Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
It doesn’t hold up but while it was happening I don’t think there was a better gaming experience than Vanilla WoW. Obviously for some it wasn’t the first MMO experience, but for many it was, and it was pure magic.
The random friends made, and mortal enemies you would drop everything you were doing to try and kill. Spending 6 hours clearing a dungeon(read wailing caverns) for the first time with random people you met in chat. Getting your first mount, walking into molten core with 39 other people and killing your first raid boss. Getting your first epic. The stupidity of barrens chat/whatever the equivalent the scumbag alliance had. The first time you had guild mates come to your rescue when some no-life higher level person was camping you and it devolving into an impromptu war between everyone in the zone and their friends. That time you pulled off an epic 1 v 2. Shit talking all the other classes in your guilds class chat during raids.
The drama ohh the drama, the e-gf/bf that became peoples husbands and wives, the guild leaders wife e-humping half the guild. Relationships destroyed because someone would rather spend their time in azeroth that just about anything else.
Drooling over the gear the best players on the server had. Battling on the front lines of alterac valley all night, going to bed and rejoining the same battle, sometimes to cheers from your fellow soldiers that you had rejoined the fight.
I don’t think there will ever be anything like it again, we know too much, have access to to much info, but for that brief period in time wow was the greatest game ever.
Wow took over my life for a while there, and then again with WoTLK. The 2v2 and 3v3 arenas were so much fun. The cool thing was that it wasn’t grindy in the beginning, you could just run quests at your level and level up at a reasonable pace while exploring the game. I had played Everquest before WoW and that game required so much grinding just to get a level, sometimes it would take weeks.
FFXIV is better. I like the fights better and the lore better. It’s a great social platform, but I think it has jumped the shark. Still a great concept. For very similar reasons.