Super simple post but which games have you played or seen, hell which books or movies or series have you seen, that are just a masterclass in design. Something others in the medium have never managed again.
I will give my favourite game directly, outer wilds is so good. If I were to say everything that’s so good about this game I would likely cross some kind of hard coded limit to post length but if you played it you know, and if you haven’t played it you should.
Breaking Bad is a Good Thing.
Discworld MUD - probably the biggest and most detailed MUD.
Star Wars Galaxies - for it’s unique crafting system, it’s resources which spawned in with unique IDs and it’s vehicles and space ships that were capable of being used by multiple players at a time. Probably the first time it was done.
Wurm Online/Unlimited - for it’s unique crafting. Unlimited also allows for linking servers so you can sail off the map on one server and appear from the corresponding direction on another server set to be in that direction.
Little Big Planet 1 - 3
Bloodwych - 4 character 3d RPG from the Amiga era where you could split the party and move them separately.
Laser Squad - predecessor to XCom/UFO games
I went through Wasteland several times. Occasionally with the same characters. The main map was on a different disk than the towns so you could switch from disks you’d played through to new copies to repeat the game with the same characters.
Half-Life 2
Oh and honestly a not very well known game, but I genuinely really enjoyed it because it’s so unique, just… if you can, play it, even if you think you’re not into that genre, it will surprise you. A lot:
Nier Automata
Dead Space is pretty dang good.
Hold on now, was Daggerfall not enough? What about Morrowind?
Psychonauts and especially Psychonauts 2 for they’re storytelling.
So many games over the years !
To name a few :
Doom reboot from 2016
Hollow Knight
FF VII for its materia system.
Devil May Cry
Diablo (the first one)
The original Elite.
Highway Encounter
Sentinel
Ikaruga
Katamari Damacy
Shadow of the Colossus
Pathologic
Slay
Dark Souls
Invisible Inc.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Quake
Shadow Tactics
Doom Eternal
Inside
Dishonored
Mirror’s Edge
Psychonauts
… probably more but can’t remember right now. There are many masterfully designed games out there.
It was on my wishlist for quite some time. Then I stopped playing games altogether. It’s totally not “my kind of thing” but I always felt some strange attraction towards it. Your recommendation might be the sign to go and finally check it out.
It definitely only started to really stick with me after the first “playthrough”.
I really don’t wanna spoil it but, trust me, once you finished the game, you did not finish the game.
Very true. The way the resources were tweaked was a thing of beauty. I got to talk to the lead game designer about the resource and crafting system when the game was out. It was very cool how they tweaked stuff under the hood.
Daggerfall was not technically an open world. It was an instanced world. You are right about Morrowind. It was first and allowed Bethesda to do fallout 3. I should have been clearer. Fallout 3 was a genre breakout game, in that people who didn’t play RPGs played it. A lot of them. Morrowind didn’t break genres like that.
I agree, no way. Fallout 3 was like a “capturing lightning in a bottle” release.
Oh ok, I just remembered it has a really huge world to explore.
This just reminded me of another game, Tony Hawk American Wasteland which I recall as being the first open world skating game, and most of the Tony Hawk games being really good in general.
Endoparasitic and Endoparasitic 2
These got some another level of creativity.
Clonk, basically Terraria or Minecraft 2D but +10 years before the others were a thing.
It was a sandbox game with many gameplay elements. Physics, weather and seasons, buildings, vehicles and lots more.
It offered different mission types, scenarios (knights, wild west, futuristic, fantasy with magic) and mod support and of course multiplayer. Once we were 3 sitting on 1 keyboard playing Clonk, when it only had local multiplayer.
I loved it.
There was a 3D game announced, but it focused only on combat afaik and never finished
Bloodborne
Clonk sounds like a game I would have enjoyed. I’ve mostly been a console gamer since PS1 so I missed it.
Tetris! In my view, a design isn’t perfected when there’s no more to add, but rather when there’s no more to take away, and that’s a tight design 
Since we’re just talking about game design (not video games), chess deserves a mention too - it was invented around the year 1500, and we’re still playing it… without mods! One of the best examples of “easy to learn, hard to master”.
Beat Saber is a favorite of mine too, when it comes to game design:
Then add Space Flight Simulator in the list, I can spend days playing it without any break.
