The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.I had to stare at the window for an hour afterwards.
The ending of the communism vision quest might be my favorite moment in any game ever.
Seriously you should play it for yourself if you haven't.
That brief moment when all of the meloncholy of DE goes away, and a few people in a room manage to do something impossible together for a few seconds just by believing they can do it is such a beautiful way to end that subplot and injects so much hope into the Elysium universe that it’s unreal.
You CAN save the city. You CAN stop the expansion of The Pale. You CAN bring about The Return. All you have to do is get fucking organized!
I wanted so hard to enjoy Disco Elysium and go balls deep into it (I always loved RPGs like that) but I really couldn’t enjoy it. I think I’m burned out of real gaming at this point
One of the best games I’ve played hands down.
I have a lot of these moments but I’ll pick my top ones.
Crystalis on the NES. When the town of Shyron gets destroyed and characters you know and care about are killed. Left me in shock as a 10 year old kid. And the temple music when you enter the pyramid is hauntingly beautiful too. I hum that tune to my kids as a lullaby.
Mass Effect 1. Exploring the planets left me in awe. For the time, the atmosphere and lore was detailed, rich, and very well thought out. Then facing down a reaper in the third game, it all made me feel so small.
FF7. Aerith getting killed took me by complete surprise. My brother and I were stunned for a while. Just sat there pondering wether it was real or not.
Minecraft back in beta. The world was just so impossibly huge and you’re all alone with your creations. Left me feeling very small. The more I built, the emptier it felt.
Finally, Mad Max on the PS4. The first time I got hit by a storm I was in awe. The world is just so well built and detailed. The whole game/movie universe is filled with amazing culture that’s just done really, really well.
Man, Crystalis was great.
I cried uncontrollably at the ending of ME3 after growing up with the series and putting in over 1500 hours between ME1 and ME2
Aerith is what immediately popped into my mind.
Looking back on it, she was a pretty one dimensional love interest. But teenager me didn’t see that. I was attached to this character. I cared. And she died. Not something I expected from a game, and it wrecked me a bit.
Sending an utterly unrepentant genocidal, eugenecist war criminal to his death, and singing along with his little musical number as he died.
Made me realise that while justice is a futile pursuit, we can still have fun settling the score.
#justice4krogans
The Genophage was right, and you and paragon Shepherd can go suck some morally uptight bollocks.
Even when I’m playing paragon, I will generally go renegade options when the Genophage is involved, since I wholeheartedly believe it was the correct choice.
Yay for genocide?
Fashionable, I guess.
You call it genocide, I call it birth control
Unrepentant? I will not stand for this Mordin slander!
Anyone else would’ve gotten it wrong
Journey by thatgamecompany - it is difficult to put into words what it is exactly that I experienced, and I think every person’s take away will be a bit different, but there is a profound and overwhelming experience to be had with that short but wonderful game.
Firewatch has a turning point in its story which hits like a truck, and is very grounding. It takes a story which has felt almost whimsically frightening, and brings it much closer to home emotionally.
Journey is one of my favorite games of all time purely because of how it made me feel. It was so hopeful and positive. And it made me feel connected to a complete stranger. I’m still impressed at how the communication is limited in a way that makes people bring out only the best in themselves. It’s beautiful.
Journey does such a good job of conveying emotion through the environment and music, when I was done I just kind of sat for a bit thinking “woah”.
I don’t usually get that emotional with games, and I’m still not sure which emotion I was feeling, other than “all of them”, but it was more than a game, it was an experience.
Absolutely agree with you on that one. I felt so overwhelmed by the emotions I was feeling, but I also felt peaceful. Genuinely changed the course of my life - I was an asshole before I played it.
Let this be your sign to get back to it!
Whole-heartedly agree. It’s worth it.
When I was around 8 years old I was lucky enough to get a PS2 for Christmas. Because I was young, my dad and I usually played games together so he could help me out if things got tough. One of the first games we played on the PS2 was ICO. My dad picked it up in the whim because he thought the box art was interesting knowing basically nothing. I still remember when the first cutscenes booted up and our jaws dropped to the floor. It was so much more beautiful and cinematic than any we had played. It was one of the first time I truly felt transported another world and I grew so attached to the horned boy and glowing girl. We played it every day and, talked about all the mysteries and theories we about it when we weren’t. When we finally defeated the epic last boss fight against the dark queen and the Castle start collapsing I got scared for the horned boy and glowing girl. I couldn’t tell you how long it actually took for the final scene to appear but it felt like forever. When I saw my lil horned friend finally escaped the castle and was on a beautiful beach with a boat he could be able anywhere, I couldn’t help but to start crying it was just such a great ending and was so cathartic after going through a dark and mysterious castle for so long.
I think it really changed the way I thought about the medium. That a game where I couldn’t really tell you what exactly what was happening and had no understandable dialogue could move me so much changed the way I thought about the medium and media in general. Nobody can ever convince me games are not art because I know I connected to ICO in a way in a way beyond just having fun. The fact it’s been over 20 years and I still recall my emotions so vividly I think is a testament to the power of video games as an artistic medium.
Any round of Space Station 13 or 14
Now I want to watch Sseth’s SS13 video again.
Showing my age here, but I’d pick Ocarina of Time as the first game I feel like I had a profound reaction to. At the end of the game, when you defeat Ganon and save the princess, how does she reward you? by sending you back in time to be a kid again. I mean, I understand that it was supposed to be a gift, but it just felt like it was erasing the heroics that you had done for her and the entire kingdom of Hyrule.
Second, I would pick God of War (2018). As a father, that game knew exactly what to do to reel me in and make me care about the characters.
God of War changed the way I speak to my cats on an embarrassingly cringy level
I encountered a rogue AI in Starfield that was kind of a trip. I ended up letting it go to be its own person.
Loved that random little side quest.
If you go the other option, the outcome is quite chilling.
What happens?
The AI starts to die slowly but after you leave the ship, the 2 Ryujin agents stay with the AI, and in its dying moments the AI decides to shut off the oxygen killing the agents onboard then self destructs.
Damn. I’m glad I picked the other option. Though in sure it too much to hope that I’ll encounter it again out in the blackest sea
Yeah that’s basically why I let it exist because I didn’t want to have to encounter it as an enemy later on haha.
I argue that someone’s first Dark Souls run gives a viewer a great understanding of a person’s true personality and how they deal with difficult problems. Like watching my stubborn friend grind out fighting the titinite deamon by the blacksmith for 3 hours with an unupgraded spear really illistrated how stubborn he can be but also the dedication for self improvement. Your playthrough can also be self reflective. I found that I am quick to search for loopholes or cheese strats on hard bosses rather than put in the reps to learn it properly. I noticed I did the same thing in classes. Not cheating, but more like finding tricks and short cuts to make it work now rather than polishing basic skills and getting a deep understanding of the problem.
Was very eye opening to me and made me realize that how and what someone plays can tell you alot about a person.
Basically the whole premise of Paradise Killer. Who ought to seek justice? Can a government be irredeemable? Is justice even possible?
I loved how that game managed to have an A E S T H E T I C that was absolutely gorgeous AND perfectly matched the games themes. It’s also one of very few games where the open world-edness isn’t just a gimmick, but is integral to the game play. A real detective doesn’t get LEVEL COMPLETE messages or 10/10 CLUES FOUND.
Oh, and finally everyone was hot and the music is an absolute banger.
You’re so right on all levels! One of my all-time favorite games!
Hard to pick.
Starting my first own game system. Before that only gaming was done in “video arcades”
Silent Service - Limping back to base with 75000t sunk, no ammo and sub barely functional.
F-18 - First vector graphics flight sim I saw, that wasn’t just wireframe. Mindblowing.
Civilization - First playthrough with a friend.
UFO - Enemy Unknown - Storming the first UFO. Although game was similar to Laser Squad, it was still revolutionary.
Wing Commander - First mission ever. Game was like anything before and really tickled my Battlestar Galactica itch.
Comman & Conquer - Had played Dune before, so it was not the first RTS, but really hit the nail on the head.
Team Fortress - My first online gaming experience.
GTA 3 - Playing the first time. My first open world experience. Have had a little pause in my gaming.
B17 - Mighty Eight - Just barely ditching on English soil with only one functional engine after a suicidal mission.
Alpha Centauri - First playthrough with the Mrs.
Battlefield 1942 - After Wolfenstain Enemy Territory, open space and vehicless felt amazing.
Elite Dangerous - First launch, first interstellar jump and first combat in the same flight. Elite games had been a bit boring on the sound and visual design before, but holy shit.
Deep Rock Galactic - Never approved any friend requests on steam before. Started approving them. Some legendary moment ensued.
Did I hear a Rock And Stone‽
Yes. About 2200 hours of spamming Rock and Stone.
We’re rich
X-COM (from the 90’s, not the remake):
I totally sucked at playing X-COM and died a lot, until I learned about real world squad tactics.
In X-COM, the members of your team can get scared/lose it, and behave in random ways like throwing away their weapons/fleeing the fight or just going berserk and shooting around.
So, after I improved my game with my newly acquainted knowledge of real world squad tactics, I had a terror mission. Terror missions are missions, where the aliens attack and which are harder than the other missions.
I managed to survive the load out from the helicopter and kill nearly every alien on first contact, thanks to very careful and orchestrated movement of my squad.
There was one alien left, I tried to shoot it several times from a distance, and of course (this being X-COM after all), all of my shoots missed…
… THE ALIEN STRESSED OUT AND BERSERKED…
I didn’t even know that it was possible. After weeks of loosing and frustration, this one moment is the most satisfying moment of my entire gaming history (more than 30 years now).
Haven’t found any modern game, where this would be even possible!
Mandatory link to OpenXcom
OG X-COM was an exercise in frustration. Fuck Chrysalids and their ability to not only move large distances but also attack in the same turn, one-hit kill your troops, and turn their corpses into more Chrysalids.
Also their stats are monstrous compared to the Enemy Unknown variant.
of course (this being X-COM after all), all of my shoots missed…
Oh gods the hit probability was just such an irritating mechanism; you could practically have your gun’s muzzle on an alien’s forehead and still manage to miss several times with 80% chance to hit.
Where would be the fun w/o a missed shot from your shotgun when standing right next to the alien? ;-)
People say that’s just the true odds but I really don’t think that’s the case. Even if I use the c++ old and flawed Rand function, rolling 2d10 almost always gives me at least one roll above 2. So in 2 shots at least one should hit. Even in the newest xcom I remember rolling 6 shots with 90% and missing all of them. 8 feel like XCOM has something broken or influencing it outside of percentage.
Yeah those odds-beating misses at least felt like they happened way too often, and I’m pretty sure the percentage really wasn’t a “raw” probability but that there was some other fuckery also involved.
Sure, it’s definitely statistically possible to miss a few 90% shots in a row, but eg. there’s a 0.0001% chance of missing 6 in a row at 90% – and it’s not like shit like that only happened once on a blue moon in XCOM
The internet is also littered with these types of studies: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/191291-xcom-2/79589841 where someone went through and calculated up some scores and hit well below the standard deviation for shots.
I remember once playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I was assaulting a medium-sized UFO, and I’d reached the front door.
Hesitant to just run in through the front door, I sent half of my party round, so they could break the wall on the other side and flank the enemies inside.
It took a few turns to maneuver my forces round the side of the UFO, and as I did so, an alien squadron spotted my three guys on the door, and they started blasting. With my flanking team still well out of range, I had to sprint them forward to help - right into even more aliens.
My men got decimated. Six turned into four, then three, until only two men remained against well over a dozen dangerous aliens. And so remain they did. Thomas Bassoon and Eduardo Garcia were immortalized as legends that day, as they fought off multiple alien squads with just the two of them.
When XCOM 2 rolled around, with a notable time skip, these were the two soldiers I grandfathered in. Two veterans, here to fight the aliens once more.
Side note: In the tutorial for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, your squad of four is scripted to only have one survivor. Eduardo Garcia was that survivor.
Very nice! :-) Cheers to Eduardo!
Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here’s one:
You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it’ll chime in when you’re having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it’ll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day’s events and trying to make sense of the reality you’ve woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it’ll say the following line:
“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You’re still alive.”
This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.
Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I’m describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!
Volition may be one of the “boring” companions, but what it lacks in dynamism it makes up for by being uplifting.
I feel that. It’s the only game to date to leave me just sat there wondering why my face is leaking.
This thread is filled with comments on DE, but it was your comment that convinced me to finally play the game.
Thanks for the story!
I really hope you get as much out of the game as many others have. What an experience.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Fucking hell yeah, brother, volition is the best
Baldur’s Gate 3. Karlach’s reaction once you kill Gortash. One of the few times I’ve ever really respected a videogame’s writing and voice acting on a serious level.
The evil route, while following the same track feels sooo different it’s amazing how well written that game is. It truly is a work of love
Baldur’s Gate 3. Karlach’s reaction once you kill Gortash.
That hurt in my soul.
Every mention of Karlach hurts me. I went into the mission where you meet her with Wyll and just killed her as just another monster. I had no clue that you could recruit her.
Outer Wilds. The universe is, and we are.
One of those games where it’s better to play absolutely blind. For the experience of discovery is the gameplay. You can never play it for the first time again.
Return of the Obra Dinn will scratch a similar itch
TUNIC is another game that you can only play once. I recommend it to anyone who likes elaborate puzzles
Oh man that one was good. You can get a couple endings but yeah it’s hard to really replay it I have found. I actually really did like Death’s Door if you like Tunic. It’s a lot simpler but has nice mechanics and a very dark and lovely story
When I first played I didn’t even know that you left the starting town. It was just strongly recommended to me by a trusted friend, and I took their word for it, and bought it without even reading the store description. It was truly the kind of wonder producing experience that old gamers don’t get often.
Lol I didn’t know anything either, and a friend of mine also strongly recommended because he wanted to talk about it so much. I tried it and stopped after like 7 min. He was IRATE. I didn’t give it a proper go until like 3 years later. He thought I was trolling him when I started playing it, and it quickly turned into one of my all-time favorites.
Rofl, yeah if it hadn’t come so highly recommend I would not have stuck it out. Because at first I was put off by the very obviously stock Unity-looking visuals, floaty feeling physics… it wasn’t a good first impression IMHO. But it made a great second, and third, and fourth impression 😉 Game just got deeper and more poetic the more I played
Definitely. It feels good just moving around, checking things off your lists. 😌
I literally tried that game a month ago, and after a couple hours of flying blind in space, with a not great flight control system, having no idea where to go, it completely lost me.
Maybe I missed the point, or maybe it’s an issue with me not having enough free time, but if didn’t grab me at all.
No game is for everyone but here’s some ideas to enjoy it more. It sounds like you never really got to the call to adventure.
The core quest will not reveal itself until you survive after take off for 20minutes. Even then there isn’t really a explicitly stated goal. Let your curiosity guide you, read all dialogue, especially the translations bits and just enjoy exploring, you are a space archaeologist. If you have trouble finding a place to start I would recommend using your signal scope and chasing one of those signals. This is a game about exploring and gathering information about a mystery, the reason people are so particular about spoilers is because there’s nothing gating your progress except your own knowledge, if you know the final puzzle you can ‘beat’ the game in like 2 minutes. the only save state the game has is your ships computer that stores the clues you have uncovered so far. Also if you got the DLC I would recommend disabling it or ignoring it until you complete the main story.
I could never get into it either. People are so so obsessed with this game. They tell you to never look anything up, etc. I’ve tried it on mouse and keyboard, I’ve tried it on controller and the gameplay does not feel right, so I’ve never left the ground tutorial area.
You basically haven’t played any of the game then lol. It’s a long slow burn but it’s absolutely beautiful. Make your way through that tutorial section and get your ship, from there it really opens up.
I know and I’ve downloaded it and tried it so many times over the years, but can’t make it past the tutorial without getting frustrated.
A few hours? Something about your post tells me that you didn’t play past 22 minutes.
Call it a hunch.
sorry I offended your game, oh fragile one. I even blamed myself for missing something or not having enough time. I ran around the starting area talking to everyone for about an hour, just wandering, and then finally went up into space, struggling with the controls. Landed somewhere with just a guy and a radio, ran all around there, again maybe a total of an hour after my first launch. Crashed a few times at first, of course.
He says that because the main mechanic of the game is that the entire game resets every 22 minutes.
So you couldn’t have ran around for hours without noticing that, which is kind of the first clue as to what kind of game it is.
Notably, 22 minutes from when you see the nomai statue. So the commenter could have spend over an hour in the tutorial area, and then quit before experiencing much of the actual game
They said they spent another hour after launching, though - not sure you can launch without having interacted with the Nomai statue.
You can, but definitely not by accident.
It’s interesting you bring up the controls, because that is one of the things that instantly grabbed me about the game. Before I even knew what was going on, I knew I absolutely loved moving around in the world. I used to spin up the game just to zip about for a half hour.
But of course everyone is different. Not every game is for everyone. I really grew to love Outer Wilds more and more over the days.
There is an autopilot that isn’t terrible but be careful if the sun is in the way. I didn’t realize there was a boosted jump with the rocket pack for like 30 hours. Seriously looking up the controls would be a good idea.
But to get started I really just recommend fly to a planet and just explore it as long as you can. Take note of what you can’t do and once you feel good just go to a different planet and start again. It doesn’t take much time and you are limited to about 20 minutes anyways.
The game rewards starting again. And sometimes jumping into space without a suit is a fast way to do that. But it is a slow puzzle/exploration game essentially in the vain of Myst so if it’s not for you that’s fine.
Honestly, I found it hard to enjoy too, even though I finished the game. The game can be really fun, but it can also get a bit annoying to realize that you have missed something on a planet and if you did, it might take a boring amount of time to find what. The problem is that the save limitations means you basically have to waste a ton of time whenever you were wrong about something or mess up. The ship computer can hint at when a planet has more to see, but it’s not necessarily easy to figure out where to go, how to reach it, or if you’re supposed to do a different planet first to get a hint.
Fuck Brittle Hollow. I almost quit the game with how much time that stupid planet wasted. A quick save/load function would have made the game massively more fun for me. Replaying stuff I’ve already done because the game has bleh checkpointing is just not fun.
This is easily one of the best games of all time I’ve played. I’ve bullied all my friends into playing it and letting me watch and Noone quite experiences the story the same way.
For me though the most memorable moment wasn’t even one that I think was an intentional part of the game. I was about half way through and I so was still under the impression that
spoiler
The Naomi were responsible for blowing up the sun
I decided to just fly as far as I could away from the solar system, I flew so far the sun was just another star. I sat on the nose tip of my ship and watched the stars, occasionally telescoping in on them. Then
spoiler
I noticed the sky was much emptier than before, I zoomed in in a star and watched it explode. I realized that it wasn’t just our solar system that was dying it was everything. I zoomed in on the home star and listened to the musicians play, and as that music started to play I listened as they one by one stopped playing, and I looked around one last time at the now completely black sky before restarting the loop, and the playback was mostly just the stars slowly fading away.
I did this in the early days of the pandemic, and I would be lying if I wasn’t crying my eyes out, but afterwards, it really made me feel better about the pandemic and life in general.
2 weeks later and I came back to read your beautiful post. Hearing about people’s early experiences with the game are my favourite.
I once managed to catch the probe. I was so far from home, and couldn’t save them.
