Comment by kobalsky

European masterpieces, recentish:

  - Talos Principle 2
  - Expedition 33
  - KCD2
  - Anything by Arcane
  - Anything by CDPR
  - 007 Last light / Hitman
  - Blue Prince

This is subject to taste, but the games I've been personally enjoying the most are almost all European. US games are comparatively mediocre. I don't have an explanation; only this observation. I was startled when noticing it.

Most recently, I'm loving Order of the Sinking Star, and that's from a US team. There's hope!

If we are sticking to the CRPG theme. Then the Witcher 3 and Divinity: OG 2, BG3 and Disco Elysium would be the obvious choices. If you told me in beginning of 2010s all of the future hits in this genre will come out outside of US and Bioware/Obsidian will fade away, I would be quite surprised (but maybe shouldn't have, considering their owners and financial situations)

As many have mentioned, BG3, CDPR's Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 franchise, Remedy's Control / Alan Wake franchise (both original IPs) to name just a few. DICE (within EA) comes from Sweden and it's responsible for EA's core Frostbite engine alongside its Battlefield franchise.

I cannot point to the reasons as to why. Many of these teams are global teams - so a lot of the same problems apply: marketing costs/timelines, release-time crunch etc. The one difference I can point to is that perhaps executive payouts are not overly dependent on total shareholder returns.

The Kingdom Come: Deliverance games from Warhorse Studios and the Witcher franchise from CD Projekt Red (both Polish) are excellent and have won a ton of awards

Lots of non EU games fall short, including several mentioned in this thread, e.g. Anthem

The Witcher 3, Any GTA game

CDPR is probably the flagship studio in Europe. Interestingly, they are probably the modern studio that most resembles Bioware in the 2000's.

Valheim, Enshrouded. Each sit at the peak of the genre, IMO.

I really enjoyed Neverwinter Knights 2.

... and then EA purchased them and forced the frostbyte engine and release cadence expectations and mechanics that worked for FIFA Ultimate Team.

I like Jason Schreier's take that the end of Blizzard began as soon as WoW blew up in popularity.

"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."

I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.

Similar with Westwood (part of Virgin interactive) and Bioware (parceled up with Pandemic studios, owned by Elevation partners, who sold it to EA)

Yep, and all these years later, we have lost so much. It may seem like such a small thing, but losing real GMs in WoW makes me really sad.

Blizzard has not been independent since 1994, but people on the internet love picking some arbitrary point in time when "Blizzard died" when in reality the timeline and quality of their releases has almost zero correlation with who they were owned by at the time.

WoW Forever seems like they're at least attempting to try for the brass ring again. But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.