’ve been dividing my time between Final Fantasy 14 and Guild Wars 2 a lot. I got back into WoW, too, but burned out like I always do—though it took longer than usual this time. I also quit and then returned to Star Wars: The Old Republic, started playing DC Universe Online again, and got heavily into Warframe.
For years now, GW2 has been a regular thing I’ve played with Phil, our global editor-in-chief, and a couple of friends, and I’m still smitten with it. Though I do have to suffer mockery for my determination to play every single story bit in sequence. ArenaNet keeps putting out new stuff, so I’m always catching up, but it’s worth it. The quest and world design remains the genre’s best, and boy does it have some great fashion game.
Fancy dress
Speaking of fashion, that’s at least part of the reason I got back into FF14, after many, many failed starts. It helps that I’ve got some buds to play with this time, who’ve been getting me through A Realm Reborn, the oldest part of the game, which can often be a slog. I’m having a blast now, though, and not just because I like playing dress-up. Eorza is one of Final Fantasy’s greatest creations—a delight to explore—and it’s a miracle that, despite being just another hotbar MMO, FF14’s combat is some of the best around. Naturally, I’m running around as a Bard at the moment, because Bards are always the best.
Playing DCUO in 2024 has been a peculiar experience. It’s not much of a looker these days, the combat is incredibly stiff, and when it comes to creating your perfect hero or villain, it doesn’t hold a candle to City of Heroes—which I’ve also been dabbling in again, now that NCSoft has granted the fan devs at City of Heroes: Homecoming the official license—but despite all of these things I’ve been having a grand time playing around with different builds and, more importantly, costumes. It’s the same with SWTOR: a bit long in the tooth, falling behind other MMOs, but I can’t quite quit it. The fact that it still features some of the best Star Wars stories in videogames helps.
Warframe, meanwhile, continues to be weird AF and undoubtedly the best online action romp around. No other live service game makes me feel as skilled and powerful, and Digital Extremes keeps on coming up with new twists. The latest, in fact, just came out recently: 1999, its most bizarre update yet, sending players back in time to fight boy bands and find romance.
Honestly, between this lot it’s a wonder I had any time for singleplayer games. But I made time.
I’ve been on a bit of an adventure game kick this year, so 2024 has really reignited my love for the simplest but frequently most entertaining of genres. The wonderful Wadjet Eye hasn’t released anything since the exceptional The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, which it published back in 2022, but I’ve returned to Dave Gilbert’s Blackwell series (not for the first time) to get my fill of ghost stories and detective yarns.
Dead good
It’s astonishing that even The Blackwell Legacy, the first game in the series, which already felt very old school back in 2006, remains such a delight to play today—a testament to its cast and Gilbert’s skill at storytelling and puzzle crafting. They’re all perfect Steam Deck games, too. Indeed, that’s only increased my appreciation of them—curled up on the sofa, the dog napping on my lap as I solve mysteries and get cozy. Lovely stuff.
The opening season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead might have been my first ever professional review (it was certainly among the earliest), but for reasons I can’t remember I never finished Clem’s journey—stopping after I finished Season 2. So I’ve started from the beginning again, this time playing with the graphic black mode, which blesses it with a more potent comic book aesthetic. While Telltale’s style ran out of steam eventually, The Walking Dead’s first season is still a GOAT. Lee and Clem are among gaming’s most lovable duos, and even though I’m prepared for them this time, the decisions I’m forced to make remain as heart-wrenching and gut-punching as they did all the way back in 2012.
Speaking of difficult decisions, 2024 once again saw me return to Disco Elysium’s Revachol. I suspect this is a game I will keep replaying until I’ve seen absolutely everything. There’s a reason it nabbed the crown in our Top 100 for several years in a row. Often, when people talk about Disco Elysium, it’s all about how loopy it is: becoming a paranormal investigator, talking to your tie, screaming “eat the rich” while wearing gardening gloves and carrying a bag full of empty bottles. And yeah, it’s absolutely nuts, but it’s also a game steeped in tragedy and beauty and terrifyingly powerful writing. I’ve never been so affected by a videogame, despite a career spent writing about and dissecting them—and I’m not sure I ever will be again.
This year, Disco’s reign came to an end when we placed Baldur’s Gate 3 at the zenith of our Top 100. Like a lot of you, I’m still playing a year after launch. It’s simply everything I’ve ever wanted from a CRPG. Everything it does, it does better than almost everyone else. Larian has done the impossible: making me genuinely interested in the Forgotten Realms again. And while it has decided to move on from Baldur’s Gate, it’s not leaving us in the lurch. After more than a year of steady (and substantial) updates, 2025 will give us one more big one, giving us a new subclass for each of the 12 classes. Like Disco, I know I’ll be returning to this over and over again.
Some of these trips into my game library have been a little bittersweet. After not playing much of the DLC, I started a new campaign in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and now I’m even more convinced it’s one of the best things Firaxis has ever done. The DLC didn’t get as much love as it deserved, I think, and both the vamps and the new characters slot neatly into the base game and add some welcome variety for a second playthrough. Mostly, though, it’s just the same old tight tactical battles and endearing RPG relationship stuff. Which is really what I wanted.
Forgotten heroes
It’s bittersweet because Midnight Suns inexplicably didn’t sell well, and it ended up being the last thing XCOM’s Jake Solomon made at Firaxis. It should have been a home run. A creative superhero game with a strong license, from one of the best strategy developers around. Hell, it should have been absolutely massive. We should be getting more of them. But nope, we don’t deserve nice things.
Endless Legend leaves me with similar feelings. Amplitude’s sci-fi-fantasy 4X came out a decade ago and tickled my brain in the same way Alpha Centauri did, back through the mists of time. At a base level, it’s just a brilliant 4X, but then you’ve got the storytelling layer, the impeccable asymmetrical faction design, the stunning art—it’s my favourite of the genre. And while it was a critical and commercial success, Amplitude has yet to return to it. OK, to be fair we did get some great expansions. But then it moved onto Endless Space 2 (also great), before nosediving into Humankind (not so great). Its last game under Sega (which it split with earlier this year) was a roguelite, which I couldn’t be less interested in. It’s a shame, but Endless Legend is a meaty game, and even now I’m still getting more out of it.
I’ve missed a lot out because, frankly, it’s the end of the year and I have a lot more writing to do before I get to say “piss off” to 2024, but even I’m surprised by how much of this year I’ve dedicated to earlier games—most of them ones I’ve already finished at least once. Maybe it’s just because this year lacked many big surprises.
The games people have been salivating over, like Helldivers 2 and Balatro, only served as the briefest of distractions for me, and until the last couple of months it’s otherwise felt like an entirely conventional, paint-by-numbers year. Not an atrocious one, but just not an especially exciting one. And broadly it’s hard to get excited about the future of the industry, which has perhaps marred my enjoyment of new games a little bit.
After killing off horrible stuff like NFTs and the metaverse, we’re now dealing with AI’s intrusion into gaming, and the horrifying number of layoffs and studio closures have left me incredibly troubled by the state of the industry. It’s hard to get pumped anymore, given how terribly gaming treats the people who build the things that keep it alive. So maybe I’ve retreated a wee bit, finding solace and comfort in the games I already love.
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Kurt Indovina
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