Good role playing game

Just be prepared to die hundreds of times before you emerge victoriously. This game has more quality storytelling in some of its fetch side quests than some other games have in their main storylines. You are Geralt, gruff and grey-haired monster hunter chap, a sort of heroic land pirate type. This is a deep-dive adventure you'll want to set a few months aside for, a bit like Skyrim.

These two duke it out as favorite accessible beards and swords RPGs, but The Witcher 3 snags the writing and moody-faced adult themes awards. While comparing the two feels natural, Skyrim is a mostly first-person game where The Witcher 3 is third-person like the other Witcher titles.

It's also not easy either. You've been warned. This is what you get if you take the DNA of Balder's Gate and Planescape: Torment, but start making the game almost 20 years after those titles appeared. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is a classic isometric party-based RPG, a style that went out of fashion just after the turn of the millennium, but one that's good to have back. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is saturated with old-school role-playing flavor.

It's the story of a blighted land, and playing it is no cakewalk. You'll need strategy, as hack 'n' slash tactics don't work here. Combat is fluid rather than turn-based, but you can pause the action at any point to issue your party orders. If you played and loved Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, you'll feel right at home. From character classes that play entirely differently to one another like the undead character that can only speak to others with a disguise to the ability to interact with NPCs in whichever way you choose, you can play through much of the game without getting your hands dirty with combat.

Thankfully if you do decide to swing your sword, combat is a turn-based treat. You can destroy an explosive barrel to deal huge damage to an enemy, or electrify a puddle to fry them. A modern classic. Considering it was a game that was considered vaporware for so long, the end product or at least this first part of it absolutely astounds with its beauty.

By taking elements from many of the Final Fantasy titles that followed the original, Square Enix has crafted arguably the finest combat system the series has ever seen, allowing players to switch from one iconic party member to the next. The Nioh Collection is the ultimate Nioh experience for fans and new players alike. Packing in remastered version of both Nioh and Nioh 2, plus all the DLC to date, this definitive collection is the best way to experience the action RPG series.

You can play it on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Those who are on the latest generation will be able to take advantage of some PS5 enhancements, including 4K support at up to fps.

The Legend of Zelda franchise has long been known for quality, but in leaning into Western sensibilities and taking inspiration from the likes of Skyrim, it has reached its zenith. From dozens of puzzle-focused shrines, chances to experiment with a robust physics system, or tough but rewarding combat, few games reward exploration like Breath of the Wild.

Even years on from launch, players are finding fresh ways to play in this version of Hyrule. The sequel to the marvellous Pillars of Eternity ventures to the archipelago of Deadfire. You, and your party of adventurers, need to pursue a rampaging god, but to reach it you first you need to learn to sail the high seas aboard The Defiant.

On the ocean you can explore and can plunder enemy vessels for loot, which you can then use to upgrade your ship. When you dock at a port the game switches back to classic top-down cRPG view and you're treated to elaborate and beautifully rendered locations.

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! Characters that are normally enemies are friends in Underworld, and we love that you may not be able to tell. Underworld was a technological marvel in , but while the graphics are dated, the feeling of exploring the Stygian Abyss is just as exciting today. Divinity was a Kickstarter success story that still somehow took us by surprise.

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. 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.

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.

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. Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 is currently in development.

Read everything we know about it in preparation for what could be another addition to this list in Release date: Developer: Blizzard Battle. 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. 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.

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. 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? It makes the game harder, but also more rewarding. 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. The epic scale of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is remarkable, but it's the power of choice in an unrelentingly ugly world that makes it unforgettable.

Moral ambiguity has never been so powerfully presented: the decisions you make actually matter, and the outcomes are often unforeseeable and rarely as good as you'd hope.

One of the most impressive things about The Witcher 2 is the way it blends two very distinct experiences. Early in the game, Geralt must make a choice that will take him down one of two separate paths, each offering a completely different perspective on the game's events. If you want to see it all, you'll have to play it twice—and there's more than enough to make it a worthwhile effort.

You might expect all your toil and trouble to eventually lead to a just and happy ending for all, but it won't. Geralt isn't a hero; he's really not much more than a bystander, trying to protect what little he has from the chaos that surrounds him. His quest is entirely personal, driven forward by a colorful, occasionally bizarre and surprisingly believable cast of characters that really brings the game alive. Geralt works alone, but he feels more like "one among many" than the savior-protagonists of other party-based RPGs.

It's a fantastic and well-told tale, layered over very solid mechanical underpinnings: A flexible character development system, glorious eye candy, intense combat and more than enough secondary content to camouflage its very linear nature. It's dark, it's dirty, it's sometimes flat-out depressing—and it's brilliant.

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.

That loneliness is key because Shock 2 is all about taking things away from you. Think twice before you walk into that radiated room. But the biggest thing Irrational takes away, right at the halfway mark of the game, is hope.

Irrational made games where the environment is the central character, and here, that character is the Von Braun. It creaks and moans as you pad quietly down its corridors. Every door you open yelps. Its security systems attack you as if you hurt their feelings. Some play through with all guns blazing, but the psionics skills balance well with combat, and Tech skills open new areas later in the game. The Guardian was one of the most terrifying things our young minds had ever encountered.

His massive stone face emerging from the screen, with his actual, real-life voice taunting us, both tempting us to play more and horrifying us. It was a technological marvel at the time, but Ultima 7 stands the test of time because of the interactivity of Britannia. This is without a doubt the best installment of one of the most legendary RPG franchises ever. Do you want to run in the firefight, guns blazing, or do you want to sneak around and flank? Do you want to snipe?

Or maybe you want to hack some terminals and get droid reinforcement? Or, what if you talked to that NPC guard over there and convince his team to take a lunch break? While it looks like a shooter, Deus Ex is all about role-playing elements. The leveling system rewards experimentation, and some of the later upgrades make your Denton feel like a superhero.

The attention to detail here is perfect, and no one element of the game ever truly feels forced. And there are a lot of clues—every note you find or sign you see seems to hint at some new conspiracy, and we love how the alliances in the game feel constantly in flux. The NPCs you meet are just believable enough to make this conspiracy-laden world feel lived-in. Human Revolution looks better, but this is the smarter, more open-ended game.

The release of Fallout 4 demonstrated that some cracks are starting to appear in Bethesda's usually reliable open world model, but that model seemed earthshaking back when Morrowind hit literal shelves way back in There was a magic in knowing you could tromp all over the island of Vvardenfell without even encountering a loading screen save upon entering buildings, and in seeing that the NPC population seemed to have lives beyond their interactions with you.

Plenty of other games have achieved similar effects in the years since, but the wonder of Morrowind is that it still holds up all these years later—even more so than its technically superior successor Oblivion. A lot of that appeal springs from the delicious surrealism of Vvardenfell itself, where racist elves hang out in twisty mushrooms like smurfs in an acid dream, and where the more traditional castles of occupying foreigners clash with the landscape like pueblos in Scandinavia.

The AI might often seem primitive by today's standards, but the stories the tell often rival those in prettier contemporary RPGs. It thrives still, thanks in part to its own strengths and a dedicated modding community that creates countless new adventures and keeps it looking more modern than it actually is even going so far as to port the entirety of Morrowind into newer game engines.

The universe was a place we wanted to live, but there were too many systems and menus to dig through to get there. Still, it terrified us to hear that BioWare had streamed back so much and put more emphasis on the shooting mechanics.

Turns out, it was for the better: Mass Effect 2 trims just enough fat to let you focus on what matters: the optional Loyalty missions for your team. Recruiting a team to take on the Collectors puts the focus on small, interesting stories. The thrill of battling fire-breathing dragons so you can suck out their souls and use their power? Could it be the endless exploration available on its titanic map? Perhaps it's the thousands of Skyrim mods that allow players to do everything from improve textures to change a dragon into a flying Macho Man Randy Savage oooooh, yeah!

Or maybe it comes down to the game's impressive malleability: you can craft any type of hero you want, go where you want, do what you want, and do it when you want.

Yes, there are myriad reasons to love one of the best-selling video game of all time, but one thing is for sure: you really don't play Skyrim. You live it. It shed the famously clunky UI of previous games to allow more of its refreshingly detailed world to shine through. Instead, checking your inventory or looting happened in pop-up menus, which not only carried into future Ultima titles, but games outside the RPG genre too.

Ultima VII also dropped the strict, grid-based approach to movement, introduced dialogue trees, and went real-time. Its innovations to the format are matched only by its impressive interactivity and the non-linearity of its main plot. Ultima VII managed to root itself comfortably in the conventions it created, but still have the sophistication to move forward in awesome new ways.

Smartly combining themes of action, role playing, survival horror, and first-person shooters, System Shock 2 expertly defies simply being a great RPG, showing how innovative mechanics that play off each other can make a game more than the sum of its parts. It also pioneered several methods of storytelling through gameplay that we take for granted — like finding doomed audio logs or reliving echoes of the past that urge you to piece together the larger puzzle of what's really going on.

The unsettling and moody atmosphere of the derelict starship go hand in hand with bioengineered horrors that roam free to create the perfect horror environment, and leave you feeling terrified no matter which of the many skills you choose to give your character. There's always multiple ways to solve a problem, letting you get truly creative in ways that never feel out of place with the character you've built.

Long ago, before Noctis went on his epic road trip and Lightning bounced between timelines, the Dark Knight Cecil fought his inner demons and a few space monsters in Final Fantasy IV. A pivotal entry in the Final Fantasy series, IV eschewed simple storytelling mechanics and set out to create a deliciously frothy soap opera, complete with love triangles, increasingly exotic locals the moon, y'all , and a classic "brothers-separated-at-birth" reveal.

The only thing that matched its ambitious storytelling was its equally ambitious combat mechanics. Final Fantasy IV ushered the Active Time Battle system into the series, fundamentally changing the way Final Fantasy games were played for nearly a decade. These features, combined with charming 2D sprites, sweeping music, and timeless themes of love, betrayal, and redemption, are why Final Fantasy IV is still fondly remembered long after its heroes saved the Blue Planet from impending doom.

A smart, action-dependent approach to leveling lets players build out their character naturally, rather than adjusting numbers in a stat menu. An abundance of quests and the freedom to carve out your own path in its world is almost overwhelming.

Its visuals were technically impressive for the time and imaginatively stylish enough to hold up even today, making the island of Vvardenfell one of the most memorable settings in the series.

It stands out with its dark, riveting storyline inspired by real-life events like the Yugoslav Wars and Bosnian Genocide. The focus on more serious themes means players are often forced to make difficult decisions with sometimes devastating moral implications. With a non-linear plot modeled after visual novels and full of branching paths, turning points, and multiple endings, Tactics Ogre became more than a mere strategy RPG.

EarthBound is a weird, wonderful game about four kids who save the world. Early proof that not all RPGs need fantasy settings, EarthBound is one of the best turn-based RPGs of the bit era and takes place in a town that feels like it could be anywhere in middle America.

That modern setting mixed with bizarre, offbeat humor makes it a unique experience and has helped it maintain its cult status as something special and very different from its contemporaries. Most of all, EarthBound has a tremendous amount of heart. Underneath its goofy jokes and pop culture references is a genuinely great, sweet story about a group of kids who are risking a lot to make the world a better place, and the final battle is an extremely clever, moving way to incorporate the people our heroes meet along their journey.

With Final Fantasy Tactics, Yasumi Matsuno took everything we thought was sacred about the Final Fantasy series and turned it on its head. While Tactics maintained the familiar creatures and archetypes we all knew and loved, it introduced us to the world of Ivalice, and leaned heavily into the Job system introduced in Final Fantasy V. While the core stable of characters provided a ton of memorable drama, being able to recruit generic characters and fashion them into roles ranging from simple Knight and Wizard to downright bizarre Mime and Calculator led to an infinite well of depth.

While you had to put in some effort to wrap your head around the tactical battle system, the rewarding feeling of mastering the complex systems made it absolutely worth it.

It perfectly balances intimate character drama and friendship with end-of-the-world heroics. Luca Blight is an especially twisted and evil villain in a genre filled with great villains. A shockingly high number of them can be taken into battle with you, and all of them enrich your castle with interesting dialogue and improvements.

Your castle is your home, and filling it with artists, shopkeepers, alliance leaders, and so many more friends and comrades results in an incredibly satisfying mixture of gameplay, story, and friendship. Multiple paths to every objective reveal themselves through experimentation and clever, oftentimes hilarious manipulation of the AI. The setting is diverse and dense, thanks to an even-larger slice of the post-apocalyptic West Coast inhabited by everything from primitive tribespeople battling giant insects to the Brotherhood of Steel standing against terrors brought by the power-armored Enclave and brutish supermutants.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was not only one of the first to let you truly explore the vast untapped universe of Star Wars before the events of the films, but let everyone play out the ultimate fantasy of becoming a Jedi Knight or a Sith Lord! Knights of the Old Republic also offered up a great cast of side characters with intriguing and complex relationships not to mention the best snarky assassin droid this meatbag could ever ask for , and set up one of the greatest player character twists in an RPG.

Its quaint Japanese setting is in stark contrast to the dark secrets its characters harbor, and that's what makes P4G so great. By the end of its ish hour campaign, you geniunely care about this quirky cast of misfits, so much so that you'll meticulously curate your schedule to ensure that you have the time to spend with each of your in-game pals equally.

Persona 4 Golden on Vita takes the foundation built by the PlayStation 2 classic and adds new social links, new personas, and of course, the ability to play this amazing adventure anywhere you want, making it the definitive edition of a seminal RPG.

With a focus on exploration, Dark Souls pushes players to experiment and take risks in ways few action RPGs have before, and in which few have truly captured since. It defies the hand-holding nature of its peers and forces us to make mistakes in order to grow — whether that means learning how to cautiously navigate its deadly world, take down one of its many imposing bosses, or just level our stats properly. It creates massive challenges out of combat situations that would be minor in any other game, making every moment memorable and every small victory an exhilarating reward.

By the time we've returned to Commander Shepard in this sequel, we have an idea of the threats and mysteries looming over the Milky Way. Mass Effect 2 gives us the chance to get to know them on a personal level with revamped combat that greatly improves upon its predecessor.

Mass Effect 2's creative take on RPG systems are more welcoming with its blend of third-person shooter mechanics, and its variety and focus on the new squad members make for a memorable and sometimes heartbreaking campaign. You can spend hundreds of hours exploring The Witcher 3's expansive continent and surrounding isles and still not have seen even a fraction of what this world has to offer. What begins as a quest to find your lost love becomes an engrossing tale full of unforgettable characters, terrifying enemies, and genuine heart.

Even the smallest side quests are thoughtful affairs and many of the main story arcs feature some of the most poignant narrative beats we've encountered in any game. Couple its stellar storytelling with deep character customization and a challenging and rewarding combat system and it's easy to see why IGN gave The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt our Game of the Year award for For all intents and purposes, Vagrant Story should not have been a PlayStation game.

The sheer volume of systems interacting with each other and the top notch graphics should have crippled the Sony's little system. But somehow, we got to experience Yasumi Matsuno's dungeon crawling masterpiece mere months before the PS2's US launch. Heavy stuff for a PSX game, but it's handled masterfully through beautiful art direction and some extremely impressive localization.

You can also craft gear, chain abilities in combat, explore a massive dungeon called "The Iron Maiden," target specific body parts on enemies, employ super moves, solve puzzles in degree environments, and take on some of the toughest enemies Square Enix ever created.

Vagrant Story is the definition of a cult classic, and is undisputedly worthy of the number nine spot on this list. Made both accessible and engaging by its unique classes and skills, the endless satisfaction of its kill and loot gameplay, and its near limitless equipment variety and character customization, Diablo II's cooperative play and item trading helped to successfully foster not only a communal spirit in each procedurally generated level of each dank dungeon, but one of the greatest roleplaying experiences of all time.

During the s, developer Squaresoft was the undisputed king of JRPGs, and Secret of Mana was one of the most dazzling jewels in its crown. Even now we still remember the action RPG fondly: its bright, candy-colored world was a joy to explore, the action-based combat was easy to learn and fun to do, and its inventory ringlets made navigating menus refreshingly simple.

Then there was the breathtaking soundtrack, celebrated for its mix of cheerful tunes and haunting melodies. But the most memorable feature was the multiplayer. Secret of Mana would let up to three players participate in combat, so long as they had an extra controller or two lying around and the correct peripheral accessory for the SNES. Even if WoW never evolved past this vanilla state, it would still be remembered fondly as an incredible RPG filled with epic dungeons, surprisingly compelling Player vs.

Player encounters, satisfying non-combat crafting and social gameplay, and more well-written, hand-crafted quests and adventures than it felt possible for a single RPG to contain.

The game has never stood still. Completely new worlds, revamped old worlds, balanced and well-integrated new classes, risky storytelling, and an almost impossible-to-count volume of quality-of-life improvements have made an already amazing game experience even more amazing, more than a decade later.

Having the creature follow you on your journey helped further transform the monsters from simply being a team of fighters to a team of your best friends. But the real stars of the game were the characters and the story. And remember, go for the eyes! Compared to its cheerfully optimistic brethren, Final Fantasy VI is a breath of fresh albeit bleak air.

It eschews the myopic viewpoint of a single, designated protagonist in order to tell a larger, more emotionally-charged tale. Its unconventional gameplay is another reason: FFVI casts off the rigid class system of previous Final Fantasies and allows any one of the 14 heroes to use magic so long as they equip magical shards. Nothing feels redundant or wasted in Final Fantasy VI. Did you know? The seamless transition between the world map full of visible, avoidable enemies and combat was a revelation in a time where most RPGs featured jarring random battles, and even today makes monster encounters a joy instead of a chore.

The plucky courage and determination of its adolescent heroes combined with the memorable art style of Akira Toriyama makes for instantly memorable characters. Start at Get Started!

Developer Sony Online Entertainment. Release Wizardry 8. Developer Sir-Tech. Titan Quest. Developer Iron Lore Entertainment. Fable II. Developer Lionhead Studios. Torchlight II. Developer Runic Games. Pillars of Eternity. Developer Obsidian Entertainment. Front Mission 3. Developer Square. The Bard's Tale. Developer Interplay Productions. Betrayal at Krondor.

Developer Dynamix. Freedom Force. Developer Irrational Games. Divinity: Original Sin. Developer Larian Studios. Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Developer BioWare. Darkest Dungeon. Developer Red Hook Studios. Developer Nihon Falcom. Kingdom Hearts II. Developer Square Enix. Jonathon Dornbush Kingdom Hearts 2 considerably ups the combat possibilities of its predecessor, introducing new forms — and snazzy new suits — for Sora to wear. Chrono Cross. Dragon Warrior VII.

Developer Heartbeat, ArtePiazza. Chris Reed Some people like short games: get in, have fun, and move on. Final Fantasy. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss.

Developer Blue Sky Productions. EVE Online. Developer CCP Games. Developer AlphaDream. Star Ocean: The Second Story. Developer tri-Ace. Illusion of Gaia. Developer Quintet. Chris Reed When the spirit of the earth asks you to do something, you do it. Valkyria Chronicles. Developer Sega. Icewind Dale II. Developer Black Isle Studios. The Legend of Dragoon. Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.

Developer Nippon Ichi Software. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Neverwinter Nights 2. Jade Empire. Fire Emblem Awakening. Odin Sphere Leifthrasir. Developer Vanillaware. Developer Toby Fox. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.

Developer Level Mike Rougeau Ni no Kuni: Wratch of the White Witch follows the adventures of Oliver and his companions, who include an oddball fairy named Drippy, as Oliver tries to save his mother. Pool of Radiance. Developer Strategic Simulations, Inc.

Lunar: Eternal Blue. Developer Game Arts, Studio Alex. Phantasy Star Online. Developer Sonic Team. Breath of Fire III. Developer Capcom.