Which RPG had the strongest effect on you as a person?

[Okagron]

If Fallout 3 caused you to go out and murder an entire family of wild geese, tell us about it!

The murder urge from playing Fallout 3 still lingers in me. It never ceases. It just lingers on and on, consuming my soul each day, one small chunk at a time.

Besides that, my life is pretty good.

 

[Quatlo]

After finishing Planescape: Torment I have instantly regreted playing it, because I liked the story so much I felt really bad that probably nothing will ever come close for a very long time. I completed the game only twice, the second time focusing on all the foreshadowing you miss while playing the game blind. More than a decade later I'm still waiting for my mind to forget it so I can experience it again.

 

[Tigranes]

NWN1 OC helped me understand that sometimes, new things are shit and old things are good, and I should not be suckered by advertising and game 'journalism'.

Thankfully, there were a few hundred more occasions to reinforce this lesson.

 

[Mustawd]

I tried baldur's gate when I was 16 years old....

...and I thought the combat was awful. It affected my life because now I hate rpgs with RTwP and I bitch about any chance I get to remind people that Baldur's Gate was trash. Baldur's Gate 2 was trash. Fuck you, fite me.

Spoiler

IWD is p. cool tho.

 

[Beastro]

Final Fantasy IV is my earliest memory of playing a RPG (even though i'm not sure if it actually the first RPG i played). The story, characters and music left a big impact on me.

It was about the second one for me, first was Countdown to Doomsday.

Looking back on those from my childhood, I realize how much music and other aethetics can effect games. I'm replaying through it atm on GBA and it's nothing like the original due to the utterly shit quality of the music and the overall different feel the game has that seems to be from modernizing many things about it, like speeding up combat.

The big ones for me from the 90s were prolly FFIII or Xenogears, the latter more about the impression it envoked rather than it's teenage philosophizing but the main one was Everquest back when the spirit of actual roleplaying was alive in MMOs.

How prole and cultures change really show how MMOs live far more ephemerally them most video games. You could remake Classic EQ as it was in ever way, and even if you got the same old player numbers or more, it still wouldn't be Classic EQ because of the different people many have become, especially the ruthless, asshole mentality that has gripped MMOs that was as much as reason for the end of EQs classic era than its qualitative decline.

 

[Drowed]

Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol because I was able to write the name of my character the same of the Guildmaster and, when I entered the guild, I read "you are the guildmaster".

...This, and the fact that it was the first RPGs that caused me the will to have the most powerful character possible, explore all the corners, rooms, kill all the enemies, etc. I had played several other games before, but for the first time I felt compelled to be "overpower", to create a character powerful enough to shatter everything in my path, collect the most powerful items and explore all the corners of the map.

The experience was so striking that it affected the way I played RPGs (and games in general) ever since. I have some difficulty in abandoning incomplete quests or ignoring any kind of content, which makes me suffer to complete some games. Which is especially irritating when I play some game where the main story is interesting (or at least vaguely acceptable), but it's full of useless and redundant content scattered around the world and I need to control myself so I don't feel like I need to collect everything everywhere until I burn myself and throw the game away.

 

[aweigh]

If we're talking chronologically then probably Dragon Quest 1 on the NES as it made me realize games with lots of text to read and turn-based battles were my favorite type of video game. If we're talking as an adult with their taste's already shaped then it was the Wizardry series with the Elminage series close behind (no surprise as they are Wizardry's spiritual sequels).

Wizardry and Elminage games did two things for me:

- These games made me realize I had been missing something in the type of RPG I enjoyed and opened new ways for me to enjoy my favorite type of video game that I had never before thought possible by giving me the opportunity to completely redefine (and rediscover) aspects of this genre that I love.

- They snapped me out of the dullness I had been experiencing for about two years then as a result of terminating a relationship of several years. That experience completely broke my spirit and made me unable to enjoy anything until I played these games (specifically Wizardry 5, Wizardry Empire 2 and Elminage Gothic).

Wizardry and its clones literally got me to touch base again with RPGs (and video games in general) during a state of depression so deep I could not enjoy anything and as such I formed a very strong connection with this type of game (turn-based dungeon crawler). I wouldn't say they changed my world view but they definitely changed my adult palette for entertainment on a fundamental level.

I played these games out of desperation and ended up finding an experience with which I could bond with through the act of mapping out dungeons and enchanting weapons and collecting Summons and building and managing my party. I daresay the act of mapping out a dungeon was almost therapeutic. It felt like I was discovering an entirely new genre of undiscovered gaming that I had never seen or experienced before and it was amazing.

EDIT: I do find it neat that DQ1 was inspired by Wizardry; gives me a sense of completeness and coming full-circle.

 

[Beastro]

Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol because I was able to write the name of my character the same of the Guildmaster and, when I entered the guild, I read "you are the guildmaster".

My friend and I loved playing the shareware version of that.

 

[sser]

BG2 cut me deep.

I put my foot through a box in the attic and that diamond casing caught me between the toes.

 

[Nael]

Morrowind. There was just something magical about exploring an alien land habited by gray elves who didn't like you.

Morrowind really captured the spirit of being deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq for me as well.

 

[mfkndggrfll]

Fallout 2 really affected my bowel movement

 

[mondblut]

Many of them taught me that if people are not enemies to be killed for experience and loot or tools to be exploited for useful information or reward, they are just pieces of scenery - and quite badly done at that.

Also, if you can't customize your friends as you need and control them completely, they usually suck.

Last but not least, never save a damsel in distress. It is always a trap.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Fallout 2 really affected my bowel movement

Yes, you had a huge bowel movement all over your thread. We saw. Go away.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Every TES game from Morrowind on (including Oblivion with Guns) has made me feel a deep sense of ennui verging on existential despair. This sounds like a joke, but I’m dead serious. I forced myself to play them because of the near universal mainstream acclaim. The experience was so empty, so meaningless, that it ended up being incredibly depressing. “Great, another dungeon that’s of no significance whatsoever... ...why am I doing this? What’s the point of playing this game? What’s the point of being alive?”

And that’s just the start, because when I have an existential crisis, like the kind brought on by playing a Bethesda title, I start engaging in “risk seeking behavior” in real life to balance things out. Morrowind wasn’t so bad, it just led to a summer of drunk driving and chlamydia. Oblivion inspired terrifying drug use and gambling. I’m still ashamed about what happened after Fallout 3, let’s just hope what happens in Vegas really stays in Vegas. Pretty sure spending more than four or five hours on Skyrim would lead to an overdose—not as young as I used to be.

If I’m ever found dead lying atop a mountain of Bolivian marching powder, know that Todd Howard bears the blame.

 

[Nutria]

Darklands taught me how to put myself into the mind of some who has a completely different belief system from my own.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Oblivion.

My PC fried just when Oblivion came out but I was desperate to play it. So I spend almost all of my money on a new machine that could not even run Oblivion properly. So I then went and spend literally like 3 weeks modding the game and experimenting with different settings and mods until it was finally playable. It looked worse than Morrowind on smallest resolution and the lowest details but it was playable. And it was the worst game of all time.

There's a valuable life lesson here somewhere but I haven't figured out what it is yet.

 

[Farewell into the night]

Revenant. It sucked me in that I didn't wanted to play football with my friends. Later I moved to World of Warcraft and play it for 10 yers. The grind was real for me.

 

[Salvo]

Gothic 2. It was my first RPG and got me to love the genre!

 

[Kaivokz]

Shining Force. I first played it at age 3. It was my introduction to reading & rudimentary strategy, and instilled a passion for virtue in me, which eventually led me to Plato and then Aristotle. Aristotle’s Ethics/Politics & Spinoza’s Ethics have influenced my character and career more than anything else, but it all began with the parables in Shining Force.

TLDR: Mass Effect. Mass Effect had a strong impact on me because its side quests were so stupid. Weird but true.

I had a similar experience a few years ago, though I think the culmination was in trying to play Inquisition. At some indiscernible moment, the last shredded vestiges of the completionist inside me exhaled a final ragged breath. I’ll still “complete” games if I want to/the challenge is enjoyable, but I won’t complete games if I don’t want to... which sounds like common sense, but there you go.

 

[Shaewaroz]

Bard's Tale 3 - my first cRPG. Inspired me to start playing tabletop RPGs and reading fantasy novels.

And I have to mention another one...

Jagged Alliance - absolutely blew my young mind with it's depth (strategic and tactical) and with it's interactive NPCs with Sir-Tech voice actors, that were unparalleled at the time. I had never heard voice acting in a game before JA. It was just so far ahead of anything else I had played prior.

 

[Vlajdermen]

Fallout NV. It got me into country music.

 

[Hyperion]

Final Fantasy 3 US (6). Wasn't my first game, however. As a kid, it was just an incredible world to experience, that blended steampunk and fantasy nicely, had some quirky characters, and a soundtrack that I can hum in my head to this day when I think of parts. Everything about it was fun, from basic fights, to the larger battles / dungeons that made you assemble 2 or 3 full groups, stomping over enemy soldiers in Magi-Tek armor, to the midpoint cataclysm it's known for.

But, after playing it as an adult, I have to say the characters, while somewhat simple compared to modern games, and WRPGs, were far more poignant in their execution. Edgar and Sabin in particular stand out, because they remind me of my brother and I. My brother, the elder of us, is pretty much Edgar to a tee - an Engineer, dutiful, and most importantly understood the of family. He's the one who settled down, and gave my parents grandchildren. The prodigal son for lack of better words, while I'm sitting here typing about video games, valuing my freedom and wanting nothing but to lift. And he has never given me grief for it, if anything, supporting my decision to be left alone, and pursue something else, whatever it may be.

 

[Cael]

Back in the 1980s. Ultima 4. Virtue system.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Realms of Arkania HD.
On a serious note, Gothic was probably on of the first rpgs where I not only bothered to acquire the ways of thievery but also the one where I had the satisfaction of looting every single container. Also kicking Bullitt's ass. And being an asshole in general.

 

[LeStryfe79]

NWN2:SOZ because it's the cocksucker that got me to sign up to this god forsaken place.