The Best RPGs of the 2010s

Ask anyone who finished it what they remember and you get the Bloody Baron questline — a missing-wife job that curdles into a drunk, guilty man and a horror in the cellar, with no karma meter to tell you afterwards which ending was the good one. CD Projekt Red released it worldwide on 19 May 2015 and kept patching for years. The side quests are why the main plot barely matters.

ZA/UM put it out on 15 October 2019 and later rebuilt the same Steam product into The Final Cut, which is why the store page still carries the 2019 date and why this keeps its decade slot. Your skills talk back as separate voices, and Inland Empire, the one that interviews your necktie, will cheerfully walk you into a conclusion the evidence never supported.

Loyalty missions look like optional side content right up until the suicide mission, where every conversation you skipped turns into a named crew member dying in a vent and the game refuses to soften it. BioWare released it on 26 January 2010, and Electronic Arts returned the standalone game to Steam in May 2023 under the awkward banner "Mass Effect 2 (2010) Edition".

P-Studio's 2016 release went out on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 in Japan on 15 September and stayed on those two platforms; PC only ever received the later Royal revision, in October 2022, so the link here is Wikipedia. Confidants are the engine: an afternoon spent with the doctor is an afternoon not spent in a Palace, and the calendar never forgives you.

Oil spreads across the floor, you set it alight, the fire boils a blood puddle into steam, and your own necromancer chokes to death standing in it. Elemental surface combat is the reason people still run this in co-op. Larian Studios self-published on 14 September 2017 and later upgraded the same Steam app into the Definitive Edition, which is what the link opens.

Ending E is a credits sequence you shoot your way through while strangers' save files volunteer to fly alongside you, and finishing it asks whether you will delete your own save so the next player gets the same help. PlatinumGames built it with Square Enix and it reached PC on 17 March 2017. Yoko Taro's ideas finally got combat worth playing them through.

Obsidian Entertainment built it for Bethesda Softworks and shipped on 19 October 2010, bugs and all. Speech checks are the whole design argument: pour points into the right place and you can talk Mr. House out of his own city, walk past the last fight, and settle a war by saying words in the correct order. Few RPGs since have trusted dialogue that far.

Toby Fox, credited on the Steam page simply as tobyfox, released it on 15 September 2015 having written the music, the code and the jokes himself. The Mercy option is the trick: every monster can be spared instead of killed, the game quietly keeps count, and a full pacifist run rewires the bosses, the ending, and eventually how your save file speaks to you.

Bethesda Game Studios launched it on 11 November 2011 for Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and that original app is still sold on Steam in its own right, separate from the 2016 Special Edition this batch's remasters list takes. Shouts are what stuck: an hour spent hunting a word wall, then a giant knocked off a rooftop with Fus Ro Dah.

Gaur Plain is the moment: you crest a rise on Wii hardware and the draw distance simply keeps going until a whole region is standing in front of you. Monolith Soft released it in Japan on 10 June 2010, and it has only ever run on Nintendo hardware — Wii, New 3DS, Switch — so the link is Wikipedia rather than a store page. The Monado shows you a killing blow before it lands.

Intelligent Systems developed it with Kou Shibusawa and Nintendo published it on 26 July 2019 for Switch, still the only platform it has ever appeared on, so Wikipedia carries the link. Choosing a house at Garreg Mach splits the campaign several ways, and the students you tutored on quiet Sunday afternoons come back years later as enemy commanders you have to kill.

The passive skill tree is the decade's most intimidating character sheet, a sprawl you navigate like a subway map, and active skills sit in sockets on your gear, so a build is a jigsaw you assemble rather than a class you pick. Grinding Gear Games launched it free on 23 October 2013 and has run it on expansion leagues ever since. Diablo's crown sat here for years.

Kickstarter money and a room full of Infinity Engine veterans produced this on 26 March 2015; Xbox Game Studios is now the publisher on its Steam page, Microsoft having bought Obsidian since. The Endless Paths of Od Nua drops floor after floor straight down beneath your own keep, optional the entire way, and the lower levels will end a party that wandered in early.

Game of the Year awards came from Game Informer, Polygon and IGN after its 18 November 2014 launch, and then a decade of jokes about the Hinterlands, the starter zone where players stalled for hours picking up shards and decided the whole thing was padding. War table judgements are the keeper: you sentence prisoners, and the game remembers who you spared.

Saviour Schnapps was the fight everyone had in 2018: you save by drinking a bottle, bottles are scarce, and one bad ambush costs you the last hour of your life. Warhorse Studios and Deep Silver shipped it on 13 February 2018 into a medieval Bohemia with no magic in it and a hero who begins unable to read. No autosave RPG has made me creep up on a bandit camp like that.

Square Enix and Acquire put it on Switch on 13 July 2018 and brought it to PC on 7 June 2019, in a sprite-and-blur art style the rest of the industry promptly borrowed. Break and Boost is the combat: chip a monster's shield down with the weapon it hates, stagger it, then dump four banked turns into one swing. Eight stories that barely touch is the flaw; the battles carried me anyway.