Mine are Half Life and Morrowind.
I feel like back when I didn’t have a massive game library I would have spent so much time replaying Half Life and exploring every inch of the maps and trying to find exploits to break the game. The massive modding community likely would have kept me playing for years.
Morrowind probably would have gotten me a lot more into RPGs and fantasy games. I do love RPGs but still struggle to immerse myself in fantasy settings. I assume this is because I mostly played SciFi games growing up.
What about you? Is there an MMO or something you maybe tried and gave up on to soon?
Dungeons and dragons, both the paper version and the digital stuff. I remember as a kid playing some random DnD games with no context and being upset that they were weird rpgs that only went up to level 8 or whatever. Without context, that is not common in videoganes. And not knowing how much more open the games could have been than just playing them “murder hobo” style…
I only ended up playing paper DnD at around the start of 5e, while I was tangentially aware of it since I think before third edition, I didn’t know I would actually like it back then. And it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have. I have a processing delay, so whether or not I end up enjoying board games, or anything else involving players taking turns doing complicated thinking… largely depends on how patient the other players are.
I also wasn’t super creative back then… although maybe playing DnD would have helped. But at the very least, I wish I would have tried learning paper DnD back then even if I didn’t like it, so I had the context when I played the digital games. I would have very much appreciated those if I understood why certain limitations were in place.
I mean, could you imagine a DnD digital game trying to accurately represent the capabilities of level 20 characters… hitting level 20 in DnD basically forces your campaign into “jumping the shark”. Which omnipotent god are we one-shotting this week?