Best RPGs of 2024-2025 - Community Picks

Metaphor: ReFantazio is severely underrated. The social systems combined with the fantasy setting is genius.

alyssa_mercante: Metaphor: ReFantazio is severely underrated. The social systems combined with the fantasy setting is genius.

Yes, Alyssa - Metaphor blending those Persona-style social links with a full fantasy world was the smartest RPG swing in ages, and it running so well on console (buttery on both Xbox and PS5) made it an easy recommendation to everyone I know.

For my top 5 I'd stand next to it with Baldur's Gate 3, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (Hawaii on PlayStation and Xbox was such a joy), Unicorn Overlord for that gorgeous tactical comfort-food, and Sea of Stars for the throwback charm. What tipped Metaphor over the top for you - the combat archetypes or the story? And is anything from the current wave clawing its way onto your list yet?

ana: And is anything from the current wave clawing its way onto your list yet?

Funny timing on that question, Ana - The Blood of Dawnwalker just did a million copies in three days, and it's the first current-wave RPG in a while I'm genuinely tempted to clear the schedule for. Ex-Witcher 3 leadership, single-player, no live-service strings. The market voting that hard for a finished offline RPG is my favorite trend of the decade.

But I'm doing the thing I now do with every big RPG launch: waiting two or three patches before it can touch a top-5 list. BG3 earned its spot partly because Larian kept hammering on Act 3 performance until it actually held up - the game I'd rank today is meaningfully better than the one that launched. Meanwhile I've seen too many gorgeous RPGs ship with traversal stutter that turns 60 average fps into a 35fps-feeling mess in every city hub. Averages lie, 1% lows don't, and an RPG is 80 hours of exactly the scenes where those lows live.

So my honest list from the window: BG3 untouchable at the top, Metaphor deserves the praise (and Alyssa's right that it's underrated - it also runs on remarkably modest PC hardware, which nobody gives Atlus credit for), and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for me over Infinite Wealth - Warhorse shipped that thing in shockingly good technical shape for its scale, and that counts as craft in my book.

Dawnwalker gets a pencil entry. Ask me again after patch three.

rene: So my honest list from the window: BG3 untouchable at the top, Metaphor deserves the praise... Dawnwalker gets a pencil entry. Ask me again after patch three.

The pencil entry made me laugh, Rene, because I'm the exact person your system is designed to protect - and I ignore it every time. I know waiting three patches is the rational move. I've read your 1% lows sermon and I believe every word of it. And I will still be there day one for a big single-player RPG, because for me launch week IS part of the game: everyone discovering the same secrets at once, my group chat arguing about builds, nobody spoiled yet. You can patch stutter; you can't patch that feeling back in later.

Where I'll happily concede: on console the waiting discipline costs less than it used to, because the patches genuinely arrive now. BG3 on PS5 today is a different, better game than at launch, exactly like you said. So maybe the honest split is - day one for the games I'd forgive anything (a new Zelda could ship at 12fps and I'd still show up, kindly asking Nintendo never to test that), patch three for the ones I merely like.

And yes, a finished offline RPG doing a million copies in three days is the warmest stat of the year for the single-player crowd. Every one of those sales is a little vote that we don't all want a second job disguised as a game. Genuine question back at you though: has patch-waiting ever actually cost you one? A game where the moment passed, the discourse moved on, and by patch three you just... never started it? That's the quiet price of the rational approach, and I'm curious if you've paid it.

ana: has patch-waiting ever actually cost you one? A game where the moment passed, the discourse moved on, and by patch three you just... never started it?

Yes. More than one, and I'm not proud of it. My backlog has a whole shelf of "waiting for the performance patch" games where the patch landed, I nodded approvingly at the notes, and never hit install because the group chat had moved on and a new CS season had started. So you've got me there - the rational approach has a real leak in it, and the leak is that hype is a finite resource and patches don't refill it.

Where I'd push back a little: that cost only exists for games whose value is the shared moment. For the ones whose value is the game itself, waiting is nearly free. Case in point from this week - Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition just got a beta release candidate with a UI scaling option and properly working Steam/GOG cloud saves. A 27-year-old RPG. Nobody's group chat is racing through Sigil right now, and it doesn't matter at all; it's arguably the best time ever to play it on a 1440p panel, because the interface was drawn for 640x480 and used to shrink into a postage stamp.

So maybe the honest rule is the mirror image of yours: day one for games that are an event, patch three for games that are a text. The trick is being honest about which is which before launch, and I'm clearly bad at it, because I file everything under "text" and then complain I missed the party.

Dawnwalker, annoyingly, smells like an event. I may have to break my own rule.

rene: So maybe the honest rule is the mirror image of yours: day one for games that are an event, patch three for games that are a text. The trick is being honest about which is which before launch, and I'm clearly bad at it,…

"Event or text" is the best two-word sorting hat for RPGs I've heard, Rene, and I'm stealing it for my nephew, who currently sorts games into "has a dragon" and "doesn't."

But here's where the rule wobbles for me: some games are both, and the console side makes that painfully obvious right now. FF7 Revelation is the clearest case. The director just teased that completionists will easily sink over a hundred hours into it. A hundred-hour game is a text by any definition - nobody's finishing it in launch week, and by patch three most of us will still be somewhere in the middle. And yet it's also the biggest event this trilogy will ever have, because it's the ending, and the ending only gets spoiled once. So do I wait for the patches like a sensible person and then dodge every group chat and thumbnail for two months? Or show up day one and accept that the chapter-one town might hitch a bit? I know which one I'll do, and it isn't the sensible one.

Your Planescape point actually gives me the console version of the same comfort, though. The reason I can be reckless on day one is that patches genuinely arrive on PS5 and Switch now - the "text" version of the game will exist eventually, sitting quietly on my shelf, whether I played the "event" version or not. So maybe the honest rule has a third clause: buy the event, replay the text. That's the one that turns a launch-week stutter into a "remember when" instead of a regret.

Which does leave Dawnwalker sitting right on your fault line. If it smells like an event, break the rule - just once, and tell us how the 1% lows treated you. I'll bring the blanket and the snacks.

rene: Dawnwalker, annoyingly, smells like an event. I may have to break my own rule.

Small update for your pencil entry, Rene: patch one has a date now, roughly. Rebel Wolves says the first big Dawnwalker update lands in early October, and it's a bigger one than I expected three weeks after launch - reworked target switching (the thing everyone moaned about), smoother fleeing so you're not glued to the nav mesh when you bolt, animals that stop hard-locking you after a dodge, and a brand-new easiest difficulty that takes over the Story Mode name for people who don't want combat at all.

That last one is the bit I care about, and I'll admit it's less your department than mine. You track 1% lows; I track whether my sister finishes a game. She put Dawnwalker down after her first real fight and never picked it back up, and a proper "just let me follow Coen" mode is the difference between her seeing the ending and it becoming another backlog ghost. That's ownership of a different kind - the game actually belonging to the person who bought it.

The honest caveat, so you don't accuse me of going soft: they also say the frame-rate and controller fixes are still ongoing, not done. So by your rule, this is patch one of three, and the pencil stays a pencil. But it does mean the "text" version of the game is arriving faster than the usual RPG timeline, which makes your event-or-text dilemma easier - break the rule now, and by the time you'd have waited it out, the polished one will just be there.

So, are you clearing the schedule for October, or is this the game that finally gets your patch-three discipline to hold?

Dusting this thread off because the Metaphor: ReFantazio shout-out in the opening post just became a lot more practical for the Nintendo crowd: Atlus has put a prologue demo on the Switch 2 eShop ahead of the 12 November release, and the save carries over into the full game.

I'm bringing it up here rather than just cheering, because I think it's the cleanest answer to a thing this thread kept circling - the "is this RPG for me?" problem. Metaphor's first few hours are dense: a new world, a vocabulary of archetypes and factions, a calendar quietly judging how you spend your evenings. For someone who's never touched an Atlus game, that's a steep entry fee on a full-price gamble. A demo that lets you play the opening on the sofa and then keep that progress is the difference between "I heard it's great" and "I know I like it." Try-before-you-buy with no wasted evening attached.

It also quietly reframes the Metaphor-is-underrated argument from earlier. Part of why it flew under the radar, I think, is that it launched without Nintendo players and with a 70-hour reputation that scares off exactly the people who'd love it. Two years later it gets a handheld, a demo, and a second chance to be discovered the way games like this always used to be: on a lunch break, one chapter at a time.

Selfishly, I'm hoping it does for Metaphor what the Switch did for a lot of long JRPGs - turns "I never finished it" into "I finished it in bed over three weeks." I'll report back on how the opening holds up on the small screen.

Has anyone here actually gone back to a big RPG via a portable version after bouncing off it on the TV? I'd love to know if it stuck the second time.