Couchpotato interviewed Alexander from Atom Team about their latest game, Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy. A Kickstarter campaign for the game has already reached 2/3 of the funding goal.

Link to article

What is the most promising RPG of 2024? Like every year, you had your say. Check out the details to find out what games our visitors and editors think are most promising.

Link to article

The RPGWatch visitors have cast their votes for the best RPG of 2023. Check out the details to find out which games made it to the top three.

Link to article

The year 2024 has just started - let's look back at the numbers of 2023:

RPGWatch has covered 156 game releases and even more unreleased games.

The RPGWatch Curator on Steam recommended 15 games last year:

• Sea of Stars
• Legends of Amberland II: The Song of Trees
• System Shock
• WitchSpring R
• Starfield
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Jagged Alliance 3
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
• Heroes of Spyria
• Wartales
• EVERSPACE™ 2
• Path of the Midnight Sun
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Grey Heritage: Faded Vision
• Chained Echoes

With more than 221000 followers the RPGWatch Curator is still the 6th most popular English Steam Curator.

108 new RPGs are already expected for 2024 - so this year will be exciting, too.

Lackblogger, Pladio, Couchpotato and Forgottenlor  wrote some informative articles in 2023. A Big Thank You - I hope to see some articles from Watchers in 2024 as well.

Many thanks to all users who send in interesting newsbits, especially Couchpotato, Henriquejr, Kordanor and Redglyph!

Last but not least thanks to Taluntain and all other staff members for keeping this place running.

I wish all Watchers health, peace, happiness and good luck in 2024.

To be more exact:

I'm wishing all of you 12 months of peace, 52 weeks of laughter, 366 days of fun, 8,784 hours of joy, 527.040 minutes of good luck, and 31.622.400 seconds of happiness :)

Cheers,

HiddenX

Like every year you can vote for the RPGWatch Game of the Year 2023 and the Most Promising RPG of 2024:

For both categories you can select the first, second and third place. The famous game -none- can be selected, too.

Vote here!

(until 5. January 2024)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

The RPGWatch staff wish you all a nice time at the end of 2023. Meet friends and family, stay healthy and play a game or two - maybe even offline :)

May all your wishes for 2024 come true!

Henriquejr has some games to give away - join the fun:

Henriquejr's Christmas Giveaway

Hi Everyone!

Christmas is nearing and I would like to raffle some game keys I won't redeem.
All of them are Steam keys and they *probably* aren't region-locked :P

Here's the list:

• Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus Standard Edition
• Hard West 
• Phantom Doctrine 
• Wingspan 
• Juno: New Origins 
• Syberia 3 
• Heaven’s Vault 
• The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day

I think these may be redeemed worldwide. Note that I can't/won't take responsibility if they can't. They are all legit game keys from Bundles bought along these years.

The rules of the Giveaway are simple:

1. You must have a minimum of 152 posts total (100 posts + 52 that's the number of springs I have seen :) 
2. You clearly state in a reply to this thread that you want to participate, don't forget to specify the preferred game/games
3. Any game keys left will be donated again sometime in the future (can't say when)

Aside from the restriction #1 above, everyone can participate, even RPGWatch staff members (admins, moderators, newseditors, etc, even @Taluntain himself). The possibility to participate in this giveaway ends on December 22nd, 2023. You can edit your game preference(s) before that date. If you have any questions /doubts please feel free to ask me in this very thread.

Have Fun!

- Henriquejr 

What is the most promising RPG of 2023? Check out the details to find out what games our editors think are most promising.

Link to article

What is the most promising RPG of 2023? Like every year, you had your say. Check out the details to find out what games our visitors think are most promising.

Link to article

The RPGWatch visitors have cast their votes for the best RPG of 2022. Check out the details to find out what games made it to the top three.

Link to article

Happy New Year!

Let's look back at the numbers of 2022:

We have covered 161 RPG releases - 15 more than last year - the days of playing every released RPG are long gone.

The RPGWatch Curator recommended the following new and old games:

1. Expeditions: Rome
2. Gloomhaven
3. Rise of the Third Power
4. ELEX II
5. Telepath Tactics Liberated
6. Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness
7. Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi
8. Dark Quest 2
9. Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga
10. Vestaria Saga II: The Sacred Sword of Silvanister
11. Planet Stronghold 2
12. Roadwarden
13. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero
14. Lost Eidolons
15. Pentiment

With close to 220000 followers the RPGWatch Curator is the 6th most popular English Steam Curator.

We got two new team members: Taluntain, the new owner, and Pladio who's moderating the forums of the Watch. And some new Watchers as well - Welcome everybody!

Myrthos, Eye, Ripper and Redgyph left the RPGWatch team - thank you for all your help!

125 new RPGs are already expected for 2023 - so this year will be interesting.

20 Watchers donated money for the Watch -  thanks a lot:

• Bateman
• BrianOConnell
• crpgnut
• GraemeL
• Hastar
• Henriquejr
• Hurls
• Luethar
• Moorkh
• Morrandir
• Moriendor
• Philistine
• Pladio
• redman5427
• rgolas
• rjshae
• Rook
• Timeslip
• TomRon
• Wiretripped
• You

Farflame, Lackblogger, Alrik Fassbauer, Couchpotato, Forgottenlor and Pladio wrote some interesting articles in 2022. Thank You - we hope to see some articles from Watchers in 2023 as well.

Like every year you can vote for the RPGWatch Game of the Year 2022 and the Most Promising RPG of 2023:

For both categories you can select the first, second and third place. The famous game -none- can be selected, too.

Vote here!

(until 7. January 2023)

The GotY 2022 voting is coming soon. From all 160 releases in the year 2022 in our database I made a list of 62 contenders by importance and popularity. Please comment in this thread if you miss something or if a game is wrongly on the list.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

The RPGWatch staff wish you all a nice time at the end of 2022. Meet friends and family, stay healthy and play a game or two - maybe offline :)

The biggest present we got already this year: The RPGWatch still lives - with the combined efforts of the old and new owners Myrthos and Taluntain and further staff members we all got a new home at the good old Sorcerer's Place. The migration was fast and smooth - a big Thank You to all involved.

Let's hope for a better 2023 with less wars, diseases and natural disasters.

The RPGWatch is now number 6 of all English Steam Curators:

Top 10 Steam Curators

1. PC Gamer (702.368 followers)
2. Follow Just Good PC Games (604.254 followers)
3. /r/pcmasterrace Group (518.845 followers)
4. Follow Critiquing Doge (402.649 followers)
5. Rock, Paper, Shotgun (306.772 followers)
6. RPGWatch (219.736 followers)
7. Anime 1.0 (219.060 followers)
8. THQ Nordic Official (164.235 followers)
9. Source Engine Games (147.722 followers)
10. Yogscast Games (141.581 followers)

-> The curation list

Update: The maintenance has been completed.

In the very near future, either today (Friday) or tomorrow, we need to do some maintenance on the database to remove all VBulletin stuff. As that is part of the same database RPGWatch is using, there is some risk of things not going as planned. To be able to recover from that unlikely scenario (when do we ever make mistakes :-) we'll make a backup of the database before this action takes place. And to make sure that restoring the database will make things look exactly the same as before we can't have our editors making changes to the database while we are working on it, hence the maintenance mode.
This only effects the news site and not the forums. However, we are also introducing an RPGWatch bot, who takes the place of my user ID in managing the interface between the news site and the forums. For that it also requires a change in the forums database, to make it look like I never did some of the things that are now quite obvious and I can blame the bot when it doesn't work.

As an extra bonus, with this news post I also get to test something else I have changed...

It has taken a while, but here we are. Welcome to our new house.

Also welcome to our new forums. A lot will be new and different, but there will also be things that are the same. As this is also new for us, our forums might need some modifications here and there. Please share your feedback on the forums in the relevant threads in the RPGWatch forum.

Have fun!

The RPGWatch will move to a new server  today around 17:00 hours CET. The move will take more than a day. In the name of the whole team I say

Thank You, Myrthos

for all these years keeping the RPGWatch community alive. The move preperations were planned and executed in record time. Big Thanks to Taluntain, Arhu and Eye and all other admins/testers as well for making the move possible.

We will see us on the new old site!

We are planning to move RPGWatch to the new server this weekend. This means that on Saturday (or Sunday) the site will go into maintenance mode and the transfer will start. The plan is to have the site available on Monday again. An explanation of what is involved with this move can be found in this thread.

I hope you can find something to enjoy yourself with, while we are in maintenance mode.

The 'End is Nigh' announcement for RPGWatch turned out to be somewhat premature. It was the plan when I posted it two weeks ago, but in the meantime I had several discussions with a third party and the RPGWatch team on the future of RPGWatch.

It has been decided that in July, RPGWatch will move to Sorcerer's Place. This means that the site as you know it, will still be available after July, but hosted by Sorcerer's Place and it's owner, Taluntain, will become the new owner of RPGWatch.

Most of the RPGWatch team will remain, but I will no longer be a part of that team and have no involvement in the operational side of RPGWatch. In case you are wondering, there has been no exchange of money to make this happen. This only happens, because I learned how much RPGWatch will be missed and after discussion with the team, this was deemed the most viable option for you to still be able to visit RPGWatch with its current functionality.

There will be some changes, like ads being introduced again to pay for the servers (which you can donate money for to not see them). And there will be a move to Xenforo for our forums. I will work with Taluntain to get this done before the end of July, or shortly after that.
Whatever happens after that to RPGWatch is to be decided by the new owner, together with the RPGWatch team.

This means that for the foreseeable future the RPGWatch team will still be able to provide you with the latest RPG news.
If you have any interest in helping the RPGWatch team in this new chapter, as news poster or moderator, there are opportunities to do so.

I hope this is good news!

For the last few years I've been thinking about what I want to do with RPGWatch. The reason for this is that I have lost all stamina with respect to RPGWatch. I found and find no enjoyment in the things I do here anymore and I find it a chore to continue doing them, so I end up not doing them anymore or only partially.

The interests I have in this phase of my life, simply do not match with what RPGWatch is anymore and I like to do other things that bring me more joy and fulfilment. RPGWatch has changed over the years, but so have I.

As mentioned, this is something I am feeling for quite some time and there isn't a particular reason why I am telling you my decision now and not in a couple of months or a year, besides that I think it is about time to let you know this and not drag this on much longer.

I have decided to stop RPGWatch. The option to fund RPGwatch via Paypal has already stopped and the funding we still have is sufficient to make us go on until the end of July, which would then also be the end date.

I've started with RPGDot in 2000 and created, together with the RPGDot team, RPGWatch in 2006. I have many fond memories of those 22 years. Also a couple of bad ones, but lets not dwell on those. Once RPGWatch is gone, I'm sure there will be days in the future where I will not only miss RPGWatch, but will miss especially the RPGWatch team and the people I like and liked to interact with on our forums.

Eventhough my feelings about RPGWatch are no longer the same, I am proud of everything we did and have accomplished in the past years and I really want to thank all of you for being with us.

I'm sorry for bringing this bad news to you.

Here are the results of the votes for the most anticipated/promising RPG of this year. With some luck they actually get released as well.

The votes have been collected and by applying some magic a winner has risen to the top. Not a surprising one though.
Go here for all the details.

Update: You are no longer able to vote.

The votes for your candidates for the game of the year 2021 and the votes for the games you anticipate most in 2022 can now be casted by going to this link.

As usual you need to be registered and have a minimum post count in order to be able to participate.

Happy New Year!

Let's look back at the numbers of 2021:

We have covered 146 RPG releases - the days of playing every RPG release are long gone.

The RPGWatch Curator recommended the following new games:

1. Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen
2. Geneforge 1 - Mutagen
3. Urtuk: The Desolation
4. Tortured Hearts - Or How I Saved The Universe. Again.
5. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV
6. Solasta: Crown of the Magister
7. Dark Deity
8. Wildermyth
9. Wargroove
10. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
11. Tales of Arise
12. Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG
13. The Chronicles Of Myrtana: Archolos
14. Ruined King: A League of Legends Story
15. ATOM RPG Trudograd

With more than 218000 followers The RPGWatch Curator is the 9th most popular English Steam Curator.

We got two new team members: Redglyph, who is hunting newsbits every day and Ripper, who's moderating the forums of the Watch. And some new Watchers as well - Welcome everybody!

103 new RPGs are already expected for 2022 - so this year will be interesting, too.

20 Watchers donated 814 Euros for the Watch - thanks a lot:

1. Bateman
2. BrianOConnell
3. crpgnut
4. DJ
5. GraemeL
6. Hastar
7. HiddenX
8. Jaw
9. Luethar
10. Moorkh
11. Morrandir
12. Philistine
13. Pladio
14. redman5427
15. rgolas
16. rjshae
17. Rook
18. Timeslip
19. TomRon
20. You

And our editors wrote some interesting articles in 2021.

Update: This giveaway is closed.

Here is our winter key giveaway, with contributions from our members. Obviously for those living in the southern hemisphere this is wrong, as it is summer, but they can still participate.

We have received keys for 64 games and we invite you to leave a comment to show that you are interested in winning one of the keys. In that comment you can also limit your opportunity to win a key, by stating what keys you want to be eligible for to win, or what keys you don't want to win. You limit your opportunity to win because we might be unable to match a key to your preferences. If you are more flexible, you might even win 2 keys. Who knows. We will try to take your preference into account for the first key, but this will become much more difficult for the second key (if you would win a second key that is). Don't bother in supplying an order of preference in that list as it will be ignored completely, simply because it is too much work.

Here are the rules of the giveaway:

• You are registered at RPGWatch before the 7th of December 2021

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate.
  As mentioned, in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is, which might also reduce your chance to win a key. The order of your preferences is not used at all.

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
    OR
  • You have made at least 5 posts in the last 12 months
    OR
  • You have a minimum of 10 posts total
    OR
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way in the last 12 months (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 7th of December 2021, but do not meet the contribution criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The number of days I have not been hit with the Corona virus since my last cold, added with the number of Christmas lights in our house I see with my left eye, divided with the number of Christmas lights I see with my right eye, when I am facing MrsMyrthos on a certain moment of time in the future. Added to that are the amount of hours I want to spent on Christmas dinner, divided by the number of hours I most likely am going to spent on christmas dinner.

Disclaimer: I'm sure this algortihm is clear enough and does not require any further debate. if despite that I still end up with an unexplainable number, I'l just see how many minutes I can throw rocks into our garden, before someone tells me to stop doing that and just use that number.

The possibility to participate in this giveaway ends on Tuesday the 21st of December 2021 (because it is numerically nice to do so), in a time zone where I feel it is a real Tuesday. In case I forget to close the giveaway at that point in time, it is whenever I remember to do so.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

Update: It is Sunday and we have enough keys, so if you still want to donate more keys, keep them for next time.

There was a voice saying it is the time of the year again, so here is the start for the preparation work for our winter key giveaway.

As usual preparation means that you send me the keys you are not using via a PM, so we use them in our giveaway. You have until Sunday to do that (or later when I forget to close this preparation phase).

This also means that only people registered before today can participate in the winter key giveaway, which should start somewhere next week.

The giveaway is closed now.

Like five years ago, I am giving aways some of the physical stuff I still have left from Gamescom visits. It is all related to games, but some of it has been gathering dust for some time and the T-shirts are because of this in need of some washing and ironing. None of it has been used though.

You can find the list of stuff here,

We will be doing a raffle for this and as always raffles come with their own set of rules, which for this one are the following:

• You can participate if you registered before the 25th of October 2021
• You need to reply to this post by stating which items you would like to win in the order of priority (if there is a priority for you). It is also fine to state you are happy with anything
• You can win only one item
• Nobody (except me) is excluded from participating, so even team members and moderators can participate. As long as the above rules are taken into account

As it is a raffle there are also tickets available. As we want to reward those who have been here for a long time and are active a lot, you are awarded a number of tickets based on de following:

• Everyone who registered before the 25th of October gets one ticket
• For every full year you are a member of RPGWatch, you get an additional ticket. This means if you registered in October 2006, you will receive an additional 14 tickets
• For every 1000 posts you will receive an additional ticket.

At the end of this event, all tickets with the name of the ticket owner are thrown in a virtual hat and a ticket is taken from that hat. I then look at the list (if any) the person has posted and take the first item on the list that is still available. If there is no list, I just randomly select something. This could eventually result in drawing a winner who has a list with items that are already given away. That's too bad, but can't be helped. it just means that the rest with less restrictive lists have a better  chance of winning something.

This event will run for one week, so will end somewhere on the 1st of November 2021.

Good luck.

P.S. To scroll through a large version of the images, use this link. Do note that this also has images from the previous giveaway, so look at the date. Only images from October 2021 are related to this giveaway.

The RPGWatch is 15 years old these days! The successor of RPGDot started in October 2006 and here's Myrthos' story of the beginning.

In the comments please tell us:

• Why do you visit the Watch?
• What is your favourite thread?
• Who do you miss?
• What's your favourite RPG?
• ...

Myrthos: Here is some of my history with RPGDot and the start of RPGWatch.

Next to running RPGDot, Rendelius was also running a hosting service on BlinkingDot, where people could get their site hosted for free, by placing some ads on their site. At the time I was operating The Locus Inn, which was focusing on Infinity Engine games (some more and some less in detail). This was the year 2000.

I'm not sure when exactly, but at some point in 2000, Rendelius was looking for people to post news for RPGDot and I applied for that position, finding myself posting news after that. I don't even recall what we used for that, but it wasn't that great, so in 2001, a guy named Stijn, Garrett and me worked on creating a new design from scratch creating our own CMS. This first version was written in PHP, but had the layout embedded in the PHP files. This actually meant that we only had one design and it would be really problematic to make design changes to it, but it was working.

The year after that I redesigned the whole thing and separated the controller part from the view part. This allowed us to create different skins, which we used a lot for the hosted sites we had, of which there were plenty. Any game of some substance had its own hosted site at RPGDot. The best known ones were the Gothic and Arx Fatalis sites. Next to that we also had a site dedicated to adventures and a site dedicated to MMORPGs. Most of these sites also had at least one person posting news and articles for that site, but news posted on RPGDot would also be automatically visible on hosted sites when it was applicable for them. So some sites only functioned as a filter of news and articles, similar to our current indie site. In any case this kept us going until 2006.

The RPGDot forums were a place that was reasonably well visited and at some time we decided that it would be a good idea to create user groups and provide those groups a space on the forums that was only visible to the members of that group. Several groups were founded, with the biggest group being the Non-flamer's Guild. These groups were one of the two main reasons that the RPGDot forums became a somewhat desolated place. What happened was that people spent more time in their dedicated group forums than they did in the rest of the forum. Some people only spent time in their group forum. This drove the number of public visible posts down.

The second reason was the moderation policy. We had quite a strict policy, even more strict than what we have now, which resulted in bans, warnings and other moderation actions that drove the number of public posts even further down. The end result was that it didn't take too long to check out the new (public available) posts for a day.

Rendelius paid the server fees and tried to earn some money by selling adverts. I don't know how well that worked, but at some point in time Jolt came into the picture. They were most interested in the MMO side of the RPGDot sites as that fitted in their business model. I don't know how much money Rendelius made of selling it to Jolt, I hope for him it was plenty, but somewhere in the first half of 2005 a deal was made. I think his biggest motivation in selling the site was that he wanted to pursue other things than running an RPG site and Jolt was willing to pay him for doing that.

Jolt wanted to make some real money of the sites and a few months later the design had changed in such a way that there were several ads on each page, but especially on the front pages of RPGDot and all the hosted sites. It slowed things down, but it also became annoying to navigate and work with, in my opinion.

So somewhere in the first half of 2006, I decided that it was time to move on and start a new site. I asked around in the team and everybody in the team wanted to move with me to that new site.

Even though the source code and designs of RPGDot were not part of the deal that was struck with Rendelius and Jolt, I decided to start from scratch again to create a new site from the ground up. Arhu took up the responsibility of designing the lay-out of the site and together we created what you see now. I don't exactly recall how we got to the name RPGWatch, but I think it was a combination of interesting names and available domain names.

Arhu and I worked on the site throughout the summer until we reached a point where we felt that we could go public in the near future. At that point I informed Jolt about the decision that I would leave RPGDot and move to a new site and that it looked like all team members would move as well. As we were all volunteers, there was not much they could do about that, but they did ask me to make sure news posts were added to RPGDot until they gathered a new team. So I implemented a way to transfer the RPGWatch news postings to RPGDot and make them visible there as well.

On the 17th of October we launched the new site, starting with a first news posting by Dhruin. In the meantime I already filled the site with the news posts of the previous months that were until that time only visible on RPGDot.

I don't recall that there was a filter implemented on the RPGDot forums that prevented to use the word RPGWatch, but we felt it was not in the interest of RPGDot to publicly advocate there was a new site named RPGWatch, where almost the whole team moved to.

Some time after that there were two new persons working on RPGDot and I severed the last tie, which was the news syndication from RPGWatch to RPGDot. After that Jolt found out, that it is really hard to find a dedicated team that would be willing to post news on a regular basis. I belief they also had issues in keeping volunteers working for RPGDot. The place never recovered from us leaving, which in the meantime also included many of the active forum forum members.

And 10 years later we are here. We are probably in need of a new design, but neither Arhu, nor I have time available to accomplish this anytime soon, so you still have to look at this design for a while.

[...]

Update: The giveaway is closed now.

Back again with our summer key giveaway, with contributions from our members. If for whatever reason, you are living on the Southern Hemisphere, just menatally replace the word summer with winter.

We have received 51 keys and we invite you to leave a comment to show that you are interested in winning one of the keys. In that comment you can also limit your opportunity to win a key, by stating what keys you want to be eligible for to win, or what keys you don't want to win. You limit your opportunity to win because we might be unable to match a key to your preferences. If you are more flexible, you might even win 2 keys. Who knows. We will try to take your preference into account for the first key, but this will become much more difficult for the second key (if you would win a second key that is). Don't bother in supplying an order of preference in that list as it will be ignored completely, simply because it is too much work.

Here are the rules of the giveaway:

• You are registered at RPGWatch before the 10th of June 2021

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate.
  As mentioned, in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is, which might also reduce your chance to win a key. The order of your preferences is not used at all.

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
    OR
  • You have made at least 5 posts in the last 12 months
    OR
  • You have a minimum of 10 posts total
    OR
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way in the last 12 months (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 10th of June 2021, but do not meet the contribution criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The amount of days I feel it is too bloody hot to actually work from home, added with the amount of ice creams I can't resist eating (note that the amount of ice creams I did resit eating, but ended up eating anyway are not taken into account), divided by the number of bugs I find in the RPGWatch source code (in the unlikely event the amount of bugs is zero, I probably did not look good enough and just use a number that looks to be OK).

Disclaimer: I'm sure this algortihm is clear enough and does not require any further debate. if despite that I still end up with an unexplainable number, I'l just grab one of the dices from the 'bag-of-dices' and role a number.

The possibility to participate in this giveaway ends after Tuesday the 22nd of June 2021, in a time zone I am happy with. In case I forget to close the giveaway at that point in time, it is whenever I remember to do so.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

Update: The preparation is over, no more keys are needed.

It is that time of the year again to get rid of some of your keys that you have not used yet, so you can share them with your fellow members at RPGWatch. For this Summer 2021 giveaway (read Winter 2021 giveaway, when you are on the Southern hemisphere) you can send me a PM, as usual. The information I need from those sending in the keys is the following:

• Title of the game
• The actual key, if you want RPGWatch to send the keys to the winners. Otherwise you will send the key to the winner and we don't need to know the key
• What platform the key is from (Steam, GOG, etc.)
• If you want the key returned when there is no winner for it. If not, RPGWatch will publish any remaining key on the forums in a thread only visible for registered members with at least 7 posts, after the giveaway.

We’ll stop accepting keys after Monday the 14th of June.

As usual, the actual key giveaway that follows is closed for everyone who registered after or on this day, the 10th of June 2021.

Next to the Best RPG of 2020, you also had the opportunity to vote for the most anticipated RPG of 2021, which as every year looks more promising than previous years. Check it out here.

The RPGWatch visitors have cast their votes for the best RPG of 2020. So check out this article to see how you ranked the releases in 2020.

Update: It is no longer possible to vote.

Here is your oppotunity to vote for the game of the year in 2020 and the most anticpiated game of 2021. As usual you can vote for first, second and third place. The voting will last until next week Monday the 25th of January.
At that time I collect the results, do some stuff with them, even I don't understand and then somehow I end up with some winners that look reasonable.

This is our Game of the Year contest for 2020. In this contest we ask you to vote for the RPGs you felt were the best in 2020(we ask you for the best, runner up and third best RPG).

In addition we also would like to know which three RPGs you are looking forward to most in 2021.

Note that these lists are based on games that in one way or the other got covered at RPGWatch. The resulting list is derived from a much longer list, which has been reduced in length somewhat in cooperation with our forum members. In addition we have removed the games that are add-ons or DLCs as much as possible. You might feel that some games should not be on these lists for some reason. If you feel heart-broken over our decisions, don't vote for those games or don't vote at all and discuss it on our forums if you like. More information on how we got to this shorter list can be found here and here.

In total our GOTY consists of making 6 choices. If you feel you do not have anything to select you can select no game. Note that if you select the same game multiple times, your entire vote will be invalidated.

As always, voting is restricted to registered users only and those with at least 10 posts.

Somewhere on this rotating infected ball we are on, it is already New Year when I type this. As one never knows where our visitors are from, let me wish you a great New Year and let’s hope that somewhere in that year we can hug people again.

So, I wish you lots of virus free hugs and kisses in 2021.

if it is still 2020 for you, just remember this for when it is tomorrow :)

Update: This giveaway is now closed.

Here we are again for our winter key giveaway, contributed by a number of our members.

We have received 118 keys and we invite you to leave a comment to show that you are interested in winning one of the keys. In that comment you can also limit your opportunity to win a key, by stating what keys you want to be eligible for to win, or what keys you don't want to win. You limit your opportunity to win because we might be unable to match a key to your preferences. Given the amount of keys we have you might win two keys. We will try to take your preference into account for the first key, but this will become much more difficult for the second key (if you would win a second key that is). Don't bother in supplying an order of preference in that list as it will be ignored completely, simply because it is too much work.

Here are the rules of the giveaway:

• You are registered at RPGWatch before the 9th of December 2020

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate.
  As mentioned, in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is, which might also reduce your chance to win a key. The order of your preferences is not used at all.

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
    OR
  • You have made at least 5 posts in the last 12 months
    OR
  • You have a minimum of 10 posts total
    OR
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way in the last 12 months (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 9th of December 2020, but do not meet the contribution criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The amount of sunny days I notice when I look out of the window, added with the amount of days left until my vacation, divided by the amount of stuff I eat that isn't too healthy, multiplied with the actually interesting episodes of whatever Netflix show I am watching at the moment.

Disclaimer: Although this is a very clear algorithm, any potential pitfalls in this algorithm are not up for debate. If for some reason it comes to a very weird number, I'll just make something up.

The possibility to participate in this giveaway ends after Sunday the 20th of December 2020. In case I forget to close the giveaway at that point in time, it is whenever I remember to do so.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

Update: We have enough keys, so you can keep any you wanted to donate for the next iteration.

I’ve been reminded it is that time of the year again. So if anyone has any keys they would like other Watchers to have, send them to me by PM and I will add them to the list for the winter key giveaway.

I’ll stop accepting keys after Monday the 14th of December.

As usual, the actual key giveaway that follows is closed for everyone who registered after or on this day.

The move has been completed... I think.
As I also moved the domain, it was more work than usually and despite that everything had been tested on a duplicate site of RPGWatch on this server, there still were a few small things left to fix apparently.

Anyway, here we are. It is quite possible that something else was missed in the testing process, so if you find that something is not working anymore, don't hesitate to let us know on the forums.

On one of the coming days we will be moving to a new server, which is something that happens every two years.
In the past months quite some time was spent on stuff that is completely invisible for any of you. At least it should be invisible for the most part, like adding extra security measures, improving the performance, updating 3rd party software components, but also preparing to be able to move to new forum software, which is something we are planning to do somewhere in the future.

One thing that has been done is limiting the number of ciphers that are supported, which is a security measure. These ciphers are uses as a handshake between the browser and the server. The result is that only newer browsers will be supported, which is also required as some security measures depend on the browser being used. For most of you that will not be an issue, but if you like to use something like Internet Explorer then I'm afraid it really is about time to leave that behind you.

The move itself will probably take more time than it usually takes, as we are also moving the domain to a different host, which  provides DNSSEC support (another security measure). This means that the move can take anything from a few hours to a day.

You will notice that the move has begun because you either see a maintenance message, or the site is inaccesible for a longer period of time. You will notice that the move has been completed, because there will be a news post shown that  it has been completed. With some luck the move goes fast enough for you, to not notice it has happened.
You can also watch our RPGWatch Twitter channel, where we will tweet when the move has started and when it has ended.

I'm not sure yet on what day the move will start, because there is still one open end (that I know of now), but it should be somewhere in the next 5 days.

Update: This key giveaway is closed.

To continue the tradition: here is the summer key giveaway of 2020.

We have received 140 keys and we invite you to leave a comment to show that you are interested in winning one of the keys. In that comment you can also limit your opportunity to win a key, by stating what keys you want to be eligible for to win, or what keys you don't want to win. You limit your opportunity to win because we might be unable to match a key to your preferences. Given the amount of keys we have you might win two keys. We will try to take your preference into account for the first key, but this will become much more difficult for the second key (if you would win a second key that is).

Here are the rules of the giveaway:

• You are registered at RPGWatch before the 14th of June 2020

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate.
  As mentioned, in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is, which might also reduce your chance to win a key.

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
    OR
  • You have made at least 5 posts in the last 12 months
    OR
  • You have a minimum of 10 posts total
    OR
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way in the last 12 months (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 14th of June 2020, but do not meet the contribution criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The amount of distress I get from working in the %*&$@^* garden over the last two weeks, minus the amount of Teams calls I have this week, multiplied with the times I manage to make a capuchino at home this week that is really good, divided by the number of chocolate bars I will consume this week.

Disclaimer: Although this is a very clear algorithm, any potential pitfalls in this algorithm are not up for debate. If for some reason it comes to a very weird number, I'll just throw a dice or two.

The possibility to participate in this giveaway ends after Sunday the 21st of June 2020. In case I forget to close the giveaway at that point in time, it is whenever I remember to do so.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

The RPGWatch Steam Curator is still doing well. With more than 213000 followers we are now on spot #8 world-wide. Thanks go to all Watchers and RPG enthusiasts who joined the Curator and/or the RPGWatch Steam Group.

The discussons on newsbits, articles, posts and reviews on this site give me often a good idea what games should be tested for the curator list. So continue to discuss RPGs!

The window of oppurtunity to send keys to us has been closed.

We are hosting another key giveaway. We have collected a few ourselves, but if you happen to have any unused keys lying around and don't mind contributing, send me a message, so I can add them to the giveaway. Please do so before the 14th of June.

The key giveaway event is probably going to run in a week or so from now and the winners should receive their keys the week after.

This message also means that anyone who is not registered at RPGWatch before today the 7th of June, will not be able to participate in the giveaway.

The votes are in and after doing some magic (which might or might not include rolling a dice), lackblogger has come up with a list of 50 games, with a clear winner.

So check out the list of games that made it into the top 50 of our Game of the Decade 2010-2019.

Update: You can no longer vote for this.

Now that we have closed our Game of the Year awards, it is time for the very first Game of the Decade and obviously we mean RPGish Game of the Decade. Our very own lackblogger has volunteered to do all the heavy lifting and process all your votes into a list that shows what the role playing game of the decade is.

Here is what each voter has to do:

Imagine your own personal Games of the Decade list and PM it to lackblogger. There are no rules regarding form or content, lackblogger will sort it all out in the wash.

What he wants is for everyone to just PM him their list of personal nominations.

you can vote for just one game. you can vote for 809 games, it makes no difference to him.

You can say in the PM how you want the weighting for each game you list. you can do a personal top 10, a personal top 100, or say you want every game on your list to be equally weighted, or you can provide tiers, you can provide the info in any way that you like, lackblogger will sort it all out so it all still works.

This main thread for the vote is an official RPGWatch vote thread but this thread will only be used for people to ask questions and advertise what they voted for, only PM'ed votes will count.

Questions about the poll should not be PM'ed to lackblogger, that's what the thread will be for. Questions sent as PMs will not be answered. If someone gets all spammy you'll be warned that you will be reported… and then be reported if you continue to spam him.

People will be allowed to change their vote right up until the last minute.

Voters will have to be prepared to get PMs back if thre are questions about their specific selections, such as vagaries, typos, versions, etc.

The list of 809 games from the RPGWatch database can be found here, for people to use as a guide to jog their memories if needed, but it wont link to any voting forms or anything.

The list of games is just a dump from the RPGWatch database and there are situations which might be confusing, for example, Divinity 2 was released in 2009, so can't be voted for, yet Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance and Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga were released in 2010. If you vote for one, do you also vote for the other, or arre you secretly voting for Divinity 2 or not? We have set no rules for anything that could be confusing, like this. Just send your votes and explain what you meant with your votes to lackblogger and it is up to him to sort it all out.

Voting will close on 28th February 2020 at midnight in Tonga.

I assume that given the fact that lackblogger needs to be PMed that it is clear you need to be a registered member of RPGWatch.

Once the voting has been closed, expect lackblogger to come up with a complex algorithm that includes all the possible variables, which will result in a list that we will then name the official RPGWatch Game of the Decade list.

Happy voting!

What is the most promising RPG of 2020? Like every year, you had your say. Check out the details to find out what games our visitors and editors think are most promising.

The votes are counted, so head over to the results of the Game of the Year awards of 2019 for best RPG.

Update: You can no longer vote for the GOTY 2019.

Here is your chance to vote in our yearly Game of the Year Awards for the best RPG in 2019 and most anticipated game in 2020. You can vote for the best, runner up and third best (or most anticipated) game. In total our GOTY consists of making 6 choices. If you feel you do not have anything to select you can select no game. If you select the same game multiple times, your entire vote will be invalidated.

The lists are based on games that in one way or the other got covered at RPGWatch. The resulting list for the Game of the Year 2019 is derived from a much longer list, which has been reduced in length in cooperation with our forum members. You might feel that some games should (not) be on these lists for some reason. If you feel heart-broken over our decisions, don't vote for those games or don't vote at all and discuss it on our forums if you like. More information on how we got to these shorter lists can be found here and here.

Note that voting is restricted to registered users only and those with at least 10 posts.

Two new threads have been opened where you can discuss how to shortlist the final lists that will be used in the GOTY voting for Best RPG of 2019 and Most Anticipated RPG for this year , which you can find here:

Shortlisting the GOTY 2019 - Released

Shortlisting the GOTY 2019 - Most Anticipated

Although it is a bit early for most of us, in some parts of the world the new year has already started. So, on behalf of the RPGWatch team I want to wish you a very great new year. If you have any hopes for the new year, I hope they come true for you (assuming your hopes are not illegal). I am looking forward to seeing you all again in the new decade to learn and discuss about RPGs and all the other stuff that can be found on our forums.

Update: The giveaway is closed.

To continue the tradition: here is the winter key giveaway of 2019.

We have received numerous keys and we invite you to leave a comment to show that you are interested in winning one of the keys. In that comment you can also limit your opportunity to win a key, by stating what keys you want to be eligible for to win, or what keys you don't want to win. You limit your opportunity to win because we might be unable to match a key to your preferences.

Here are the rules of the giveaway:

• You are registered at RPGWatch before the 28th of November 2019

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate.
  As mentioned, in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is, which might reduce your chance to win a key.

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
    OR
  • You have made at least 5 posts this year
    OR
  • You have a minimum of 10 posts total
    OR
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way in the last 12 months (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 28th of November 2019, but do not meet the contribution criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The number of years RPGWatch exists, incremented with the number of years RPGDot has existed, subtracted with the number of chocolates my daughter has given me for my birthday, multiplied with the number of chocolate bars I probably will eat until 2020 and that divided or multiplied by 2 depending on the mood I am in when I start assigning keys.

Disclaimer: Any negative reactions to this obviously clear method of determining the minimum post count, will be ignored.

The possibility to participate in this giveaway ends after the 13th of December. In case I forget to close the giveaway at that point in time, it is whenever I remember to do so.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

It is that time of the year again where we are hosting another key giveaway. We have collected a few ourselves, but if you happen to have any unused keys lying around and don't mind contributing, send me a message, so I can add them to the giveaway. Please do so before the 5th of December.

The idea is to have everything wrapped up before Christmas. The key giveaway event is probably going to run in the week of the 9th of December and the winners should receive their keys the week after.

This message also means that anyone who is not registered at RPGWatch before today the 28th of November, will not be able to participate in the giveaway.

We are running RPGWatch without ads for some time now and even when we did have ads they only covered a small part of the total cost, because we had chosen to make sure the ads are not very obtrusive and are only about games. For the most part we have been running on donations from our visitors.
The advantage of doing this is that there are none or only a few game related ads. The disadvantage is that we are fully dependent on donations.

The current situation is that we are not really close to have the operational cost of this year covered by donations. I am looking into lowering that cost for next year, but that isn't going to help for this year.

This is why I am making this post to ask our RPGWatch members and other visitors if they are able to make a donation, which allows us to get closer to covering our operational cost for this year.
Any amount of money that you can spare for RPGWatch will help in reaching that goal. When we receive more donations than needed for this year, they will be used to cover the operational cost of next year.

At the moment we are only supporting PayPal donations. If you would like to donate in another way, contact me via a PM or via the 'Contact Us' option in the 'Contact' menu, near the top of the page. If you would like to make a recurring payment then this can be done using PayPal.

Thanks for being with us!

This year we are going to be at Gamescom again and at the moment the following games are on the schedule:

• Children of Morta
• Conglomerate 451
• Dark Envoy
• The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics
• Dolmen
• Gamedec
• Legend of Keepers
• Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory
• Starpoint Gemini
• Stygian
• Unannounced RPG (1C)
• The Waylanders

That is definitely a list with some non-high profile indie games there :)

What I have requests for, but still no responses up to now are:

• Bloodlines 2
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Greedfall
• Wasteland 3

Some of the publishers for these I have contacted in various ways and still have no response, so I doubt they will all materialize (if any). Either the mails are going into their spam folder, are rejected by their server, sent to the wronf recipient or is just ignored.

Larian has no presence on Gamescom. Swen isn't going, some others are, perhaps I can talk to someone else about BG3, but I have no response about that either.

Update: I just remembered to close it, so the giveaway has ended

It is that time of year again where we are giving away some keys again. We have a whole bunch of keys, so most of you shoul dbe able to get one.

To be able to participate, the following rules are applicable:

• You were a registered member of RPGWatch before the 6th of June 2019

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate
  Note that in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is. You should be aware though that giving a preference might reduce your chance to win a game and does not guarantee that your preference is met.

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
  • You have made at least 5 posts this year
    OR
    You have a minimum of 10 posts total
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way in the last 12 months (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 6th of June, but do not meet the third criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The total number of degrees Celcius that is indicated at whatever I am looking at. Divided by the amount of sleep (in hours) I did not have the night before, because it was too hot, subtracted with the number of ice creams I ate in the last 7 days and that subtracted with the total amount of goals that were scored in the Women's soccer world championship finale (or when that did not take place yet, a random number that happens to float in my brain at the time).

That is transparent enough to settle any dispute about this.

We have 86 keys this time. They should all work, but there are no guarantees.

The possibility to participate in this giveaway ends after the 1st of July. In case I forget to close the giveaway at that point in time, it is whenever I remember to do so.

If you are registered on or after the 6th of June 2019, you will not win a key, so don't bother to participate.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

Forgottenlor uses his experience in playing blobbers through the years, to bring you an overview of the blobbers from the past and the ones that could be worth your time.

Way back at the end of the 1980s I discovered three games which turned me into a hardcore computer RPG fan. Those games were Bard's Tale 3, Wizardry 6, and Might and Magic. All three of the games are now defined as blobbers. Blobbers are games with first person gameplay, and usually a party of adventurers. Most of these games are classical dungeon crawlers, though Might and Magic and its successors always featured a huge outdoor world to explore. Dungeon Master was the first action Blobber, and it also inspired game series like Land of Lore and Eye of the Beholder. But these action games were never really my great love, like classical turn based blobbers were. Of course, we didn't call them blobbers, since most RPGs back then were blobbers (the Ultima series was a huge exception). With the success of Baldur's Gate and Morrowind, blobbers began to die out. Wizardry 8 was released in 2001 and Might and Magic 9 in 2002, and both of those releases marked the demise of their respective studios. For me that was a dark time in cRPG gaming, and even though I enjoyed many of the new, more action oriented RPGs, with their beautiful graphics and excellent stories, I missed the depth of character creation and tactical combat of early cRPGs. With the rise of Kickstarter and Steam, cRPGs have experienced a rebirth on the pc, with a massive number of indie RPGs, mid-sized studio RPGs, and Japanese console ports. Also, the traditional blobber, much to my joy, has returned and I have greedily bought up almost every turn based, hybrid, and RTWP blobber offered on the market. I tend to play six games in parallel, and one of them is almost always a blobber. With this article I wanted to share my love of blobbers with you and give you an overview of where you can begin or how you can expand your collection of blobbers, should you be so inclined.

It is that time in the year again where I'm starting to think about another key giveaway. So, if anyone has any unused keys left, please send them in, by PM or mail, before Saturday the 22th of June 2019. We still have a few keys left from last time and we have received some new ones as well, so we probably end up with too many keys again, but at least there is a choice to be made :)

For the actual giveaway, only registered members with a registration date earlier than the 6th of June 2019 (the day of this posting) can participate, but the usual additional restrictions will also be applicable.

You have read what the best RPGs of 2018 were and here is the list of games our members think offer the most promise in 2019 (assuming they are released this year).

Here they are, the results of the voting for the best RPG in 2018. Check out the details to find out which games made it to the top three.

Update: It is no longer possible to vote for the Game of the Year Awards of 2018.

Here is your chance to vote in our yearly Game of the Year Awards for the best RPG in 2018 and most anticipated game in 2019. You can vote for the best, runner up and third best (or most anticipated) game. In total our GOTY consists of making 6 choices. If you feel you do not have anything to select you can either select no game or enter a game (only for most anticipated), which is not on the list by selecting other. If you select the same game multiple times, your entire vote will be invalidated.

The lists are based on games that in one way or the other got covered at RPGWatch. The resulting list for the Game of the Year 2018 is derived from a much longer list, which has been reduced in length in cooperation with our forum members. You might feel that some games should not be on these lists for some reason. If you feel heart-broken over our decisions, don't vote for those games or don't vote at all and discuss it on our forums if you like. More information on how we got to this shorter list can be found here.

Note that voting is restricted to registered users only and those with at least 10 posts.

We here at RPGWatch are amazed by the sheer number of rpgs that have been released the last few years. When I first visited RPGWatch in 2013, the Game of Year list was much smaller and I at least recognized most of the titles, even if I hadn't played them. Now the situation is so that even all together our staff does not have time to check out all of the games released, even the ones with positive or very positive feedback.

For this reason we have decided to try out an Indie Showcase. The purpose of the Indie Showcase is to give members of the community the chance to nominate an indie game which they like, but which has slipped (mostly) under our radar for our new Indie Showcase. We'd invite the developers to fill out a short interview, and send us some screenshots.

Here's how it will work:

Any forum member with 10 or more posts, who is not the game's developer can nominate a game for the Indie Showcase. When nominating a game, please tell us where you purchased it, and what you like about the game. We will decide which game to choose and whether to contact the developer based on the following criteria:

*The game must be finished and available for purchase. This is not a forum for games in development, crowdfunding games, or early access games.

*The game should be easy to find and purchase. Games on a major platform like Steam or Gog will be given preference.

*Games which have recieved customer feedback and positive customer feedback are preferable to games with mixed feedback, which are preferable to games which have yet to recieve any kind of feedback.

*Rpgs are preferrable to games with rpg elements, but are not classical rpgs.

If a game meets the criteria we will try to contact the developer. And send them an interview. The following is what we've come up with. If anyone has ideas how to improve it, feel free to send us ideas. The only thing is we want to keep the interview to a managable size.

Tell us a little about your background and experience?

How long did it take you to develop your game?

What games inspired your game?

What's the target audience for your game?

How would you describe your game to an interested player?

In a huge rpg market, why should players give your game a chance?

You're game has gotten some positive feedback. Is there any player comments you found especially noteworthy?

Do you have future plans to support your game? If not do you have plans for another project?

So if anyone is interested in nominating a game, the Indie Forum is now open!

We need some help in shortlisting the RPGWatch Game of the Year contenders. I extracted the information from our database and put it here as is, unfiltered. There are far too many games in the list in my opinion, so I would like to shortlist this into something that can be managed better. The question for you is, which games should be in and which games should be removed.

So, I don't want to know what game released in 2018, you think is the best, but what games should be in the list (or should be removed).

The most anticipated list is as accurate as a drunken leprechaun throwing darts, so for that list I would like to not only know if games should be removed, but also what games should be added.

The lists can be found in the first comment to this post.

At this point in time the new year is already 3 hours old in Samoa and In Sydney they are shooting fireworks up in the sky. So for some it is already late and for most it is a bit early, but on behalf of the RPGWatch team I want to wish you a very happy, healthy and awesome New Year.

Thanks for being with us in 2018 and I hope you will remain to be with us in 2019 as well. 

After the giveaway we just had and the giveaways in the past, there still are some keys left. I don't want to take them to the next giveaway, so the keys from RPGWatch and from those who are OK with this, will be published at irregular intervals in the comments thread, until there are none left.

We will publish the key code itself in the comments thread, so this means the first to enter it on Steam (I think they are all Steam keys) will be the lucky winner.

Have fun and have a very good Christmas (perhaps you even get to play a game).

Update: This giveaway has ended.

We are giving away some keys again and if all goes well you should have the key just before Christmas. We have a whole bunch of keys, of which one , or maybe two could be yours.

To be able to participate, the following rules are applicable:

• You were a registered member of RPGWatch before the 15th of December 2018

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate
  Note that in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is. You should be aware though that giving a preference might reduce your chance to win a game

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
  • You have made at least 5 posts this year
    OR
    You have a minimum of 10 posts total
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 15th of December, but do not meet the third criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The total number of posts of the left wing members of our forum, divided by the total number posts of the right wing members, subtracted by the total number of posts of those who don't like to be on a wing, incremented by the total number of chocolates that are still in the house when I get around to determining who is eligible.

That is transparent enough to settle any dispute about this.

We have over 100 keys this time (we had some left from our last giveaway). If there are less potential winners than number of keys, I will hand out the remaining keys randomly amongst those who already won one.

The possibility to particpate in this giveaway ends on Friday the 21st of December at 23:59 (CET), which is 6PM on the east coast of the USA (you will have to do the math for the rest of the time zones yourself). In case I forget to close the giveaway at that point in time, it is somewhere Saturday when I remember to do it and find time to actually do it.

Oh, and if you are registered on or after the 15th of December 2018, you will not win a key.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

It is time for another key giveaway. I want the giveaway to be over and done with before Christmas, so If anyone has any unused keys left, please send them in, by PM or mail, before Saturday the 15th of December. We still have a few keys left from last time and we have received some new ones as well, so we have already quite a number of them, but more keys won’t hurt.

For the actual giveaway, only registered members with a registration date earlier than the 10th of December can participate, but the usual additional restrictions will also be applicable.

The RPGWatch Steam Curator is still popular - we have reached the 200,000 follower barrier and are on the #9 spot.

A big Thank You for all who joined us!

Update: The move has been completed and it looks like it is working.

Today, we will move to a new server. At a certain point in time today, you will see a maintenance message, which means the movers are doing their work.

Two things can happen after that:

1. We'll meet again at the other server. Eveyrthing is fine (or fine enough to make the move work)
2. Something has gone wrong and we'll meet again on this server and the move is postponed

As I have been fiddling with this for a few weeks now, I'm going for option 1. However as there are some changes under the hood, I have been unable to test all of that with a larg amount of visitors, so we'll have to see.

Let's be optimistic and see you on the other side...

Update: The giveaway is now closed.

We are giving away some keys again in this period of time, which is either still spring or summer, depending on what you use as a reference. But regardless of that, we have a whole bunch of keys, of which one could be yours.

To be able to participate, the following rules are applicable:

• You were a registered member of RPGWatch before the 28th of May 2018

AND

• You clearly state in a reply to this news topic that you want to participate
  Note that in your reply you can indicate what your preference of games to win is. You should be aware though that giving a preference might reduce your chance to win a game

AND

• You have contributed to RPGWatch in one or more of the following ways:
  • You donated one or more keys to this giveaway
  • You have made at least 5 posts this year (which averages to 1 post a month)
    OR
    You have a minimum of 10 posts total
  • You donated to RPGWatch in some other way (I'm sure you'll let us know how, if it isn't clear to us)

For all those who did register before the 28th of May, but do not meet one of the third criteria, do let us know why you consider yourself to be eligible to participate. Either that or I use the following formula for the post count:

The number of posts of JDR13 divided by the cost of one of the electronic devices I purchased in the last 12 month, subtracted by the average cost of the first 12 products I randomly pick at some grocery store this week.

That is clear enough to settle all dispute about this, I think......

Oh, and if you are registered on or after the 28th of May 2018, you will not win a key.

Check out the first reply to this news topic, for the total list of keys.

It looks like a nice time in the year to start another key giveaway.

RPGWatch has received a bunch of keys from publishers and game devs and there have also been submissions from our visitors who are not using their keys. If you have some unused keys left (meaning they are not registered at Steam or GOG yet) and would like to contribute them to this giveaway, please send me a PM with the name of the game(s) you have an unused key for. You can also send me the keys, in which case I will take care of the distribution, otherwise you can take care of that yourself.

As usual participation in the giveaway, which remains to be scheduled, is limited to registered users only and in this case to all registered users who registered before today: the 28th of May, 2018.

Following the results of the Best RPG of 2017 we now bring you the games our voters and editors feel are the most promising, and we probably look forward to most, in 2018. Check it out here.

We took our sweet time to get the results of your votes to you, so without further delay check out the results and see what game our visitors and our editors think is the Best RPG in 2017.

Update: it is no longer possible to vote.

Until Monday the 22nd of January, you can vote for the 3 best RPGs that were released in 2017 and the three games you really would like to play and are scheduled to be released in 2018.

Note that the games listed in the Best RPG section, is a subset of all RPG and RPGish games that have been released last year. Together with some of our forum members we reduced the size of the total list. However, if you want to vote for a game that is not on the list of best RPG or most anticipated, you have the option to manually add that game.

As usual, the voting is limited to registered users with at least 10 posts.

You can vote right here.

A happy New Year to all our readers from the RPGWatch team. May you have loads of enjoyable moments :)

Like every year we will have in January 2018 a Game of the Year vote again. Also like every year, we ask you to help us with the lists. Although in previous years we did this in the General RPG section of the forum and that was apparently not seen by many of you. So, I now am doing it in this way.

We give you the unfiltered list of games that have been released in 2017 and the unfiltered list of games that are labeled to be released in 2018. Where unfiltered means straight from our database.

The list of released games in 2017 should be fairly accurate. The list for 2018 is as accurate as the average drunken dwarf throwing darts at a dart board.

So give us your feedback on games that should and should not be in these lists by replying in the comments section, where the first comment also provides both lists.

This giveaway is closed.

Here is our RPGWatch winter key giveaway. Until the 22nd of December you can respond to this post and have a chance to win one of the many games for which we have keys. Keys that we have received from our RPGWatch members and keys that were sent by publishers/developers to RPGWatch, but are not used and even keys that are provided to us by developers explicitely for this giveaway.

You can provide us in your comment to this post, with a list of games you are, or are not interested in, but be aware that the more restrictive your list is, the lower your chance to win one of the games is.

If all goes well, I can sent out the keys, just before Christmas.

And if you haven't registered on our RPGWatch forums before the 22nd of November, you have no chance to win a key.

Check out the first comment for an overview of the games we have keys for in this giveaway.

Winter is coming and just in case there is a chance you will be bored during that time we will organize a game key giveaway again somewhere in the next weeks in which you could win a key and have something to play. Although it also just might increase your backlog :)

RPGWatch has received some 30+ keys from publishers and game devs and there are still some keys from late submissions to our summer key giveaway. So we already have a bunch of keys, but for those amongst you who also have some unused keys left (meaning they are not registered at Steam or GOG yet) and would like to contribute them to this giveaway, please send me a PM with the name of the game(s) you have an unused key for. You can also send me the keys, in which case I will take care of the distribution, otherwise you can take care of that yourself.

As usual participation in the giveaway, which remains to be scheduled, is limited to registered users only and in this case to all registered users who registered before today, the 22nd of November 2017.

In our latest poll we are wondering if  you feel we should be getting a new design or not. The current one has been around for 11 years now, so perhaps it is time to do something about that.... or not.

As usual we might do something with the results of the poll

In my function as a Game Curator I made use of a new Steam feature and created a list of our recommended Dungeons Crawlers. More lists will follow...

As you might have noticed we are running only one advertising banner and that is for Good Old Games. We are doing that as it is the only organization we use to get some revenues from whenever people buy a game from them.

The TL/DR of it is: If you want to buy a game on Good Old Games, click on one of our GOG banners and navigate on GOG to the game(s) you want to buy, which will give us a percentage of the sales made.

The details of it are:

1. If you register through RPGWatch, by clicking on the banner to go to Good old Game, or by clicking a GOG link in a news posting that ends with a long series of numbers and letters, just like this one, and you make a new account on Good Old Games, any game you buy for the next 12 months after creating your account will give us a revenue of 8% (minus taxes) of that sale. You won't have to go through any link on RPGWatch to make sure we get that revenue, it is automatically handled during these 12 months.
2. After the 12 months, we do not get any revenue anymore from a game you buy at Good Old Games, unless you go to Good Old Games by clicking on a banner, or a link that looks like the one above. In that case any game you buy during that session will give us a revenue of 4% (minus taxes).
   Clicking on a banner will lead you to the game belongig to that banner on Good Old Games, but that is not relevant. At the moment you enter Good Old Games, a new session is created and you can move to the game(s) you want to buy. As long as you don't let that session expire (by going away for a longer period of time and come back later) we will get that revenue of anything you buy at Good Old Games.

So, if you want to help RPGWatch out financially then you can donate and/or use one of our Good Old Games banners to take you to the Good Old Games site, in case you want to buy some games there.

Update: Maintenance has been completed.

We will be performing some maintenance today at 13:00 CEST / 7 am EDT / 9 pm WST.

It should not take long in theory, but as has happened before theory is failing sometimes and it might take up to an hour.

We are Steam Curator #8 now. Thanks to all who joined us.

After the success of last years key giveaways we now bring you the RPGWatch Summer key giveaway (those on the Southern hemisphere have to replace summer by winter, which also puts them in the mood for next month's Game of Thrones).

From the vaults of RPGWatch and some of our visitors we have a collection of games, of which some are RPG(ish) and some are not.

Here are the rules in participating in this giveaway:

1. You need to be registered at RPGWatch before the 1st of June 2017, to be able to participate.
2. You need to reply to this news posting.
3. Everybody fulfilling the first two rules, gets one ticket for the raffle.
4. We will draw as much tickets as are needed to give away all the keys we have. Once you have won, you are excluded from winning another key in this giveaway, unless the number of participants is lower than the number of available keys.
5. If your name is drawn in the raffle, we will sent the key to you via PM.
6. You can provide a preference of what keys you want to win, or what you absolutely do not want to win. We will try to take this into account, but it is impossible to satisfy everyone, but at least we've tried.
7. If you provided keys in this giveaway, we will make sure that you are not winning one of those keys.
8. The giveaway will last until Monday the 19th of June.

See the comments thread for the list of games we are giving away.

Summer is coming and just in case you are bored in that time we will organize a game key giveaway again somewhere this month in which you could win a key and have something to play. Although it also just might increase your backlog :)

We have some keys for this, but for those amongst you who have some keys left and would like to contribute them to this giveaway, please send me a PM with the name of the game(s) you have an unused key for. You can also send me the keys, in which case I will take care of the distribution, otherwise you can take care of that yourself.

As usual participation in the giveaway, which remains to be scheduled, is limited to registered users only and in this case to all registered users who registered before today, the first of June 2017.

Those who participated in our Game of the Year awards had the option to win a game as well.

The overview of the winners and the game they won can be found in the Comments link.

Here are the results of the votes for the most promising RPG of 2017, according to our visitors and the RPGWatch editors. In contrast to the Best RPG, these results are a bit less surprising.

Here is the conclusion of the votes for Best RPG in 2016 according to our visitors. The actual winning vote was skipped and we made the entry at second place, the winner, because we like to do stuff like that.

If you want to find out the results, check out the article.

RPGWatch is Steam Curator #10 now. Thanks to all who joined us.

It is no longer possible to vote.

We went through our database and came up with the games that were released according to that database and are or could be considered to be an RPG and have added them to the list of games that you can choose from in our Game of the Year 2016 awards.

You can give 3 votes for the best RPGs in 2016 and 3 votes for the most anticipated RPGs in 2017.

In addition you can also specify if you want to participate in our key giveaway (last question), which means you have a chance to win one of the keys we have for a game. You cannot give a preference for a game, if you are selected as a winner for a key, you get one randomly. If you already have that game or don't want it then you can give it to someone else yourself. The list of available games will be given in the first comment to this news posting.

You will need to be registered and have a minimum of 10 posts in order to be able to participate in the vote and key giveaway.

It's been 2017 for almost an hour now where our server is standing, so here is RPGWatch wishing you a great 2017, with hopefully a lot of good things happening to you and lots of gaming fun.

Update: this giveaway is closed now.

Here is our last key giveaway of this year with a collection of keys from various sources.

Here are the games:

• Dead Age
• Divinity Original Sin 2 (from RPGWatch)
• Ghost of a Tale (from Celticfrost)
• Neverwinter Nights Diamond (2 GOG keys, from RPGWatch and Irien)
• Star Wars games collection with 14 Star Wars games (from Celticfrost)
• Typoman
• Underrail (GOG, from forgottenlor)

Update 20-12-2016: added the following keys:

• A Fistful of Gun (from CRD)
• Avernum 2: Crystal souls (from CRD)
• Dungeon Keeper Gold (GOG, Fluent)
• Enigmatis - Ghosts of Maple Creek (from Irien)
• Enigmatis 2 - Mists of Ravenwood (from Irien)
• Expeditions: Conquistador (from xenocide)
• Fortix 2 (from Dez)
• Grim Legends - The Forsaken Bride (from Irien)
• Grim Legends 2 - Song of the Dark Swan (from Irien)
• Half Life 2, includes Lost Coast (from xenocide)
• Kentucky route zero (from CRD)
• Left Behind - No One on Board (from Irien)
• Mordheim: City of the Damned (Darkheart)
• Northmark: Hour of the wolf (from Dez)
• Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic (from Dez)
• SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition (from CRD)
• Shadowgate (from CRD)
• Shadowgate (from Dez)

This list might grow in the next few days.

And here are Da Rulez:

1. You need to be registered at RPGWatch before the 19th of December 2016, to be able to participate.
2. You need to reply to this news posting, stating which of these games you want or don't want, or don't mention that, in which case you will be surprised.
3. If you are banned, you cannot participate anymore.
4. Everybody fulfilling the first three rules, gets one ticket for the raffle. Nobody is excluded.
5. If you have a ticket, for every year that you are registered at RPGWatch you get one additional ticket (we base this on months, so if you registered in November 2006, you get 10 additional tickets, If you registered in December 2006, you get 9 additional tickets).
6. If you have a ticket then for every 500 posts you have (at the end of this giveaway), you get one additional ticket.
7. We will draw as much tickets as are needed to give away all the keys we have for the games listed above. Once you have won a game, you are excluded from winning another in this giveaway, unless the number of participants is lower than the number of available keys.
8. If your name is drawn in the raffle, we will try as much as possible to take your mentioned preferences for games into account and we will sent the key to you via PM.
9. All keys are on Steam only, unless specifically mentioned they are not.
10. The giveaway will last until Friday the 23rd of December.

Update: This giveaway is closed now.

In our Divinity: Original Sin 2 fundraising campaign, there were quite a number of people who donated money, but did not want the key(s) and mentioned that RPGWatch should give it away instead. So, that is what we will be doing now.
To be honest, we have not received these keys yet from Larian Studios. So, I am not sure when we will get them, but when we do get them I'll send them to the winners as soon as posisble.

This giveaway will conclude our series of 5 giveaways, which will have lasted exactly one month.

And here are Da Rulez:

1. You need to be registered at RPGWatch before the 18th of October 2016, to be able to participate.
2. You need to reply to this news posting.
3. Everybody fulfilling the first three rules, gets one ticket for the raffle. Nobody is excluded.
4. If you have a ticket, then for every year that you are registered at RPGWatch you get one additional ticket (we base this on months, so if you registered in October 2006, you get 10 additional tickets, If you registered in November 2006, you get 9 additional tickets).
5. If you have a ticket then for every 500 posts you have (at the end of this giveaway), you get one additional ticket.
6. We will draw as much tickets as are needed to give away all the keys we have. Once you have won, you are excluded from winning another in this giveaway, unless the number of participants is lower than the number of available keys.
7. If your name is drawn in the raffle, we will sent the key to you via PM.
8. By default the keys are on Steam only, unless you specifically mention you want a GOG key, in which case we will try (but not guarantee) to get you one.
9. The giveaway will last until Friday the 18th of November.

Update: Closed, nothing to win anymore.

Often at Gamescom, publishers would hand me some loot. As most of that stuff I never have found a use for, I gave or throw it away. Below are the items that are left and that I want to send to whomever wants it. There are a total of 9 items. I made some photos of the items, but dod not spent too much time in making them very good. I think you get the idea.

Elex artbook

The Elex artbook isn too big, but it contains a couple of nice pieces of artwork of vistas and monsters

Europa Universalis IV Mouse Pad

A reasonably big mouse pad featuring the world in Europa Universalis IV.

Farming Simulator Shirt

This is more blue than it looks in the photo. It comes in the size L

Morning Men Artbook

This is an artbook which has a large number of pages. It looks like they spent some time and effort on this one.

A Space Cap and Button

These items are related to space games. The first is a cap for Stellaris and the other is a button, for a game that I don know what it is for anymore, but it had to do with a space game.

The Witcher 3 Jigsaw Puzzle and Bag

If you are into jigsaw puzzels and also can get enough of The Witcher 3, this might be something for you.

The jigsaw puzzle is already 3 years old, but is unused and still in its wrapping.

Torment Pen and Bag

As the title says, it is a pen and a bag of Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Tyranny Mouse Pad

This is a big mouse pad, you need some desk space for this one.

Warhammer 40K: Inquisitor - Martyr T-Shirt

A T-shirt for the bigger ones amongst us, or for those who just like wide shirts. It comes in size XXL.

Seven T-shirt and Bag

A T-shirt (size M) and a Bag from the upcoming game Seven: The Days Long Gone

And here are Da Rulez:

1. You need to be registered at RPGWatch before the 18th of October 2016, to be able to participate.
2. You need to reply to this news posting, stating which of these items you want or don't want, or don't mention that, in which case you will be surprised.
3. If you are banned, you cannot participate anymore.
4. Everybody fulfilling the first three rules, gets one ticket for the raffle. Nobody is excluded.
5. If you have a ticket then for every year that you are registered at RPGWatch you get one additional ticket (we base this on months, so if you registered in October 2006, you get 10 additional tickets, If you registered in November 2006, you get 9 additional tickets).
6. If you have a ticket then for every 500 posts you have (at the end of this giveaway), you get one additional ticket.
7. We will draw as much tickets as are needed to give away all the items listed above. Once you have won an item, you are excluded from winning another in this giveaway, unless the number of participants is lower than the number of available items.
8. If your name is drawn in the raffle, we will try as much as possible to take your mentioned preferences for games into account and we will sent the item to you after we have contatced you via PM and you provided us with the address to ship the item to.
9. The giveaway will last until Friday the 12th of November.

Update: This giveaway is closed.

Here is our third game giveaway and our second and also last giveaway donated by our members.

Here are the games:

• Betrayer, courtesy of Strafe
• bit Dungeon II, Courtesy of Acleacius
• Dead State (GOG key), courtesy of Capt. Huggy Face
• Drakensang, courtesy of Capt. Huggy Face
• Drakensang: The River of Time, courtesy of Capt. Huggy Face
• Eador Genesis, courtesy of Wisdom
• Etherlords I, courtesy of Acleacius
• Etherlords II, courtesy of Acleacius
• Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, courtesy of Capt. Huggy Face
• FATE: Undiscovered Realms, Courtesy of Acleacius
• Gorky 17, courtesy of Capt. Huggy Face
• Grim Dawn, courtesy of rune_74
• Guns of Icarus Online, courtesy of Capt. Huggy Face
• Legend of Grimrock 2, courtesy of rune_74
• Lichdom: Battlemage, courtesy of Strafe
• Lucius II, Courtesy of Acleacius
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny Revised Edition, Courtesy of Acleacius
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny - For the Gods DLC, Courtesy of Acleacius
• Silence of the Sleep, Courtesy of Acleacius
• Silent Storm, courtesy of Capt. Huggy Face
• This Book Is A Dungeon, Courtesy of Acleacius
• Wizardry 8, courtesy of Wisdom
• And some late entries by Black Rune:
  • East India Company Gold Edition
  • Gorky 17
  • Knights and Merchants HD
  • Pirates of Black Cove
  • Septerra Core
  • Two Worlds Game of the Year Edition

And here are Da Rulez:

1. You need to be registered at RPGWatch before the 18th of October 2016, to be able to participate.
2. You need to reply to this news posting, stating which of these games you want or don't want, or don't mention that, in which case you will be surprised.
3. If you are banned, you cannot participate anymore.
4. Everybody fulfilling the first three rules, gets one ticket for the raffle. Nobody is excluded.
5. If you have a ticket then for every year that you are registered at RPGWatch you get one additional ticket (we base this on months, so if you registered in October 2006, you get 10 additional tickets, If you registered in November 2006, you get 9 additional tickets).
6. If you have a ticket then for every 500 posts you have (at the end of this giveaway), you get one additional ticket.
7. We will draw as much tickets as are needed to give away all the keys we have for the games listed above. Once you have won a game, you are excluded from winning another in this giveaway, unless the number of participants is lower than the number of available keys.
8. If your name is drawn in the raffle, we will try as much as possible to take your mentioned preferences for games into account and we will sent the key to you via PM.
9. All keys are on Steam only, unless specifically mentioned they are not.
10. The giveaway will last until Friday the 5th of November.

Update: This key giveaway is closed.

We continue to throw some more keys around for our second raffle.

We have keys available for games that are all donated by our members. This is the list of games:

• Knights of the Old Republic, courtesy of Korplem
• Knights of the Old Republic 2, courtesy of Korplem
• Lichdom Battlemage, courtesy of Black Rune
• This Book is a Dungeon, courtesy of Darkheart
• Tyranny Commander Edition, courtesy of CelticFrost
• Waste Walkers, courtesy of Darkheart
• Wasteland 2, courtesy of Arkadia 7

And here are Da Rulez:

1. You need to be registered at RPGWatch before the 18th of October 2016, to be able to participate.
2. You need to reply to this news posting, stating which of these games you want or don't want, or don't mention that, in which case you will be surprised.
3. If you are banned, you cannot participate anymore.
4. Everybody fulfilling the first three rules, gets one ticket for the raffle. Nobody is excluded.
5. If you have a ticket then for every year that you are registered at RPGWatch you get one additional ticket (we base this on months, so if you registered in October 2006, you get 10 additional tickets, If you registered in November 2006, you get 9 additional tickets).
6. If you have a ticket then for every 500 posts you have (at the end of this giveaway), you get one additional ticket.
7. We will draw as much tickets as are needed to give away all the keys we have for the games listed above. Once you have won a game, you are excluded from winning another in this giveaway, unless the number of participants is lower than the number of available keys.
8. If your name is drawn in the raffle, we will try as much as possible to take your mentioned preferences for games into account and we will sent the key to you via PM.
9. All keys are on Steam only.
10. The giveaway will last until Saturday the 29th of October.

Success!

Update: This raffle is over

Yesterday RPGWatch turned 10. Now that the dust has settled, the hangovers are under control, no traces of any legal (in some countries illegal) substances can be found anymore and the awfull smell that lingered in the in the RPGWatch office this morning is gone, we will spend some time on those who made us stay for 10 years, which is you, and start the first of our giveaways.

We have keys available for a bunch of games, RPGs and non-RPGs and for some games even more than 1 key. This is the list of games:

• Bloodgate
• Deadstone
• Dungeon of Zolthan
• Dungeon Rushers
• Factorio
• Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander
• Hero Quest
• Heroes of the Monkey Tavern
• Hieroglyphika
• Insincere
• Mystery Castle
• Purgatory
• SMILE game builder
• State of Anarchy
• Trulon: The Shadow Engine
• Wartile

And here are Da Rulez:

1. You need to be registered at RPGWatch before the 18th of October 2016, to be able to participate.
2. You need to reply to this news posting, stating which of these games you want or don't want, or don't mention that, in which case you will be surprised.
3. If you are banned, you cannot participate anymore.
4. Everybody fulfilling the first three rules, gets one ticket for the raffle. Nobody is excluded.
5. If you have a ticket then for every year that you are registered at RPGWatch you get one additional ticket (we base this on months, so if you registered in October 2006, you get 10 additional tickets, If you registered in November 2006, you get 9 additional tickets).
6. If you have a ticket then for every 500 posts you have (at the end of this giveaway), you get one additional ticket.
7. We will draw as much tickets as are needed to give away all the keys we have for the games listed above. Once you have won a game, you are excluded from winning another in this giveaway, unless the number of participants is lower than the number of available keys.
8. If your name is drawn in the raffle, we will try as much as possible to take your mentioned preferences for games into account and we will sent the key to you via PM.
9. All keys are on Steam only.
10. The giveaway will last until Monday the 24th of October.

Success!

It took some time, but we are back again. We have lost some information though.

I have been able to restore the backup from the 17th of July. This basically means we have lost everything from that day onwards until last week Sunday when the site went off line.

I plan to restore the articles that were created in the time up to now and still need to fix a few things as not everything is running as it should, but at least we're back :)

There are still some other open ends to solve as well.

If you want to know more details, check out the comments for this post.

With a small delay we bring you the results of the votes for the games you look forward to most in 2016.

A large number of our visitors voted in our Game of the Year awards for 2015, as did our editors. Curious what games are in the top 3? Check them out here.

Update 2016-01-22: It has been running for over a week, which is long enough. The poll is closed now.

Here it is, the Game of The Year 2015 poll. We are asking you which games you thought were the best games in 2015 and which games you are anticipating most, to play in 2016.

You can enter 3 games, which should be entered in the order you think were the best in 2015 and think will be the best in 2016.

We explored our database and ended up with over 90 games that were released in 2015. Some of them only have very few RPG elements, but were covered at RPGWatch anyway. So if you feel they should not be on the list, feel free to ignore that game. If you feel a game is missing on the list, you can always add that game manually.
The three games you look forward to most in 2016, will all have to be entered manually.

Note that voting is restricted to registered members, who have a sufficient amount of posts.

Enjoy!

The new year has started where I happen to live, so let me start to wish you  on behalf of the RPGWatch team, and myself, a happy New Year and I hope that it brings you what you hoped for and a lot of gaming fun and pleasure.

Here at RPGWatch, we regularly get keys sent to us, without anybody at the Watch asking for them. Obviously the reason for people to send us keys is to play them and create an article for them. I once started to ask our members to review games, where they would get the key for free, but that wasn't really a success and the once who do review for RPGWatch tend to buy their own keys anyway.

So those keys are just sitting around here with no owner, which is why we want to give them away to you, with no strings attached. It would be nice if you could write something up about the game, but there is no requirement. Here is the list of Steam games we have keys for:

Heroes of legionwood
Judgement
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians
This Book Is A Dungeon
Game Corp DX
The dwarf Run (5 keys)
Legends of Dawn Reborn (4 keys)
Swords and Sorcery - Underworld Definitive Edition
The Last Warlock
Transcendence
ADOM
Plastiland
Zombie Party
Rise of Keeper
The Hive

The only requirement is that you have 25 posts at least on our forums in order to be eligible to win one or more keys. We will randomly select from those who create a comment on this post a bunch of winners for these keys.

the giveaway will run until the 30th of December.

Happy holidays to all of you from the RPGWatch team!  We wish you joy, comfort, safety, and warmth wherever you are.

About three quarters of those who voted in our latest poll, are excited at some level with the development of Original Sin 2.

in 2013 RPGWatch ran it's own campaign in which we raised $10K for the devlopement of Original Sin and handed out a lot of goodies to those who participated, courtesy of Larian Studios. Our new poll is about whether or not you think we should do this again for Original Sin 2.

A new poll was long overdue, so here is one to check if you are excited about the prospect of a new Original Sin game.

After one year of existance the RPGWatch Steam Group has now 1000+ members.
The RPGWatch Curation List is even more popular with more than 56,000 followers.

A big 'Thank You' for all who joined us.

In our last poll you voted that Baldur's Gate is your favourite Bioware franchise. in our next poll we ask you if The Witcher 3 lived up to the hype or not. Vote on the front page or here.

Lackblogger came with the suggestion for a new poll. It is about the Bioware franchise, so check it out here.

Our previous poll asked you if The Witcher 3 will live up to the hype created around it. Some 73% of the voters are on the positive side.

As I promised its Monday so here are the winners of our Distant Star Beta Key Giveaway from last month. I will send the winners a PM with the Steam Key later today.

Here are the Beta Key Winners.

1. Capt. Huggy Face
2. rune_74
3. Carnifex
4. wiretripped
5. fatknacker50
6. JDR13
7. Strafe
8. you
9. Farflame
10. darklord
11. Dagon
12. basharran
13. Yme
14. Thrasher
15. Arahael
16. Ursusdraconis
17. Wenzil
18. Grifman
19. goblin
20. Hurion
21. Spaz
22. Bry72
23. wildrems

Enjoy everyone and look forward to more giveaways in the future.

Well I have a special treat for everyone today as I was given a generous amount of Beta keys to giveaway from the Marketing Manager of Blazing Griffin Scott Boyd.

Now here is a brief description of the game as its not an RPG.

Distant Star: Revenant Fleet is a real-time, space-strategy game for PC, featuring fleet-based combat with persistent ship upgrades in a dynamically generated galaxy.

In Distant Star: Revenant Fleet, you take control of the last remaining ships of a near-destroyed A’kari fleet, and must rebuild your forces as you battle through ancient, galactic battlefields towards a final showdown with the Orthani.

Like RTS? Like roguelike? Like space? This is the game for you!

Distant Star: Revenant Fleet combines fast-paced RTS gameplay with roguelike elements. You can mix and match your small fleet of ships, upgrade their weapons, gain experience, new skills and traverse the galaxy, system by system, experiencing a series of mission types. Each sector in the galaxy and the missions within each system are dynamically generated so each playthrough is a different experience. Story events offer you a range of choices which may affect whether or not you are attacked (or you attack your enemy), are rewarded or the option to upgrade your ships.

So to celebrate just write what you like about the game, and I will randomly select a bunch of winners to announce at a later date. Good luck everyone.

At the advice of one of our members I would like to bring your attention to the following forum thread. It's a new donation thread thread for myself & Fluent.

Hello guys just something I would like to bring up with everyone. As most of you know I spend over 30-40 hours a week posting news, and doing interviews.

I started a new donation page today on Paypal to help support my work, and provide a way to tip me if you like what I do, and to show my work is appreciated.

Now I wont force anyone to donate, or stop posting news if no one will donate. I do this everyday because I love this site, and look forward to sharing information.

For members who donate we both thank you in advance for your kindness. We also look forward to bringing all of you new content for many years to come.

Like every year you also got to vote for Most Promising RPG of 2015. Check out the details to find out what games we, and our visitors think are most promising.

You have voted last week for the best RPG in 2014 and so has the RPGWatch team. For some odd reason both you our visitors and the RPGWatch team came to the same results. Want to know what those results are? Check it out here

Voting is no longer possible!

It is that time of the year again in which we give you the opportunity to vote for the best RPG of 2014 and the game you are looking most forward to in 2015.

You have the opportunity to vote for the best, runner up and third best game for both the RPGs of last year and most promising RPGs of this year. However you should not vote for the same game twice as that invalidates your participation.

At the end of the vote you have the option to participate in our raffle in which we are giving away boxed and digital versions of Divinity: Original Sin.

Participation is restricted to registered users only. Enjoy!

Update: New registrations to the site won't be counted in the vote.

We are back again with the quest for new news posters. Our latest group of candidates turned out to be not very active, so here is your chance to do better.

I'm sure there are some of you who think you can do this, so why not give it a try and contact me via PM.

Before you do, be aware that it does take time to post news. We are looking for people with some stamina who can invest a number of hours per week and continue for a long, long time.

So, if you still think you have what it takes and want to join the glorious ranks of RPGWatch editors, contact me.

As you must have found out by now, we are flagged by Google to host malware, which could do naughty things with your computer.

This is incorrect, we are not hosting malware. The 'detection' is related to the way things are set up at RPGWatch related to ads. They have been removed for now and we are waiting for Googe to finally finish the review to remove the warning, after which we'll solve the ads issue. I'm sure we'll survie without them for some time :)

To enance the RPGWatch team we are looking for additional news posters.

The main requirements for the job are that you should be able to make some time avaialble on a regular basis to search the internet for news and post is here and that you master the English language.

The benefits are just too much to mention, so I won't even start, but I'm sure you know them :)

If you are interested, send me a PM via our forums (yes, you need to be a registered member for that) and I'll get back to you.

HiddenX sent me news about his complete, and updated version of his CRPG Analyzer. Don't forget to thank HiddenX,Wulf, and Arhu for all their hard work.

You can check out his project here.

The CRPG Analyzer: A checklist for computer roleplaying games

One of most discussed questions in computer roleplaying game forums is the question: “What is a CRPG?”

You can find a lot of different answers and opinions about this question all over the net. Some say “This question never gets old” other say “Please, don’t beat this dead horse again”

Because we belong to the former group about one year ago Wulf, Arhu and I started a discussion trying to identify the characterizing defining elements of the CRPG genre. Others joined us and over the course of one year we created a checklist that helps to understand why a game is labeled as a CRPG or not. This article describes our approach to the leading question and presents the results. The easy answer:

A CRPG is a computer game that belongs to the CRPG genre: A class of games that allow you to role-play an in-game character. Leads directly to the following new questions when you try to decide whether a given game belongs to the CRPG genre or not:

• What are the characterizing elements (=recurring patterns) of computer role-playing?
• Which of these elements are essential, which are important and which are optional?
• Which elements distinguish CRPGs from related genres like strategy games, adventure games shooters and simulation games?
• Are there similarities to pen&paper role-playing games?

After some brainstorming we decided to cluster characterizing CRPG elements in four main categories: Character Development, Exploration, Story and Combat. The consensus is that the main categories Character development, Exploration and Story are essential for the CRPG genre and the main category Combat is common but optional.

Wow, that Kickstarter poll was running for a long time. Must have been more than a year since we started that, so here is a new one (looks to the right side of the front page).

It is about Original Sin on Early Access and if you are playing it or not.

After the announcement of the results for the vote of Best RPG in 2013, we now have the results of the votes for most promising RPG scheduled to be released in 2014. Be surprised, stunned, in acceptance or whatever with the results by heading to them.

You voted for the best RPG in 2013 and despite the fact that quite a few votes were cast for the games on the list that aren't real RPGs, they did not make ik into the top 3.

So, if you are curious to find out who has won, head over to the results for the Best RPG of 2013 as voted by our visitors.

After a long delay and some discussion on our forums we now offer you the option to vote in our Game of the Year Awards for 2013.

With respect to last year there are a few things that have changed:

1. Voting is restricted to registered users only.
   This means you need to have an account on our forums and have to be logged in to be able to cast your votes.
   This does mean that we end up with less votes and regular visitors without an account will not be able to vote, but it also means that we will not get loads of votes from fans of a game that have no binding with RPGWatch, skewing the results.
2. There are no different categories anymore for indie games and non-indie games.
3. You can now vote for the best 3 games in the two remaining categories: Best RPG of 2013 and Most Anticipated for 2014.

As usual our list of games is for the large part based on the contents of our database. The lists might be incomplete or contain games you think should not be in there. Feel free to discuss that in our forums and in the meantime you can either add that game you feel is missing (by means of the 'other' option) or don't vote for the game you think should not be on that list.

The voting will last until Sunday the 16th of February, 23:59 hours (or any moment after that when I find the time to close it....)

Galaad offered us a Steam key for Crusader Kings 2 to give away to our visitors. If you are interested, you only have to reply to this thread.

I've sent out e-mails to everybody who donated $10 or more to our Original Sin fundraiser, to verify if you want to receive the available rewards corresponding to the amount you donated and if needed your address.
Those who have donated less than $25, but at least $10 are eligible for a digital copy of the game as well, because many who have donated more do not want their copy.

At the moment of this writing I am still missing information of 38 individuals!!

If you have donated $10 or more, but did not receive an e-mail, check your spam folder. If that does not show the mail contact me via a PM on our forums.

When you read this message you know we have moved to our new server.

So, welcome to our new server. Not much has changed (for now), but we are planning some site updates in the next months.

This fundraiser has ended!!

We have reached more than $10,000, which brings us a tower, a NPC, an item, a statue and a jailor (with a bunch of other goodies to give away as well). We have achieved our goals but the fundraiser will stay open until the 10th of May.

So you still have a way to get the game and other stuff for a low prize and help Larian Studios in the process. Besides that you take part in our raffle, in which you have a chance to win one of the many prizes.

The following will be yours, depending on the amount you donate:

And you have a chance to win one of the prizes in the raffle.

So help RPGWatch and especially help Larian Studios by throwing some money our way.

The following is the current status:

We currently are at $10,140 (net amount, includes deduction of fees)

  $0:        $2,500
                                                    Item              NPC                                 Tower

  $2,500: $5,000
                                                                                                                 Jailor

  $5,000: $7,500
                                                                                                        Jailor + Statue

  $7,500: $10,000
                                                                                                            More stuff

The status is updated as often as we can, but it is a manual process so bear with us.

Place your donation right here!

Larian Studios was kind enough to offer us some additional rewards, so here is the overview of the rewards available:

For the benefit of all:

Listed in the credits at Divine level.
We get to create an item.
We get to define a NPC.
We get to create a jailor.
We get a statue (or something equal as they are sold out).
In addition there will be a watch tower in the game (like our logo). In the neighborhood a lore book is hidden named "The History of the Watch". The contents of this book is to be defined by us, but needs to be in the spirit of the game. Reading the book will give the player a benefit related to their skills.

For even more rewards and details check out the donation page.

And if you really don't want an RPGWatch statue/NPC/item/whatever you can always help our friends at RPGCodex to get one.

Here is the last of the articles on the game of the year awards, which is on the topic of the most promising Indie RPG. For this award the 2nd to 4th places are very close together and are just a small number of votes apart.

Here are the results for Most Promising RPG of 2013. There are two Kickstarters in the top-3 and all three are either a sequel or a prequel.

The votes for the best Indie RPGs released in 2012 have been collected brining us some clear winners. Is your choice at the top as well? Find out in our article.

It has been a while that you could cast your votes for Best RPG of 2012 (or games that are RPGish), so after taking a long hard look at the results and being busy with stuff in the dreaded real life, I finally found the time to put things together. So here it is, the results of your votes.

Like previous years we ask you to vote for your game of last year. And as usual we focus on Role Playing Games, although the lists might contain games that are not considered to be role playing games by some or even most. The games you can vote for are made up of games we reported about and thus are in our database, so actually this is the RPGWatch Game from our Database of the Year 2012 Awards, but that title was too long.

That said our database might be flawed. If you feel a game is missing in the contest select 'Other' and enter the name of that game in the edit box.

The last day you can vote is Sunday the 13th of January (CET).

It's New Year's morning down here in Australia, so I'd like to wish all of you and your loved ones a wonderful year ahead.

On behalf of the staff of RPGWatch I want to thank you all for visiting us in 2012 and hope you continue to visit during 2013 to read the latest RPG news. Thank you to everyone, from occasional lurker to battle-hardened regular to visting Codexers, for making our forums a lively place.

And finally I want to thank the staff and moderators for their hard work and dedication. Without you, there would not be a RPGWatch to visit.

Happy New Year!

We're back again as you can see. Someone pointed us to the fact that there are some areas in our software that can be misused by means of SQL injection, so I took some time to resolve the issue.

Sorry for the downtime.

Yes, I know, the old poll was past it's use-by date long ago. So, a new poll.

Our news is dominated these days with crowdfunding campaigns - be it Kickstarter, Indiegogo or even independent efforts.

Do you see this as a new era, supporting indie and middle-tier developments without the burden of publishers - or do you want a finished product before you spend your hard-earned? Is there yet another perspective?

Hit up the poll and comments.  

So, if Obsidian tried to crowd-fund an RPG with a new, original IP, what setting would you like them to use? Hit the poll link in the right bar or head to this thread.

Polls only support 10 options, so feel free to add more detail or suggest alternative settings.

The last set of results are for the indie RPG that we are looking forward to being released in 2012. The editors could not make up their minds and ranked three games as most promising and our visitors made some different choices.

Here is the game that both the editors and our visitors have in their top 3:

The game is a RPG zompocalaypse. It takes the frequently used zombie theme in a new direction that has not really been done up to this point. While there are a lot of zombie games out there, there are hardly any zombie RPGs with turn-based combat, skills, party members, a shelter to protect and expand upon and most importantly an evolving storyline where your actions influence the game.

Interested to know what collection of games you and we are looking forward to most in 2012? Then find out how you and we voted. And the following is from the editors number one.

Combat mechanics will see progress too: magic spells and ranged weapons are out, voodoo,  muskets and dirty tricks are in. You can, for example, throw a parrot at an opponent or use voodoo magic to make one enemy attack another.
Other novelties: the first island will be relatively small, to make things easier for new players - after that the game opens up more and more. Storytelling will be more cinematic, companions will used more often.

This is the first year where you could cast a vote specifically for Indie RPGs. If you are curious enough to find out which games received the awards, check out our article.

Here is a snippet from the Gamers' Choice:

It isn't a typical action/RPG but rather a hack'n'slasher that has very carefully stripped away unnecessary elements and substituted some innovative ideas, such as the optional shrines that allow players to choose additional challenges in return for more XP. XP unlocks slots for "tonics" - potions that improve stats or provide other benefits. Instead of the usual inventory management, you only carry two weapons at a time but the loadout can be swapped around and each weapon has five upgrade levels.

As usual we try not to be the first in announcing our Game of the Year awards and this year is no different. We now present you the awards for the best RPG in 2011 as voted by the editors and our visitors, which in this case shows we have similar tastes.

The contest is closed!!

From today until Tursday the 12th of January you have a chance to vote for your game of the year 2011.

We've changed the voting process a bit. You now have the opportunity to vote twice in each category (first and second places). The categories you can vote in are:

- Best RPG 2011
- Best Indie RPG 2011
- Most promising RPG 2012
- Most promising Indie RPG 2012

This means there are a total of 8 questions.

We have given a number of games in each of the categories, but if you feel we've missed a game, you are free to add it to the list, by selecting 'Other' and entering the name of the game.

This year we have not included DLC and add-ons in the lists (unless they are really big).

At the time of writing this more than half of the world entered the new year and so has the server (and my little location). This brings me to the point where I want to wish all of you and your loved ones a fantastic 2012 and I hope that it brings you everything you wished for.

On behalf of the staff of RPGWatch I want to thank you all for visiting us in 2011 and hope you stay with us during 2012 to read about all the RPGNews. So thank you old time visitors, newbies, lurkers, Codexers and everybody else for making 2011 a year to remember.

And finally I want to thank the staff and moderators for keeping this place together. Without you there would not be a RPGWatch to visit.

Have fun!

As always, it's way past time for a new poll. This time we're asking about your prefered inventory size / philosophy - click the poll link in the right bar or head to this thread.

In this third week of our 5 year anniversary we are again giving away two copies of the yet to be released indie game Driftmoon.

As usual all it takes to participate is to leave a comment to this newsbit.

All good things come to an end, so this is the last giveaway we are having to celebrate our five years of existence.

Update: The contest is closed.

In the second week of celebrating our fifth anniversary we are giving away two copies of the indie game Dungeons of Dredmor.

Like before all it takes to participate is leaving a comment on this newsbit.

Update: The contest is closed.

It's been a long time since we had a Side Quest editorial piece. Jacob Way, producer on the indie zombie RPG I Shall Remain recently covered offered to write some articles. At some point, we hope Jacob will delve into the design of his game but for this first piece, Jacob looks at the "games as art" debate. A sample:

In my first article, I'm going to revisit an ongoing debate on whether or not video game design can be called an art form. I think those in the RPG realm who seek carefully written stories in their games can quickly say 'yes', but it's important to know why we say yes. I'm going to open up the floor with a quote by Roger Ebert. Immediately, I expect everyone on this website to balk at what he says. But what he said needs to be carefully considered.

“I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”

Read it here - and thanks to Jake for participating.

Update: The contest is closed.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of RPGWatch, which officially started on October 17th 2006. In that year we decided to leave RPGDot and start a new RPG news site, which you are reading right now. Lot's of labor has gone into this site and if it wasn't for our news posters, you our visitors and the others keeping things up and running, this site would not be where it is now.

To thank you for visiting us in these last five years we are running a contest this week and two more in the next two weeks. in each of these contests you can win one of two Indie games. We start with two copies of Frayed Knights, which were given to us by its developer. Thank you Jay!
As usual with our contests, all it requires to participate is to post a comment to this newsbit. Any comment will do.

We hope you will continue to visit us in the next five years as well and enjoy it as much as we are.
Enough talk: Here are the virtual drinks :)

It's way past time for a new poll, so here's a simple one to get us back into it. How often do you game? - hit the poll link on the right to vote or comment.

We've added the IndieWatch site, which can be found at http://indie.rpgwatch.com.

The site is a filter of everything available on RPGWatch. In this case it filters for all indie games that we've covered and are covering.
So in essence it does not contain anything new, we just felt that it might be useful to provide such a service to our visitors.

Some changes have been made to the DNS settings for RPGWatch, as a result you might encounter some hickups in visiting RPGWatch in the next 48 hours.

It's well past time for a new poll, so here we go. Skyrim will be a major discussion point as the year goes on, so I thought I'd ask about the best Elder Scrolls game so far.

Is it the depth of Daggerfall, the alien landscape of Morrowind or the polish of Oblivion? They all have their high and low points, so let's see the outcome. Hit the poll on the upper right to go to the thread.

After the Best and Worst RPG our visitors and editors also voted for the Most Promising RPG of 2011 during January. Check out the details to find out what game you - and we - think is most promising.

Our visitors and editors have voted for the worst RPG of 2010 during January. You may anticipate this result - but you know you want to look. Check out the details to find out what game has won, or should we say lost?

Well, here we are at our annual Game of the Year awards.  Our editors and many of our visitors have voted for the best RPG of 2010 over the last few days and we've tabulated the results. Head here to find out what game has won - and look for Worst RPG and Most Anticipated next week.

Yeah...I let that last poll languish for a while, didn't I?  With only a couple of days before BioWare's free upgrade to the Dragon Age 2 Signature Edition expires, I thought we'd look at your attitude.  Have you preordered to get the upgrade, would like to but just haven't seen enough information about the changes to Dragon Age 2 or perhaps you hate this whole DLC enticement system?  Hit the link on the top right to vote in the poll thread.

It's great to have a brand new year. Unfortunately a new year also adds new costs, so after a year I'm back again to point your attention to our donations page.

You have been very generous in 2010, which allowed us to keep ads to a minimum. I hope we will again be able to cover the operational cost for 2011 from the ads and the donations.

Thanks for your help!

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a fantastic New Year and I hope it will bring you and all your loved ones everything you ever wanted.

Thank you for being with us in 2010, I hope you will continue to visit us in 2011. Especially as this year marks the 5th anniversary of RPGWatch which we will celebrate later this year.
My thanks especially goes to the staff and moderators of RPGWatch who make this site such a special place and without who this endeavor would be impossible.

I hope you have lots of gaming fun in 2011!! 

The move to the new server has been completed. Welcome!

Both RPGWatch and the forums should be working again. Enjoy!

It's been a long time since we've had one of our Side Quest editorials but VoxClamant steps up with some frustration over recent releases and a rant about industry trends - but optimism about the near future:

And don't even get me going about DLCs.  Bioware is a company that to me is on a pedestal no other company in the industry can match.  I enjoy and respect them immensely.  Yet this summer, they showed me a different side of them that has me deeply bothered.  A company that arguably is the finest RPG developer on the planet decided that 2010 was the year of the DLC ripoff.  Look at the DLCs for Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age.  With one exception, they ranged from overpriced to absolutely valueless.  For $5 to $10 (USD) you typically got an hour of shallow fluff.

Read it all here.

We have solved the hack to our forums and reverted back to a 1 day older version of the forums database, so probably several messages are lost now. More information can be found on our forums.

Let's finally get a new poll up.

With Mass Effect 2 just behind us and Alpha Protocol a mere month or so away, I thought we'd look at the best shooter/RPGs. Feel free to add others in the comments or argue a genre definition.

On a personal note, I'm surprised this isn't a better represented genre - and why has noone tried to improve on Deus Ex?

Have at it, by clicking "vote" on the right-hand side.

You've seen the winners of our Best RPG poll, now it's time for the results of the Most Anticipated RPG for 2010.  Can you guess what won?  Head here to see how your fellow readers voted, as well as our Editors.

The votes are in and everything has been tabulated!  Head here to find the results of your vote for the Best RPG of 2009, as well as the choices from the RPGWatch team.

We bring you the Most Anticipated results in the next day or two.

The links to the donation option have been enabled again in the donations page. As mentioned before the current donations cover the operational costs for 2010 and because of that we decided to close the option to donate a while ago. However several people requested to enable it again, which is what we have done now.

In the donations page you will see a new limit to give you an idea that RPGWatch is nowhere near making a profit. However even if we receive no other donations we remain grateful for the donations already made and like to stress that RPGWatch will continue to be here for you.

It's way past time for a new poll.

Just before we close out the Combat, Death and Reloading poll, it's interesting to note nearly 60% of respondents reload regularly (or even habitually) to optimise the result.  I'd suggest this is at odds with the vast majority that prefer traditional death-and-reload systems (according to a past poll) because of the consequences.

Anyway, as a bit of fun while we wait for the Game of the Year results, let's do a Most Disappointing Game of 2009 poll (thanks Joxer). For consistency, I've based this on the GotY choices but I'm limited to 10 options by the forum software, so a couple of outliers had to go.

Usual disclaimers apply: the choices are RPG-ish games we cover with at least one English first release in 2009.  Hit the poll thread from the link on the upper right.

It's time to vote in our Game of the Year Award for 2009!  In addition, you'll get the chance to nominate your most anticipated release of 2010.

Head to this page to cast your vote, which will be open for the next 10 days.

When we put the donations page up less than 1 week ago, we hoped to break even later this year. However in less than a week all operational costs related to running this site in 2010 have been covered. We actually received more than the 750 Euros hoped for:  we exceeded the sum by one Euro and on top of that there is also the advertising income, budgeted at 135 Euros.

This money is not wasted and will be put to good use: to cover additional costs. We will move to a new server in the second half of 2010 (contract obligations force us to make the move at that time). The current server had a hard disk crash twice and extra money is needed to have the two servers running in parallel for a month or so to be able to move the site to the new server.

If for whatever reason we have more income from ads and donations in 2010 than currently estimated, we will invest it in RPGWatch. If there are no additional costs to pay for, the extra money will be used to pay for the bills in 2011. We have no intention at all to make a profit based on your donations.

Thanks to all of you who showed their support, it has been an amazing week.

As you might know RPGWatch is a site made by volunteers who invest their time and money into bringing you as much RPG information as possible and provide a place to discuss RPGs (and whatever else you like to discuss).

Our ads income are minimal and the operating costs for RPGWatch are not getting any less so we decided to open up a donations page where we ask you our visitors for a voluntary contribution. The link to this page can be found at the top of every page (a bit below the ads banner). On that page we give some more background information and the option to donate if you like. Alternatively you can also click this link to reach that page.

Update by Arhu: If the link at the top doesn't show up for you, try shift-reloading the site. One of the style sheets has changed.

For some it is too early and for some it is already old news, but over here we just entered the new year, so a great Happy New Year to all of you. Thank you for staying with us and I hope 2010 will bring you a lot of gaming fun.

Time for a new poll.  This time we're asking about death and reloading habits in combat - hit the "Vote" link under the poll on the right to participate and comment in that thread.

This weekend RPGWatch turned 3. On October 17th 2006 the site went live and marked the start of a new adventure, bringing us to where we are now.

We are doing very well for a niche site as we are. We have a few million page views a month a continuously rising number of visitors and the feedback we are getting is increasing as well.

In the last week or so the team discussed the future of RPGWatch and decided that we want to keep our focus on RPG's and drop the support for online games. As a result we have ended our activities related to MMOWatch and, although the site is still active it will not be updated anymore. We will have to see if we will remove the link to the site all together or just leave it as it is now.

Another thing we discussed is the fact that we need more staff. It would help if we get some assistance in posting news and in creating articles for RPGWatch to make the site even better. An official announcement will follow, but if you feel you can contribute just message us by clicking on the 'Submit news' link at the top of the page.

We have other plans for the site but it is too soon to talk about them as we don't know if and when they can be realized. As you might know we are all volunteers and most of us have a full-time job besides keeping RPGWatch running, so the realization of the new features might take a while, but we hope that some of them will be realized before we turn four.

We want to thank all of you for visiting us so frequently and for your involvement on our forums. Without you our efforts would be meaningless and RPGWatch would be nothing. We hope we can continue to attract your attention and that (in the not too far future) we can enhance the site to make it an even better experience for you.

Well, it's way past time for a new poll.

BioWare has positioned Dragon Age as a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate but it's been a long time since they've made that style of game. In the meantime, the game has gone from PC only to a simultaneous multiplatform release and we've seen a controversial marketing campaign featuring Marilyn Manson.

Obviously technology has changed and it isn't based on D&D but do you expect Dragon Age to live up to the claim?  Hit the link on the right to vote.

So, E3 has come and gone and although previews will continue to flow for at least the next two months, most of the new media is out and the main sites have presented their big articles.

There really weren't any surprises and we didn't see Fallout: New Vegas, Risen, Diablo III, Two Worlds: Temptation or a bunch of others. Some of the smaller games might yet get a few previews down the track.

Still, from the small group we did see - what grabbed you the most?  Hit the poll on the right.

The old poll was so old it had cobwebs.  The result was clear - most respondents like traditional death systems and obviously don't see any need for change.

This new poll suggestion comes from Kostaz, who wants to know about our favourite RPG developers.  Hit the link on the right!

As part of our Game of the Year election you also got to answer the question of the RPG that is a must have for you in 2009. This time the Editors' Choice is different from the choice of our visitors. Read it all here.

The most promising MMORPGs can be found on our sister site MMOWatch.

The last two weeks of the year you have been able to vote for what you think was the best RPG in 2008. I'm sure those that have voted have been waiting for the results, so here they are.

We also added the choice we as editors made for the best RPG in 2008, which shows a remarkable resemblance of the top 3 games, with one exception.

If you also like to know what the best MMORPG of 2008 was then you can check that out on our MMOWatch site.

The Game of the Year contests are now closed, we are processing the results and will get back to you in the next days with the results.

As far as prizes are concerned: RPGWatch puts forward some of the games that fell on their doorsteps and remained to be unopened. They are actually 2007 releases and they are European versions, but we'll ship anywhere :)

• Medal of Honor: Airborne
• Lost planet: Extreme Condition
• Resident Evil 4
• Stranglehold

And 1C makes 2 downloads available from their collection of games, including King's Bounty.

As you might have noticed we are running an ad at the top of our page. And this for the site that was running without any ads for all this time. So what is happening? Are we selling our souls????

No not really. This is an experiment. Good Old Games approached us with a deal; Everybody who registers with GOG through the banner link we have at the top of our pages is marked as coming from RPGWatch. We then get a percentage of every game that is purchased from GOG by that user.
This deal doesn't apply to already registered users, it is only valid for new users.

We never said that we wouldn't be running any ads (we have one from 1C in the Game of the Year newsbit). What we do believe in that IF we are running ads it has to be about games, we have to be in control of the ads (so no funky flash ads that try to install stuff on your PC), no pop-ups and the front page is not going to be postered with ads. So this is why we have this single banner from Good Old Games.

We can cope with the cost of running this server without the ads, but if we want to keep on growing cost might be rising as well, so this is why this experiment is running for the next 3 months. If it is a success, we consider if we continue this. If not then we have to consider where we want to go with this site. It will definitely not mean the end of RPGWatch either way, so no worries.

For some the new year has already started, for some it is still some hours away. So I might be early and I might be late, but I want to wish you all an awesome 2009. May it bring you and your loved ones all the joy you can handle and all the gaming fun you need.

I also want to use this opportuity to thank you all for staying with us this year and making RPGWatch bigger and better. We are now at an average of about 1.6 million page hits a month, which is twice the amount we had a year ago. So thank you for visiting us and making it all worth the effort we put into making this possible.

So have a lot of fun, hug the ones you love and don't love and hopefully we will see you again in 2009!

We've resurrected an old tradition with a formal RPGWatch Game of the Year poll!  Use the links below to vote for the best RPG and MMORPG of 2008 and most anticipated of 2009.  All the options are drawn from our database and represent the titles released in English in 2008 from our coverage.

Follow these links to cast your votes:

• RPGs
• MMORPGs

If you leave your email address in the space provided at the end of the vote, we'll enter you into a random draw for prizes.  We promise your details will only be used for the purpose of  the contest.

Voting runs until December 31st - have at it!

We can announce the first prizes. RPGWatch puts forward some of the games that fell on their doorsteps and remained to be unopened. They are actually 2007 releases and they are European versions, but we'll ship anywhere :)

• Medal of Honor: Airborne
• Lost planet: Extreme Condition
• Resident Evil 4
• Stranglehold

And 1C makes 2 downloads available from their collection of games, including King's Bounty.

Time for a new poll.

What death system do you prefer? Do you like NWN2's "Everyone's a medic" system (see below) or did Baldur's Gate's "Traditional permanent death" system get it right in the first place? Lucky Day has put together a list of death systems that have been used for us to consider.  We have limited space for the poll options, so you'll need this list to interpret the choices names.

• Traditional permanent death - player must load a previous save
• Hardcore mode - permanent death, player must restart the game
• Miraculous resurrection - player returned to start point
• Japanese miracle - returned to previous check point (player may only save at these points)
• Waiting for a miracle - player can wait for the heat to clear before respawning at the place they died
• Everyone's a medic - permanent death only when last party member is dead (playable party or NPC)
• Casper system - player can only interact as a ghost until restored to the land of the living
• Hybrid/Cocktail - low levels character are too weak and its too expensive to rez (effectively making it perma death at level 1) or high level, where taking the next step in the evolution of your character comes at a cost (effectively God Mode)

You can have any of these with various penalties such as wait times, stat adjustments, permanent injury or experience or level drops, player must walk back to start to continue and so on.

Make your vote on the right and feel free to add comments on your own experiences, preferences or ideas for a better way to handle death.

The RPGWatch sites (RPGWatch, MMOWatch and The Locus Inn) have been unavailable in the last hours. This was caused by a server harddisk failure. We managed to repair it but we might need to go off-line for a second time to make some permanent repairs later on. We'll do our best to keep the site up and running as much as possible though.

Way past time for a new poll.  Our last question asked about replaying games and it seems a good chunk of us don't have the time - or the inclination - to replay all but a handful of classics.

A little over 4% replay new games straight away and just under 10% get around to replaying most of them eventually.  32% see their way clear to replay a really great game, while 34% only ever replay some chosen classics and nearly 20% rarely replay.

That makes something over 80% of players that don't expect to replay most of their games, for whatever reason.  It's interesting to contrast that against RPG design characteristics, where replayability is highly regarded.

Bartacus sent in the next poll, which asks about purchasing influences.

The Locus Inn that was previously still hosted on the RPGDot network is moved to the RPGWatch network. The site is my own private site and I have been running it since 2000. It started as a place where I could store the stuff I had about one of the best games I ever played: Planescape:Torment.
This was followed by information about the Icewind Dale games and Baldur's Gate 2.

After that I became interested in Divinity for which I had several contacts with the developers and had the opportunity to play versions of the games even before a beta version was available. This was followed by Beyond Divinity, for which I was the co-writer in writing the best strategy guide in existence of that game :-)

Now with the PR machine of Divinity 2 starting to spread the news, I found it was time to make the move to the Watch network.

Unfortunately, due to some funky ads Jolt showed on the sites at the RPGDot network, they were tagged as suspicious and containing malware. This was strictly because of those ads and not because of the contents on those site. As we don't have any ads here, that problem won't exist, so I requested Google to remove the warning on it.

Time for a new poll.

I think we've established that Planescape: Torment easily has the best end game.  A whopping 47% chose PS:T, easily trouncing Gothic on just under 14%.  Fallout was next (11.65%), then BG: ToB way back on 6.77%, then Vampire: Bloodlines just behind on 5.6% and The Witcher on 4.5%.

This time, we're asking about replaying games.  Do you start a replay as soon as you've finished a new game for the first time or are replays reserved for those elite classics?  Hit the link on the right to go to the poll topic on the forums.

So, Baldur's Gate is our favourite series, collecting 29.52% of the vote and comfortably ahead of second place Fallout, with 20.13%.  Some way behind in third place is Ultima with 13.97% and then we have Gothic (10.81%), NWN (10.58%).

Trailing well behind we have Might & Magic, Elder Scrolls, Realms of Arkania and the AD&D Gold Box series.

The next poll asks "Which cRPG has your favorite endgame?"

The endgame includes the actual ending as well as the gameplay immediately leading up to it, so please consider both elements when voting - hit the link on the right to head to the forum poll.

Thanks to the thread in General RPG and everyone who participated for the selections and Prime Junta for the reminder. 

In our last poll, we asked about RPG elements.  This is always a difficult one, because - as many readers quite rightly point out - it's often hard to separate what makes a game enjoyable.

At any rate, NPC interaction squeaked into first place with 32%, while character development was just behind at 31%.  Exploration scored highly with 23% and then questing (6%), combat (5%) and puzzles (a little over 1%).

It's interesting to compare these results with the actual time spent on different elements in the average game - particularly with combat. Do we really prefer NPC interaction that much more - or does it mean the average RPG just doesn't have compelling combat?

This time, following on from a recent newsbit that inspired a few comments, we're asking about your favourite series.  Bear in mind the polls only support 10 options so some just had to miss out.  Over to you...

Magerette writes her first solo Side Quest from a personal perspective. I'm sure this happens to all of us from time to time. You've been anticipating this game. You've read all about it, downloaded the patches - even checked the mods. If only you could get as excited about about actually playing it...

I’ve recently had this happen with a game that deserves better, the Mask of the Betrayer expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2. In fact, this article was intended to be a review. Unfortunately, I had to abandon that idea, as I can’t make myself play and finish the game. I’ve had this game since day one of its release, and I can’t say how many times I’ve started it up only to shut it down again and set it aside for ‘some other time’.

I’d like to think someday things will be just right and I’ll be ready to plunge right into it, but realistically I’m starting to think that may never happen. Am I taking a time out, or am I burned out on this game for some reason? That’s the question I’m asking in this sidequest.

Read it all here.

Wow, it's way past time to kick up a new poll.

The last one asked Was 2007 a good year for RPGs? and most of our readers were positive - 38% said it was a great year while the biggest response - 41% - said it was "OK". A bit over 15% weren't very happy while 5% characterised 2007 as "terrible".

Pulling that together, 20% were unhappy and 80% were at least partly satisfied.

This time around we're asking about your favourite RPG element - hit the poll on the right for some explanation and to cast your vote.

Edit:  Looks like the hamster running the voting link fell off his wheel, so until our hamster wrangler/technical guru looks into that, you'll have to find your way to the Polls forum to vote.

In our latest Side Quest, Josh "Moxie" Sprague delves into the "feel" of a game and how it comes together from the design choices:

This isn't to say that turn-based or active RPGs fall cleanly along these lines. Compare Eschalon: Book I to Final Fantasy VII. Both are turn-based, but the combat of each has a much different feel. In Eschalon, my avatar swings his sword or casts a spell as quickly as I click on an enemy. The game allows me to consider my turn as long as I want, but as soon as I make a decision, it's ready. If I make my decisions quickly, the game feels much like an action game, but with some added control. In a game like Final Fantasy VII, the player gives orders to his characters, but must wait as the turns execute. The battle here becomes more of a stageplay where they player is a director offering input.

Read it all here.

It's nearly time to kick off some formal content for 2008 but it's been a while since we've had a Side Quest discussion piece, so we'll ease into the year with some conversation. Corwin raises the interesting subject of developer manipulation in RPGs - but then adds an oddball theory into the mix, so it  might be fun to see where this goes:

What brought all these thoughts rushing through my head this morning was the ending for Act 1 of The Witcher. I feel manipulated. The Reverend is an obnoxious, arrogant, offensive, hypocrite. He's also old, ugly, male and has a loud, grating voice. There's not much more the developers could have done to make me dislike him either directly, or indirectly.

Read it all here. Don't forget to add your comments; very minor spoilers for The Witcher might apply.

It's a hot, sunny New Year's morning down here - depending on your timezone, some of you may be gearing up for big celebrations or winding down, nursing a sore head.

While we dig out the abacus and work on the RPG of the Year results, we'll switch to an interim poll on the quality of 2007 as an RPG gaming year before tackling some meatier subjects down the track.  We'll post results on the last poll in due course.

Happy New Year! 

So, I'm about to jump in the car and perform the annual mandatory balancing act between different sets of relatives, so time to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a safe and happy holiday.

Many thanks to all our readers, to the team for their awesome work and all the people who contribute, send links or just participate in the forums!

Time to move on to our RPG of the Year poll.

First, Eschalon: Book 1 was the winner of our Indie RPG of the Year poll, taking the honours in a landslide victory with 77% of the vote.  Congratulations to Basilisk Games and I think many of us look forward eagerly to see what Book 2 holds in store.

Soldak's Depths of Peril came second and Spiderweb's Geneforge 4 was third.  I think it's worth noting the comments that this was a landmark year for indies, all around.

So, voting for the RPG of the Year is open, based on a field selected by our editorial team.  Go to it!

Time for a new poll and being that time of the year - you guessed it - we're going to do a couple of "Game of the Year" polls.

First, our last question asked if you would play an RPG that restricted you to the opposite gender. While we expected a lop-sided result, I was a little surprised to see that nearly 10% of respondents won't play the opposite gender. There you go.

So, next we're going to tackle the Indie RPG of the Year - have at it on the right and don't forget to comment after you've voted.

The server move we initiated this weekend has been completed. Everything should be working as always again.... I hope :)

Wow, I lost track of time and didn't realise the last poll have been up so long.

So, the previous results floated a couple of points one way and the other but around 80% of our respondents prefer a physical boxed copy, while 20% like the immediacy of digital downloads.

For this next poll, we're following up on a recent forum conversation on avatars, gender and sexism with a simple question: will you play games that force the opposite gender on you (ie, males playing as females and vice versa).  Hit the poll on the lower right and don't hesitate to comment in the poll thread. 

It's way past time for a new poll.

The last one asked about your impressions of Fallout 3, with 12% saying it looks fantastic, around 25% thinking it looks good but they have some concerns, while 33% aren't impressed so far and 18% hate it.  Breaking that up, around 37% are generally positive while some 51% are negative.  4% couldn't decide and 6% don't like Fallout, so it looks like interest in the franchise is very high.

Our next poll is a simple one: all things being equal, so would you prefer a digital download or a boxed copy?  I've deliberately kept it to two options so you can argue the details such as price, DRM and declining game manuals in the poll comments.

For a couple of hours today the home pages of the sites RPGWatch and MMOWatch showed an empty page. As you can see we are back again. There were no real problems, but I really should not make changes to the site after midnight anymore I suppose :-)

It seems a large chunk of our readership has an interest in Bioshock with some 40% of respondents to our poll  saying they would be playing the PC version asap.  Add the slower adopters and Xbox 360 numbers and around 65% - 70% intend to play the game at some point.

21% had no interest, including a small but significant 13% who don't think we should coverthe title at all.  Also interesting is that despite the growth of the "next gen" console market, we can probably infer our readership remains decidely PC-centric with only 3.11% playing Bioshock on Xbox 360 immediately (and around 5% including late adopters).

Our next poll is on Fallout 3.  You've seen it presented at E3 and GC...what is your opinion so far based on the information revealed to date?  Head to the right to vote and comment.

------- 

In other RPGWatch news, we want to improve our screenshot collection so we're calling for submissions from the community - head to this thread for more info and thanks in advance for any help.

We've kicked up a new poll, so go over and vote (and comment) on the right.  Yes, the topic is the game de jour but beyond measuring interest in Bioshock, it might give a bit of a feel for how many of our readers are moving to consoles (at least for some of their gaming) and perhaps whether some readers hate seeing RPG-lite games on the site.

For the previous poll, most respondents (about 73%) knew that our 1st-year anniversary is fast approaching - how time flies.  We had grand plans when we started RPGWatch and we haven't had the time to follow through on all of them but I think the site is coming along nicely, so far.

If you haven't noticed, we recently added searchable database access (hit the Games link at the top) where you can search by title, developers and publishers.  It will take some time to fill all the gaps but the data is pretty comprehensive for the last 18 months.

The Leipzig GC is a week away and we should have some cool features out of that.  Looking beyond, we'll be calling for additional staff (including MMOWatch) and (quality) articles from interested readers -- if you'd like to help out, please send me a PM or watch for more details.

What's going on in the RPG world for portable gaming systems? Join Mike Anderson as he continues his monthly quest to keep you informed on the hits and misses of RPG's on the GBA, DS and PSP.  This latest monster guide to recent happenings in the portable RPG market has so much content, I'll let it speak for itself:

Another month has come and gone ... and then another, and now we actually have a few interesting handheld RPG's to look at. I will continue to include a full review at the end of some articles (last month I did Final Fantasy III DS), but will move more to including mini-reviews in-line for other games I've been reviewing so that you can get a better picture of multiple games rather than just short snippets and one monster review. So as a result you will get several mid-sized reviews, in fact in this edition you get several small opinions, three medium sized reviews, one large review and a full review feature. This month's featured review is Mazes of Fate for the GBA, which is an attempt by a small independent developer to bring us back to the exciting first person RPG styles of the Wizardry and Ultima games. This isn't the best game I'll talk about in some detail this month but Mazes of Fate is bound to be much more appealing to people typically enamored of western-style computer RPG's ... and it is just really cool.

Read it all here.

What's going on in the RPG world for portable gaming systems? Can you get a decent role-playing experience on the go? Mike Anderson catches us up on the latest RPG's on the GBA, DS and PSP, including a full review of Final Fantasy III on the DS. Here's a snip:

As I mentioned before, Final Fantasy III is a port of a classic game - one that was never released in the US. The first two games were released, and then nothing for a while until the game called Final Fantasy VI in Japan got a release as Final Fantasy III in North America. Confusion continued as later releases and compilations for the Playstation fixed some of the numerology but not others. Being late to the party myself, I find myself confused whenever the subject comes up, and asking fans of the series only makes it worse since it inevitably leads to endless discussion about which one is best and the reasons why that is true. One thing I've learned - compared to other entries in the series Final Fantasy III is big on characters, not so big on a deep and engrossing story, but critical for the introduction of the job system.

Read it all here.

In his second Side Quest, Corwin looks at "The Great Debate" - is turn-based or realtime combat better?

Head here to read the article and don't forget to throw in your opinion.

Mike Anderson takes a second trip into the world of handheld RPG gaming with the latest The Whole Game in My Hand, bringing us up to date with the latest releases and the outlook for each of the handheld platforms.  Also included is a full review of Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony for PSP.  Here's a snip:

The to-hit bonus for ported games being crap has to be something like +4 with a greatly extended critical range. So why should this game even be of interest? Because new content based on existing franchises has worked well on the PSP –as the Grand Theft Auto and Syphon Filter games have shown. Also, games like the two Untold Legends have demonstrated that an action-RPG is a near-perfect fit for the PSP hardware and controls. What those games lacked was a compelling reason to play – they featured generic characters, stories and combat, even by action-RPG standards. Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony will not change any opinions you might have about deep stories in action-RPG’s, but it is a fun game that is the best handheld action-RPG yet and will keep you going for many hours if you can get past the limitations and issues.

We continue our preview of 2007, covering more action titles, indies and speculation on a number of topics.  Here's a snip:

Pulling back from specific games, will 2007 see any particular trends? Apart from the long-term general action-isation of the genre, it's hard to pick any movements with confidence.  I'd like to predict the arrival of a thriving indie mid-tier market enabled by digital delivery but, frankly, there's little sign of a stream of new indies to follow this current batch.  I'd also like to predict this year's diversity and new IPs will continue but, again, it's not likely...2007 is just a trick of accidental timing (assuming the expected titles actually ship, of course). 

Head here to read it all.

It's traditional at this time of year to release Yet Another Retrospective and we wouldn't want to let you down.  Our latest Side Quest starts with an overview of the RPGs of 2006 and then kicks off the first part of a 2007 Preview:

2006 should be stricken from the annals of CRPG history.  Not because nothing of any note was released - that’s something roleplay fans have learned to expect.  No, it’s because it should have been a fantastic year and ended up a hodge-podge collection of botched releases, compromised gameplay and worse: failed potential that sometimes offered just enough brilliance to really make it hurt.

Read on...

There's a mood...a sense the greater gaming public has embraced Oblivion as the new template for all future RPGs. Rules are out, simulations are in. But is it really the best path to better gameplay in future RPGs?

There has been an inexorable move toward action/RPGs for many years (in fact, the term is redundant – they’re almost all action/RPGs) but since the success of Oblivion, there’s a sense that the general player base has awakened and co-opted the genre -- finally, they’re saying, RPGs have crawled out of their grognard past and caught up with modern gaming.  Rules-based play is old-fashioned and out-moded; being the character on screen in a cinematic first-person action extravaganza is real roleplaying. 

Read our latest Side Quest here -- and don't forget to express your opinion.

In our first Side Quest at RPGWatch, Corwin looks at roleplaying in modern CRPGs from both the player's and the game's perspective.  Do modern CRPGs really offer any roleplaying and do modern players really want it?

How much Role playing really happens in a modern CRPG? According to a recent readers poll on a well known gaming site, more than a third of all respondents said they only played ‘themselves’ and fewer than that actually tried to play a role. Should this be surprising, or has the ‘Role’ disappeared from our gaming?

Head here to read it all and don't forget to throw in some comments.  Just in case you aren't aware, guests are able to post in news comments threads.

We've added the first of many additional site features - RSS Feeds
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Hello and welcome! After many months of planning and hard work, we are now live.

The current site represents a basic feature set, with more advanced features planned as we move along. In the meantime, choose your preferred skin (you'll find a Light and Dark choice on the menu bar at the top) and join us regularly for the latest RPG and MMOG news and exclusive articles.

More about RPGWatch...

"In September 2006, the editors of Gamasutra asked its readership of game industry professionals to chime in and vote for which game in the role-playing genre "brought the genre forward" in the biggest way - whether it be an early game that helped define the RPG, or a more recent one which took those core ideas and developed a more rewarding experience than before. Specifically, we asked:

"Which role playing game over the entire history of the genre do you think has made the biggest 'quantum leap', and why?"

As part of a recent Game Metrix study, comScore surveyed both the heavy and medium gamer segments regarding their attitudes about in-game advertising. Thirty-seven percent of heavy gamers (those who play games at least 16 hours a week) agreed that featuring actual products or companies in games make the games feel more realistic.

Acclaim is about to take product placement to another level with its free, ad-supported massively multiplayer online games next year. Game industry veteran Dave Perry, who's directing 2Moons for Acclaim and creating several additional MMO games, wants to open up the door for corporate-sponsored micro transactions.

"When you buy a virtual item, we're going to do a search to see if any advertiser in real-time is willing to pick up the cost of that item," said Perry. "If you want this sword, it would put up a message and ask if you would like Coca-Cola to buy this item for you."

One of the new features that are recently added is certainly the Dark Souls effect. Dark Souls are one of the key elements in the game. As you know from the background story, they are the right hands of Pompolic. By capturing them after some time a negative effect will influence the character for a short period of time. As the player moves to the end of the game, these negative effects will be longer and appear more often. For the Warrior all input damages will be doubled and the character can't run. The Amazon's health will slowly decrease and the character's strength will be reduced to half, thus making 50% less damage.

What could Bethesda, or any other developer for that matter, have done to keep my interest level high, and keep me logging in to their world, immersing myself in their content? Again, I stress, the answer is simple. Provide distractions. Provide simple little things that would keep me coming back day after day, night after night, even if I only had 10 minutes to spare. Heck, some "hardcore" gamers might even consider these types of things worthless and meaningless at first glance. But lately, one of the current industry-wide objectives is to find a way to capture and engross the "casual gamer" and turn them onto playing video games. Oblivion failed to do that on every account. But Oblivion (and Bethesda) are not the only ones who are failing at this. Apparently, it's an industry-wide "epidemic." All I have to do is look at the game icons on my desktop that go unclicked for more examples. Even beyond those, I've got the stack of games literally sitting within arms reach from me on my desk, that remain uninstalled. If you seriously want examples, I'll give them to you, just ask. But I don't think it needs to be done. I'd rather you all ask yourself which games failed you, and then we can all discuss that.

The 500MB demo offers a mix of single- and multiplayer gameplay utilizing both the RTS and RPG elements from the full game. Included in the demo is an extensive single-player mission taken directly from the game, and a LAN-playable skirmish mode with two available races (Elves and Undead - each with three heroes to choose from).

In "Mass Effect," a next-generation role-playing game for the Xbox 360 scheduled for release in the first half of 2007, Walters and lead writer Mike Laidlaw recall that creating the characters became a team effort. [The first installment of a planned trilogy, the game takes place in the year 2183 and revolves around an ancient prophecy that says that every 50,000 years machines come to this galaxy to harvest all organic life -- and the time of their return is approaching.]

With the third game in the series, Piranha Bytes is hoping to bring the same kind of positive progression to the gameplay with new combat features, improved user interface, and even more open-ended options. Care is being given to create a storyline that transcends the all-too-familiar good versus evil conflict. choices will be presented that not only supply the chance to help the orcs, but they'll be presented in a way that will make the idea sound like the right and just one. What looks evil at one point may actually look good towards the middle of the game. The new combat system has some key additions that should help with accessibility. These include a soft lock, a tweaked combat system, and a ten slot quick access bar at the screen's bottom.

GB: How did you get involved with Wasteland?

Ken: Brian Fargo visited me in Phoenix and described a post World War III game that Interplay wanted to do using some new coding techniques that Alan Pavlish had developed. He asked me if I could come up with such a game, maybe modeled along the lines of the movie "Red Dawn"? I told him I thought I could.

New screenshots for The Guild 2 are now available for download in regular and high resolutions along with the GC movie trailer for this medieval role-playing strategy sequel being developed at 4HEAD Studios. You can also view the images online, while the very high resolution clip shows off the game in a bit under two minutes of mostly new, in-engine footage.

The whole world lies in ruins. Humanity is almost annihilated. Due to the high-level of radiation cities became unsuitable for living. Outside cities, as rumours say, there are endless burned out deserts and wilds of mutated forests. The survived still remember about the past greatness of human. But the remnants of the civilization gradually become just memories, spin with stories and turn into legends.

GSUK: The Movies and Black & White 2 didn't enjoy the same level of success as previous Lionhead titles, despite being critically well received. Would you put their lack of success down to marketing?

PM: It's very easy to blame marketing departments and publishers when sales don't live up to expectations, but in reality there are many, many reasons for what happened, so I'll just focus on three. Firstly, the PC market has been declining; the number of PC-only titles that have been successful is nonexistent. And, in fact, The Movies was, in sales terms, the most successful original IP over the Christmas period. Secondly, launching any game over the Christmas period is challenging, as there is so much focus on a few games which have massive marketing budgets behind them. Thirdly, I think the type of people playing and buying PC games has changed. If you exclude World of Warcraft, there seems to be many more casual gamers playing games on the PC than hardcore gamers.

Jonric: In your own words, what kind of game will Pompolic: Call for Heroes be, and what kind of player is likely to find it most appealing?

Attila Siladji: It's a third-person action game with some RPG elements. There will be a lot of action, and because of that, it should appeal to gamers who are hungry for this type of play. Besides killing the bad guys, the player will need to capture the Dark Souls, the servants of Pompolic. They will be well protected by monsters. The player will gain certain amounts of experience for each enemy you kill, which will help to upgrade the character's strength, health and armor.

As long as Wizards is allowed their autonomy by corporate overlord Hasbro, it looks like they're going to remain a surprisingly spry and innovative force in gaming. RPGs surely aren't their only focus, and most of their actual innovation seems directed toward board games and miniatures, but the potential for innovative RPGs remains. However, as a part of a huge corporate hegemony, Wizards is also just a heartbeat away from bureaucratic control at any moment.

With the situation currently as it is, do you think that the Deus Ex universe will ever be revisited?

I wish I knew, but you'd have to ask someone at Eidos about that. I'd love to go back there, myself. There are plenty more games to set and stories to tell in that universe. I miss the Dentons a lot... Hey, Eidos, wanna sell the IP?

A commonly held distinction is that the Asian-influenced RPG features a pre-determined protagonist, while the Western style leans towards a customized character. The former offers an ability to let the gamer play a greater role in the plot of the game, but the latter is where we can find actual personal involvement and emotional attachment. Sure, on the average customization boils down to a handful of numbers with no inherent meaning, but those are our numbers, and it does imbue the title with a sense of personal investment.

Wouldn't it be great if we had both?

3) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Multi-Platform, 2004)

The Grand Theft Auto games have always been fairly open, but it is in the state of San Andreas that you could really play a role. In the beginning, the protagonist, CJ, is pretty much a blank slate, and through the course of the game you get to mold him to whatever you see fit. Should your CJ be a gleefully rotund gangbanger, always wearing his colors and getting respect in his hood? Or would you rather turn him into a lean, mean, killing machine, decked out in the latest fashions and obscene amounts of bling for his high-brow social engagements? The myriad ways in which you could alter and customize CJ in the great sandbox that is San Andreas really helped the game feel like you were playing a role, especially compared to the fairly worthless protagonists of the first three Grand Theft Auto titles.

Years ago a dimensional portal to the Outer Worlds was suddenly opened, and an enemy from the darkness encroached on our world. Led by a demon named Pompolic, armies of demonic hordes quickly overran most of the planet. The origin of Pompolic remains unknown, but it is certain that this malevolent spiritual being possesses supernatural powers. His desire is obvious: possess the people and turn them into minions of his dark army. He wields his power through his servants, the Dark Souls. The Dark Souls, protected by horde of monsters, infiltrate people's minds and make them slaves of evil. The denizens of our world are on the edge of total annihilation.

We are proud to announce that we have opened a dedicated website for our upcoming game, Pompolic : Call for Heroes. This is a 3D action game with RPG elements placed in a fantasy world. There are 2 different characters the player can choose from, each with unique weapons and abilities. And of course, there are dozens of monsters...

Since its announcement, Russian RPG-project named Not The Time For Dragons received little publicity. Information starvation could not be satiated with but a handful of previews based entirely on the official press release and short comments by the developers. And there is much yet to reveal about such an interesting project. Based on a solid and popular setting (the game's based on a novel by popular Russian fantasy writers Nick Perumov and Sergei Lukyanenko), the game's using The Engine from Blood Magic to breathe life into the world, spicing it all up with some very intriguing gameplay features. Plus, do we really have an abundance of promising party-based RPGs nowadays? And yet, no new facts... Unable to bear such an injustice, we embarked on a holy quest of shedding the light on this project by questioning the developers about all the juicy details.

It is perhaps fair to say that the Japanese have been bolder in their approach to the role-playing game - Final Fantasy VIII took a turn for the technological without missing a beat, and Skies of Arcadia seamlessly blended airships and swashbuckling - but even if we stick to our domestic role-playing games - free of giant hair, effeminate male protagonists, and the same story told 12 times over - the genre still reeks of standard openings, closings, transitions, narrative devices and themes.


This is ironic, considering the roots the American role-playing game has in the pencil-and-paper world. For example, Alkabeth, the precursor to Ultima, was totally derivative of Dungeons and Dragons. But while the pencil-and-paper RPG scene rapidly expanded to fit every niche imaginable - horror, intrigue, adventure, and romance - their digital counterparts stayed as close as possible to plate mail and red dragons.

This report provides a unique insight into one of the most complex of computer games genres: the Role Playing Game (RPG).

The RPG genre is calculated from a sample of 272 RPG games. Standard deviations are used to identify key selling points and new games potentials.

The second part of the report uses the same games analysis software to undertake an investigation into the way platform technology, PC and Console in this case, influence fundamental aspects of RPG design.

The report concludes with general principles of relevance to both RPG developers and publishes and the games developer community in general.

Key Selling Points, Genres and Platforms:

In this report we investigate the underlying nature of role playing games (RPGs), clarifying the subtleties and complexities that characterise such games. We also identify two very important sub-genres, within the main RPG genre, and the role of platform technology in creating them.

Games can be compared both against each other and against their industry attributed genre profiles. As a result we can spot developmental trends and identify the Key Selling Points (KSPs) of individual games and franchises.

Fable was pretty much portrayed as one of the most open games of all time, but in terms of hype, it failed to meet the high expectations that you gave the game. There was even a forum post where you apologized about this: why did it get to that level?

Well, it started with this fatal line that I made and that was that I wanted to make Fable the greatest role playing game of all time. I kinda still defend that because I honestly don't see the point in making a game that you don't honestly believe has a chance of being the greatest game of all time. I meet the press quite a lot, every 6-8 weeks there's some sort of press interview. The way I work then is to get a system in, play around with it, polish it, make it better. Sometimes I leave it as it is and sometimes I throw it away.

I think what ended up happening was twofold: because I was meeting people so frequently I was talking about features that actually hadn't gone through that process, like the tree example. Actually it was stupid! Growing trees took a lot of the processing power that could have been used for combat. What does growing trees really add for the player?

FiringSquad: What can you tell us about the Austin studio's first game projects and will they be similar to the first person action-RPGs that you have developed in the past?

Raphael Colantonio:Both the Austin and Lyon's office will be co-developing on the same games. The idea is to collaborate and get the best expertise of both places. So this won't really affect the Lyon office, but it certainly makes the communication process different.

"I do have a kind of very story-heavy, story-based kind of RPG game that I'm currently designing, but I'm still looking for a publisher willing to publish it", Gilbert explained. "[It's] very heavily story-based, a lot of sensibilities of adventure games mixed with some of the action fun RPG elements."

"The thing I'm trying to do with the game right now is kind of meld it with an RPG," he continued, "So what you've got is the kind of large world exploration that you have in an RPG that you don't really have with an adventure game. You've got the action, some light combat, you know, Diablo-style combat going on with it, but it is also infused with really good adventure-game-style puzzles and adventure-style sensibilities to the storytelling.

Eurogamer: One of the things I like as a player is to find out more of the back story by being thorough. By poking around in dark corners and finding old notes that give clues away, and things pinned to notice boards, or chests to break in to. Games like Silent Hill, Metroid Prime and Resident Evil have always favoured this approach, but then you get games like Oblivion where there are more books and more items of text to read than most gamers could ever have time or energy to read, and games like Half-Life 1 or 2 which have few secrets to uncover. Do you feel text can still play an important role in providing a deeper narrative or is it more about listening in on NPC conversations these days?

Warren Spector: I don't think it'll surprise anyone that I like text in games but I recognise that a lot of players don't. The fundamental experience of videogames is, and should be, seeing, listening and doing, but there's certainly a place for a certain amount of optional text.

The key for me is to give as many players as possible as many ways to get into your game as you can. If players want to ignore text, they should be able to. Heck, if players want to be able to bypass combat, let 'em.

Eurogamer: There's a certain irony that you're working with Valve when it's clear that Gabe Newell has an almost polar opposite design philosophy to yours. As you know, he firmly believes that gamers should get to experience "as much entertainment as possible", but that making something where players may miss five sixths of the game is a "mistake". He says, "You spend all this time to build stuff most players will never ever see." That's a pretty wholesale rejection of your company's mantra of allowing players to craft their own unique experiences through in-game choices, don't you think? Who's right here?

Warren Spector: Well, I'M right, of course! No, seriously, there's clearly room for a variety of approaches to game design - god, it'd be boring if we all believed the same stuff and made the same kind of game! Fact is, I've been having this argument with Gabe for, oh, let's see... how long have I known him? Nine years? Yeah, all that time. And before that, I used to argue with Richard Garriott and others at Origin about the same damn thing. I'll go to my grave believing I'm right.

But, really, I find the idea that one design philosophy is "right" and another "wrong" (or even that one is better than another) incredibly odd. I mean, is Star Wars better than The Godfather? Is Lord of the Rings better than Goodfellas? Should Stephen Spielberg make nothing but action-adventure movies because they make more money than his more "serious" efforts? Should we elevate Tom Clancy or Dan Brown to the top of the writing heap and stop reading Shakespeare? Does anyone think all music should be aimed at the top of the Billboard charts? I sure don't want to live in a world where everyone sounds like Britney Spears... oh, wait, I already do... Anyway, you get my point...

Software Industry Embraces AMD's Upcoming PC Enthusiast Platform; PC Games Joining Digital Media Software in Transition to Multi-Threaded Applications
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 26, 2006--AMD (NYSE: AMD) announced today broad software developer support for its upcoming four-core, multi-socket enthusiast platform, codenamed 4x4. Leading software developers including Bioware, Cakewalk, Crytek, Havok, Irrational Games, Midway, NERO and Sony have been working on software applications and games to take advantage of multi-core processors and benefit from AMD's Direct Connect Architecture. [...]

"BioWare is committed to delivering truly amazing next-generation gaming experiences. Our future title "Dragon Age(TM)" is an excellent showcase of what we can deliver by combining our BioWare Eclipse Engine(TM) with its multi-core design philosophy with the power of an AMD four-core, multi-socket architecture," said Trent Oster, director of technology at BioWare Corporation.

"Afterfall: Prelude" is a short, but fully-featured game set in a pre-war German military base a dozen years before the game's timeline. "Afterfall:Prelude" will offer:

- One of a kind atmosphere mixed of a post-apocalyptic, known to you from our stories and descriptions, Afterfall's climate, and that of various survival horrors.
- Circa 3-4h gameplay
- 7 atmospheric locations to explore. All brimming with delicious details.
- Original game's "Afterfall" v1.0 beta mechanics, which is a depleted, but self-sufficient version.
- Over 300 items, which can possibly be modified and assembled by the player character.
- A complete story, an unusual hero, whose actions you might direct, and a distinct time frame.

The industry seems to have been brainwashed into thinking that all a game needs to have included to be called a role-playing game is a paint by numbers plot coupled with experience points and leveling up. That is not what a role-playing game is supposed to be about. Role-playing is about loosing yourself in a character, a concept that is lost on far too many role-playing games, especially (but not exclusively) of the console variety.

...our latest gripe turns to originality, or to put it better, the lack thereof. Now, I understand that creativity and the spark of inspiration when it comes to creating a new game, especially a role-playing game, are not things to take for granted. However, for what seems like an eternity role-playing games have been feeding players the same tired themes and circumstances to the point where one game's plot reads much like most any other.

It simply defies logic how developers can deliver a role-playing game to market, and ask players invest uncountable hours into the adventure, but then simply forget about their accomplishments and start from scratch when a sequel comes along months, or even years later.

Jonathan: Please, briefly introduce yourself.

Randy: Hi, I'm Randy Smith, game designer.

I'm a 5' 10" 31 y.o. Gemini, interested in the cheeses of the world. I worked on Thief 1, 2, and then for a change I worked on Thief 3.

I was a freelance consultant on various projects for a couple of years, and more recently I took a full time job working with Doug Church's team on a Steven Spielberg project here at EALA.

• Dungeon Siege II: Broken Worlds
• Nightwatch
• Titan Quest

Let's talk a bit about Junction Point Studios. The company has been founded about 1.5 years ago, but it's been pretty quiet until now. What have you been doing so far?

JPS currently has about 20 people. We started out working on a pretty epic game with a supportive publisher but, through no fault of our own, the deal got cancelled after about 9 months of work. Since then, we've been working on some stuff with Valve (can't talk much about that), doing concept development for some folks (can't talk at ALL about that, sadly!) and pitching some new game ideas. We're keeping plenty busy!