Demiath's 2011 Gaming Year Retrospective
0Another year, another Gaming Retrospective...and as always, this list includes games I actually finished during the year regardless of whether they were released during the year or not.
First and foremost, 2011 marked my long-awaited return to high-end PC gaming, and the sheer technical wizardry involved in playing just about any recent title on a powerful personal computer (as opposed to a currentgen console) is almost enough to make me heartily recommend investing in a good rig right about now. In more mundane (but still tech-related) terms, getting load times down to a few seconds and increasing frame rate to a solid 60 FPS in most games makes gaming *much* less of a hassle than it is on weaker PCs and consoles.
More importantly, though, 2011's gaming experiences (both the actual 2011 releases as well as any older titles I chose to play) didn't present much in the way of actual gameplay innovation. A string of sequels and new installments in long-running series would dominate any Top 10 list I could possibly come up with, but at least the overall quality at display was respectable.
In the RPG departement (always an important genre for the purposes of this channel) we had The Witcher 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Skyrim which all presented ambitious revisions of previously established gameplay formulas. DX:HR was by far the most conventional (sticking close as it did to the original's flawed but fascinating concept) while Witcher 2 became the most controversial release for me personally. CD Projekt's gloomy lore-heavy narratives and reflex-oriented combat simply does not represent the direction in which I would want hardcore PC RPGs to develop, and it's surely not among my favorite gaming experiences of the year. Skyrim has its own issues (many of which carry over from many of the underwhelming previous installments in the series), but the world Bethesda created this time around is one of the most immersive and meaningfully explorable in the history of RPG gaming, and the sheer ambition that went into creating it and filling it with genuinely interesting content is on another level entirely when compared to anything else I've played during 2011. So, yeah, despite its undeniable problems TES5 is easily my personal game of the year.
Other memorable experiences of 2011 include the gorgeous beat em up action in Arkham City, the perfectly paced singleplayer campaign of Gears of War 3 (which is easily better than GoW1-2 combined) and the impressive-looking and mind-blowingly dynamic multiplayer mayhem of Battlefield 3.