Yup, this list is biased as hell. It was trying to determine iconic characters. Put Mario and Lara Croft in front of a 90 year old person. They’ll recognize Mario immediately, but almost certainly won’t recognize Croft. Hell, I’d put Bowser, Peach, and Luigi over Croft.
Shadowheart? Astarion? Don’t get me wrong, I love BG3, it’s my favourite game at the moment. But any character my mom wouldn’t recognise shouldn’t be on that list.
Granted, Lara Croft fits that bill, but how did they determine that she should be above Mario or Pac-Man?
I couldn’t ask my mom, she has too much work today but I could ask my father and thus can present you with the 100 % super scientific and objective list of most iconic video game characters:
Okay so for context I’ve not played BG3. However I do consider myself pretty upto date with my gaming stuff (I run a videogame community afterall). I couldn’t tell you which of the characters on the front of the BG3 box-art is Shadowheart; not the foggiest.
As for Croft. I wonder if they’d ‘commissioned’ this poll before the release of the recent game if she’d have even made the top 10. For the most part, her star has fallen pretty significantly from where she was in the 90’s.
The one online singleplayer game I like is Deathloop.
In Deathloop, you’re a man who keeps waking up with a hangover on a beach on an island of people who want to kill you. Your hallucinations say you should probably break the loop. However, a strange woman with an EXTREMELY personal grudge against you keeps murdering you.
That strange woman is another player, who will unlock more items in her game if she finds creative ways to kill you. You’re playing a singleplayer campaign, but she can show up and turn your game into pvp whenever she wants.
It sounds like that’s an important and interesting part of the game - and I also have no issue with No Man’s Sky’s shared Universe and so on.
I suppose it’s more those games that have no reason for needing it. Rise of Flight was one where the single player campaign was kept on their server, and you land back at base after an hour-long mission, and it would fail to connect to the server, and delete all your progress. Dirt Rally was bad for deleting your progress because “Could not connect to Racenet”.
Also Deathloop has a failsafe. If nobody on the internet is playing as Julianna, the game will make her an NPC instead. She’s also an NPC during several scripted sequences.
I’m interested to see if they provided a list or if they asked people to submit their own choices. Sackboy and Arthur Morgan are…I mean I’d argue Arthur isn’t even the most iconic character in his own game. Surely that honour goes to John Marston?
They polled gamers, for sure. Non gamers are only gonna recognize part of this list, and thats what makes them truly iconic - being known by people who dont even care about video games.
Thats gonna be mario, sonic, pikachu, pacman, and maybe Zelda (but probably not Link). The average person will know those but would have no clue who Lara Croft, Nathan Drake, or Solid Snake is. Kazuma Kiryu?? I’m an avid gamer and wouldn’t recognize that name.
Wasn’t link only the official in-game name starting with botw? Not saying it wasn’t link before, but previously they asked for your name first and only used Link if you didn’t give one, so many casual players wouldn’t have known it’s Link.
I thought the same thing. The only thing I’ll disagree with is Lara Croft being unknown. She was huge in the '90s and '00s. She was even featured in Playboy and once the first Angelina Jolie movie came out she was a part of the general consciousness. Probably not more recognizable than Mario, though.
Hunger mechanics. I don’t find them fun at all even in survival games.
Valheim (and to a lesser extent, Palworld with the feed bag) had it right. You don’t need to eat to survive but there was still incentive to farm and cook different food for the buffs they provide
You phrased it better - it’s really when hunger mechanics distract me from the actual game.
I thought of another game where I don’t mind it - Don’t Stare (/Together). It’s part of the challenge of the game, not some side thing you have to maintain
I’m currently playing Syberia (2002) for the first time. I never played it when it was new because I didn’t like the demo. But people kept praising it over the years so I decided to give it a try.
I still have the same complaints I had back then but the story is nice.
I searched it based on your comment and that is one of the most divisive games I’ve ever seen! One review calls it awful and unplayable and the next says its the GOAT. It looks like it just got a remake so it must have done something right.
Id be interested to hear youre thoughts if you finish it.
Oh my god. I played those when they came out, except the newest one.
They were good for its time for the people who loved Myst games and then sought any adventure games that remotely resembled point-and-click adventures. We played really cool but definite imitators like Schism Mysterious Journey, The Longest Journey, Atlantis games, and The Journeyman Project.
Then came a developer called Microids with another pre-rendered point and click: “Amerzone”, everyone played that.
Once we got used to low-budget point and clickery it was only natural that when Microids came out with Syberia we all played it and loved it in the vacuum of adventure games back then. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone blindly as they were a product of its time.
I still have to play the newest Syberia and Longest Journey, for nostalgia’s sake only.
Minecraft, of course. Been playing it for what, almost 15 years now? Which is insane to me. Still pick it up once a year or so and spin up a server with my brothers.
Same for me. The wild part is that the majority of my interest in the game comes from the modding community, which has continually output interesting content pretty much this whole time. If all we got was vanilla updates, I doubt I’d have stayed engaged nearly as long.
The XCOM 2 combat system ruined trpg’s for me because of how freely you can move and set up characters. I find myself saying “I wish this worked like XCOM” for just about every turn based game
I would vote for Stardew Valley as a universally “good” introduction to gaming. There’s a lot of charm, it’s low intensity, it’s obviously a labor of love, there are frequent rewards, and it incentivizes planning/engagement but not in a way that makes a new player fail.
Honestly though I’d rather know what kind of preferences a person has and tailor the game to that because gaming is so diverse.
Even if SDV is my favourite game to play, I wouldn’t recommend it for someone with little to no gaming experience. It’s a cozy farming sim yes, but a lot of mechanics are not that well explained and you have to use the wiki A LOT! Even watching streamers playing it for the first time just shows how much on top explaining is often necessary to really start a good farm where you can feel the progress.
Micro transactions for non-cosmetic items, such as weapons, skill points, dlc, etc… Especially on a game you already bought.
Oh, and adding a game breaking anticheat/DRM to a already launched game. Scrap that, anticheat/DRM in general. If you have to do it, at least do it right.
Or anticheat/DRM that prevents games from running in a VM, annoying AF. My main desktop would probably be Debian with Windows VM on a GPU passthrough if it wasn’t for that shit.
Definitely Subnautica. It doesn’t matter how many times I play it, there’s still the twitchy dread. I imagine if I could play it for the first time, but in VR, I would never have finished it and there’d be a hole in the wall where I threw the controller.
I didn’t find all the parts to the Cyclops on my first play until I was like an hour away from finishing the game. So months later I played it again, so that I could find the Cyclops sooner. Definitely didn’t feel as magical the second time around, even with my shiny new sub.
Did they publish the poll itself? Curious how they defined “iconic.” These results are baffling. I’m most surprised by Shadowheart, who is a great character but…functions as part of an ensemble and is arguably not even the most “iconic” character within her own game. And BG3 itself, despite being one of the most culturally impactful video games in recent memory, still is just too young to qualify for iconic status.
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