All of this is layered upon a traditional yet polished MMO foundation of go-there-do-this quests and hotbar-driven combat.

In their stead you'll find an awesome main quest line, terrific public quests called FATEs, a slew of great instanced dungeons, and a bewildering amount of Final Fantasy fan service. Gone are the horrible systems and bugs that plagued the original launch.

Fast forward three years, and 14 has been rebuilt from the ground up in the form of Version 2.0: A Realm Reborn.

A questionable fatigue system reduced your experience rewards the longer you played an impossibly complex interface made playing it a nightmare and even if you were willing to look past these horrible flaws, countless bugs and glitches made it all but unplayable. When Final Fantasy 14 launched back in 2010, it was a broken mess. That its a competent and addictive action game is almost a bonus. And as silly as the game sounds on the surface, the humor is often incredibly subtle and restrained. But its not just in the writing the game lets you participate in some insane, unbelievable set-piece moments, like gunning down a fleet of alien ships from a POTUS-themed AA canon. Saints Row IV is genuinely hilarious thanks to its sharp writing and voice-over performances. Oh, and youre the President of the United States of America. Just you, Keith David, and your Dubstep Gun. No revelatory interweaving of mechanics and story-telling. There are no ambiguous moral choices to be found here. In fact, its the apex of whats starting to feel like old-school game design, as it throws pretense by the wayside in favor of being a god damn video game. Youd be hard-pressed to think of a year that was more replete with wonderfully artistic, experimental, boundary-pushing games than 2013. The only things that prevent NBA 2K14 from being higher on this list are repeated slices of commentary, and some annoyingly last-gen features that appear as an inevitable consequence of developer Visual Concepts being forced to create a cross-gen game. Theres now a proper story in My Career, giving context to your achievements as you rise from rookie to Hall of Famer. If friends ask you to show them a game that really looks and feels next-gen, show them NBA 2K14.Īnd while there are fewer modes on PS4 and Xbox One, the quality of series staples like My Career and My GM (former Association) has been significantly upgraded. All the awesome presentation and sim details are present and correct in both versions, but next-gen adds amazing player likenesses and animations to the party, really bringing the new balance between offense and defense into sharp focus. While the current-gen version of NBA 2K14 merely maintains the status quo as 'the best sports game around,' its the next-gen iteration that really impresses.

Best video games 2016 metacritic