Curious to hear what the criteria for “masterpiece” is, otherwise I think it is just peoples’ subjective opinion of what makes a great game that they also think others might agree about being a great game. Genuinely curious, interested in discussion, not saying this to shut down any of the answers here.
Historically a masterpiece has been a (or the) work that demonstrates an artist is capable of utilizing their medium to its fullest extent, i.e. it has been mastered. Per ye olde Wiki:
Historically, a “masterpiece” was a work of a very high standard produced by an apprentice to obtain full membership, as a “master”, of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.
In that light, I’d say the best qualified would be games that completely utilized the capabilities of the platform they were designed for or, perhaps of interest to more people, expanded what everyone thought could be done with those systems. Games which were furthermore well polished and complete, and did not have much room for improvement taking into account the constraints they had to work with at the time. (For instance: No duh we could make Mario 64 run at a higher framerate and have better textures to look nicer on hardware now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t arguably a masterpiece of its time, on the system it was on.) This doesn’t just have to be technical stuff – It could be the way the game used storytelling, its gameplay mechanics, or anything else.
Then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom belong to that category - run smoothly as fuck on one of the lamest consoles there is, and are beautiful and complex.
Spyro and Crash trilogies on the PSX, as well as the Quake 2 port, would definitely merit being called technical masterpieces
On the original Xbox, Phantom Dust would fit that bill, despite being a commercial failure at the time. The tldr is that you create a collection of spells (attacks, traps, dodges, curses, buffs) and try to grab them and the “mana” during the real time duels, in order to beat your opponents. Terrain is semi destructible and you have to take into consideration the trajectory of your spells - www.xbox.com/games/store/…/9PCDNBHR11MR
I spent a fair bit of the past weekend spinning it up and loading my library. Still have some cleanup to do, a fair bit of learning I think, and dipping into the community for some questions. At this point, I’m not sure it holds a ton of value for me personally, but it looks great and has been a lot of fun. Definitely looking forward to what the future brings.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is the most notable example of this. The monastery mission is absolutely brutal both by how difficult it’s intended to be, and by how broke it is, on a technical level.
It’s definitely interesting, but it’s so difficult.
The game itself, for me. I played it through a few times when it first came out, and then very recently I got it on Steam and played again for the first time since. Still as poignant.
Sorry, Eno caught me first lol. It’s a wonderful game and it would be cool to see more posts like this searching for people to play with as opposed to the weekly “Skyrim released on your refrigerator, should you care? (Seven pages of ads later) No”
If they force you to buy the items they are, by definition, necessary (in context of the game that is).
But are there actually games that do this? Mostly they give you the tokens needed for free to goad you into playing the game ‘for free’ and extort you later on as the game gets increasingly unplayable without buying the stuff.
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