Tell GR: The Most Influential Game Of This Generation

I'd have to say Assasin's Creed. The free running, the simplified attack, counter, so many things were taken whole or by the piece and placed into other games.

Whether people like it or not Call of Duty 4 changed the face of gaming the most this generation, for better or worse. And Gears of War did for 3rd person shooters what CoD 4 did for 1st person shooters. I know these were on Alex's list but they were dead right.

It has to be Gears of War, for better or worse. The positive influences: dat cover system, the graphics. The negative influences: the frat bro personality, the browns and grays.

Even though Gears really didn't invent or really innovate any of these, it certainly popularized them.

So I'm going to second the first three. Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, Gears of War. That's this generation in a nutshell. There are no other two influential games this gen, because everything this gen is either based on one of these three games or is based an older generation game with no real influential impact behind them that didn't already exist.

What a shame.

Gears of War was my first choice. Alex had a pretty spot on list, but I might as well add another. How about Skate? Skate definitely deserves credit. The Tony Hawk games kept lowering itself from moron to ******* after THUG. Skate changed the feel making it more tactical and strategic. The sequels improved the game, even though I feel Skate 2 was better with its local multiplayer.

Well, some people don't have a taste in games.

Some people don't understand what "influential" means.

I hope this isn't directed towards me.

It is directed towards you.

Yeah, well, it changed the way I felt about skateboarding games. Its influence I had for it probably came from it's control features. If you screwed up with the analog stick, then you couldn't do the trick properly. There were some times I got frustrated, because of that. I'm saying its and influential game for the skateboard genre.

May I add The Elder Scroll games? Or am I going to get thumbs down for that?

Journey, no other games...scratch that, no other piece of entertainment has moved me the way Journey did.

As much as people hate on it. The whole Mass Effect trilogy.

people hate Mass Effect? as far as i knew it was just the ending people hated

"Hate on it." not hate whole thing lol

Agreed, it was such an incredible franchise filled with incredible character and lore. To this day, it still brings me hope about the future of gaming.

I liked alot of it as well even though in hindsight I think another developer could really pick up the ball and delver something extraordinary in the future.

The most influential game of this generation, at least from a PC perspective and not a console one, (in that case its probably GoW or MW) is Half-Life 2. Now I know it came out during the last cycle and I know that not enough game developers seem to be taking what made it good but that really doesn't mater because what makes it the most influential PC game of this gen is its DRM steam. Steam has revolutionized the PC market allowing for way more games to be made in sub-genres that would never find a large enough audience in past generations to mater but they no longer need to. Look at the breadth of the content, sure there are still the arcade shooters like CoD and Battlefield but there are also very sim like ones like arma and iron front for people who want something with more depth and realism. This doesn't just apply to shooters either all of the genres seem to have grown much deeper with the rise of the downloadable games. Classic adventure games for example were dead last generation and now they are alive and healthy with excellent releases coming out all the time. Platformers have gone from being something that you only get when nintendo releases a new Mario game on one of their handhelds to a genre with tons on inventive entries coming out each month from a slew of indie studios.

All in all the thing influencing this generation the most is not a single game but the rise of digital retail.

Gotta say Demon/Dark Souls. They got the action/RPG genre right with great mechanics, cool multiplayer, epic bosses and completely appropriate difficulty. Too many games hold your hands these days. Dragon's Dogma was good too, but not quite the same. Maybe they'll add true multiplayer next time. I look forward to more action/rpg's like these.

Rofl, how are the souls games influential AT ALL?

Really, i love them as much as the next guy but this isnt about games you like, its about games that were infuential, and demons souls/dark souls didnt influence much.

The Witcher 2 and Dragon's Dogma were both based off it. It's hard to tell with the latter, but the former literally based its combat off of Demon's Souls. And really, when you look at the other games stated, nearly all of them are influenced more than they're influencing. Hell, look at Mass Effect. By game 2, they're running straight off the Gears of War formula. Mass Effect 1 didn't even influence its own sequels.

Nothing important happened at all in the 7th generation of consoles, just increased polygons and bloatware. All the seminal and noteworthy things happened on the PC and crossed over, and then all the rehash got ported back to the PC, which is ironic as hell. I can't think of anything important that didn't either begin in the previous generation of consoles, or was originally a PC game thing. The only single noteworthy feature of the 7th generation is that it has set the stage for strong cinematic single player narratives. I honestly tried to think of a game that had any kind of influence, but all of them are based off of PC or last generation stuff. This generations was an existential crisis for consoles, the Wii and Xbox were family entertainment systems and the Playstation was more computer than console. I think that the next generation will be influenced by this crisis of identity, which means that the question being asked is irrelevant.

Fanboys are so cute. Care to site any examples for the heap of slander you've just thrown on consoles?

Gears of Wars over the shoulder? Resident Evil 4, and the cover system? Metal Gear Solid 2, 6th generation consoles. Call of Dutys First Person Shooter gameplay? PC port, there are countless examples. Assassins Creed? Prince of Persia (6th generation console.) Mass Effect had about 10 different engine modules doing the redundant task of filtering the screen, that bloat. The first one was so bad that you had to restart the console after awhile because it would take an frames dive. Modern Warfare 2 was the same. Indie developers have also been inspiring console games with voxels from Minecraft and others for example. It is also worth noting that while many of the games you have all cited are big names of this generation, few of them inspired others to create anything.

It's not about who did it first, its about who made the biggest leap forward. Why does anyone care about Wolfenstein or Doom when FPS games had been around for over 10 years? They weren't first, nor are they the best, but they raised the bar like almost no other. No one is saying Gears or MW invented their genres or gameplay mechanics, but they brought everything together in a way that made people notice.

unfortunately, the wrong games become influential this generation. every developer follows either Call of Duty or Gears of War. While I do enjoy cod, I've never understood what it is that people love about Gears so much. Games want games to be treated as forms of art, but at this rate they're looking at the wrong sources of inspiration. Repetitive gameplay and big set pieces are the only thing people are interested in now (cod, gears) while people ignore the games that actually can be considered artistic (metal gear solid, final fantasy) that focus less on gameplay and more on things like story and characters. I've always considered this to be the worst generation of gaming that i've been alive to witness (born in 91) and because of things i just mentioned, i think i'm right.... yep.

A game like Gears exists for a visceral experience. Not every game needs deep characters or an elaborate story. That's like saying every movie should be like LOTR or Million Dollar Baby. Those are great films, but there are other good films in other genres that don't have to be anything like those movies to be good.

that i get, but i just don't think gears deserves the insane recognition it gets. it's not just that im not fond of the concept, i've played all 3 gears games and i just don't find them all that fun. not to mention they're all exactly the same. Obviously there are enough games with deep characters and such, but they aren't the ones influencing future games like they should be, which was my original point.

*Walks on stage*
Minecraft
*drops mic and leaves*

*standing applause*

Ouendan.

Because Ouendan.

But seriously, Kanklez is right. Half-Life 2's forced Steam use is a bit of a pain in the ass to this day, but it plugged pretty much every serious PC gamer directly into the digital distribution revolution.

I somewhat agree with the Steam/HL2 problem thing. I remember buying the game back when it came out and living in an area that did not have internet access at the time. It wasn't until months after I bought the game that I could actually play it since I couldn't get online to authenticate it via Steam; and even then, it was on dial-up and took for-freaking-ever to download the updates (literally, almost 12 hours of downloading).

I'm going to go a different route and say something like shadow complex, not because it influenced games in general but because it showed downloadable titles can be more than cheap gimmicks or casual games. And i think because of games like it we have greats today like journey.

See also Bastion, Super Meat Boy, and Limbo

The reason Journey exist is because of Flow and Flower.

I know that, i wasn't saying shadow complex influenced journey. I was saying that it was one of the first downloadable titles do actually be a fully fledged game and in that way it somewhat influenced all the big ones that came after it

Of THIS generation? I'm somewhat inclined to say Fallout 3. It made leaps and strides in bringing the ever popular "post-apocalyptic" setting to mainstream gaming in the modern age. There have been numerous games produced since its release that draw on some similar themes and settings (see Borderlands, Rage, Metro 2033, and I'm willing to bet earlier incarnations of the Fallout franchise had some influence on Bioshock's setting as well). Not to mention, Bethesda also said they took a few aspects from Fallout 3 for Skyrim (one of the most popular games to come out in years) as well.

Fallout is also helping (along with Mass Effect and Bioshock) to popularize the shooter/RPG genre of gaming (though Bioshock's RPG elements are significantly downplayed in comparison).

It's not a perfect game, but Fallout 3 will almost certainly have a lasting impact on the gaming world. It may not be THE most influential game of this generation, but it's most definitely up there. I'd say top five at least

I agree 100%, I do like skyrim more i think, but like you said, it helped bring the apocalypse to a center stage in gaming

I'm going to say Castle Crashers. If there's another Arcade/PSN game that was more popular early, go with that. It was the first one I ever heard of though, and this generation saw the rise of the small, Indie, downloadable game. There will be nothing but more Indie games.

I think the Batman: Arkham games deserve recognition for showing us that superhero games don't have to suck.

Gears, CoD and GTA IV. Also we can't forget WoW, the blueprint for every MMO since.

I was going to say WoW but this seemed more towards consoles.

Wow is the most popular and refined but I'd argue Everquest was the biggest leap forward for the genre. It proved MMORPGs were a viable genre outside of pasty neckbeards and introduced many of the features that continue today.

Mass Effect trilogy for sheer volume of story
Arkham series for revolutionizing melee combat
Red Dead Redemption for creating a truly beautiful, living open world
Uncharted 2 for massive set pieces
COD4 for starting the online modern shooter
Angry Birds for revolutionizing the mobile game market

As much as I hate it COD is the most influential game, almost every 1st person shooter has its mechanics. Most games that come out are shooters now too. But I think this "list" should have sub genres like influential for 1st person shooters, racers, RPG. They all draw from the best in that genre.

Yes, I think a number of people are discounting opinions on games that affected players, rather than other games. It would be a shame to ignore games that had some unique features or unique structure that could change a person's view of video games and how they entertain people, and simply focus on the most prototypical examples of cover-based shooting, or online-multiplayer progession.

Also, what is with all the down-voting? I always felt that the GR community was close-knit enough to be pretty open-minded towards other member's opinions, and leave the hatred for non-GR-readers. I'd say that a down-vote goes beyond simply disagreeing with someone, but also denies that a post has any value at all.

To me a down vote means "I disagree with this post". If people take them personally that's their choice, but I think we're all mature enough we can assume most people are not down voting with hateful intent

When I think influential it has to change the way I look at gaming in general. Could be for the worse or for the better of our line of entertainment. The two games I think that does better is Mass effect because it set forth that we gamer like to feel like it's us making the choices and us receiving the consequences of this. True this wasn't the case in the ending but the other 95% of the game felt like it was you doing everything instead of the game holding your hand dragging you along *even thou it was doing it*. And i think with that formula other gaming companies followed suit and are attempting to reach that sort of understanding. Now for the worse I'd have to say COD. Look at all FPS games now, you have no more HP points, iron sight 95% of the time, and when you are close to dying your screen turns red. When Modern Warfare came out it gave all other devs ideas that this is how we want all our FPS games and it became normal for almost any game now. Those are my two cents. .>

Shooters, shooters everywhere.

I'm sad to say that this current generation has been and is being dominated by an overabundance of shooter games. While a few titles do stand out, the majority are mediocre at best.

Which titles stand out from the crowd, being shooter or not? Here are my 2 cents:
- Assassin's Creed (series).
Good series, with a rather mediocre start. Got better with each installment, which is a rarity these days. Only negative issue: what's up with those aliens?
- Batman: Arkham Asylum/City
Finally a game which does the caped crusader justice. Superb on every level. Finally DC fans have a game they can be proud to show as well.
- Borderlands
Yes, a shooter, but one that did not take itself very serious. A fresh breath of air in the genre, which encourages teamplay and joining others online. I still like to dust this one of from time to time.
Mirror's Edge
- First person... survival thriller? How Dice never combined the movement mechanic of this game with (cont...)

its big selling brother Battlefield is beyond me. It did something interesting and original. And for that, it was shunned by the majority of 'hardcore gamers' and forgotten.
- Red Dead Redemption
Rockstar did something which only they could; revive a near dead (movie) genre and make a lot of money on it. And then they went back for seconds... with zombies. The first western themed game after Outlaws which held me in its thrall up until the closing credits.
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Showing the world that, while not as good as the original, sometimes a sequel/prequel can be quite good. Technically a shooter, but it is rather a first person adventure with some shooting elements, if you desire to play it like one.
- Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2
Companies like Relic Entertainment are one of the few that are keeping the RTS genre alive and kicking. Sure, Chris Taylor did his best with Supreme Commander, but that title stuck a little too much to its roots. Also (cont...)

Easy. Its calles World of Warcraft. Released close enough to 2005. It has ha more effect on the largest ranges of demographics. Old/young. Men/women. All countries.

It still has 9 million people over 7 years later. It wins.

the console outings, while a daring move, weren't all that great. And let's forget about SupCom2.
- Halo series (online component)
I'm not going to praise the story whatsoever, its a genre thing that you like or don't like. No, I'm talking about the online play. As far as the console market is concerned, I think many a game (FPS or not) can learn a thing or two from the Halo franchise; this is how it is done. The Waypoint tool for download on XBL only makes it better and easier to keep track of your progress in each of the Halo games.
- The amazing indies: Limbo, Bastion and Braid.
Just a few titles which should be mentioned: Limbo, Bastion, Braid. Bite size games that make you coming back for more. They look old school, but each of them have solid gameplay, gorgeous graphics and beautiful music. If you don't own any of these titles yet; what are you waiting on?