Biggest video game surprise?

The binding of Isaac. It looked ok but I wasn't sure. Bought it on a sale and holy shit a few hundred hours later. The highs and lows that game delivers...delivers. From soulcrushing failures to roflstomp overpowered runs.While I like the soundtrack of the first game better the second was awesome and the way edmund handled the reworked game was excellent. Some of the best gaming ever in a zelda meets dark and twisted ren and stimpy.

I'll throw a holler out at Terraria as well. I have a few hundred hours sunk in there easily, and will probably be doing a playthrough soon.

Telltale storytelling games were a big hit with me, and I initially only bought the first one (TWD) because they practically gave it away on steam.

Destiny - I had stopped playing fps/shooters after Quake 2, buddy at work talked me into trying out Destiny, and it was pretty amazing.

Black Desert Online - Very intimidating game at first, but once I learned the various systems the game had, it became the best mmo I've played (except for WoW-Vanilla/BC/Wrath). RNG ruined it for me though.

Bloodborne - Bought a PS4 for this game, and the fun I had playing it was very much worth the cost.

Tomb Raider reboot. Near zero humor yet still damn entertaining. Playing Rise now.

The Last of Us. Yes I knew all the hype and I didn't play it until the PS4 version. I was still surprised.

Doom. It gets better all the way to the end.

Onyxia was like, whaaaaaaat?

Janx said:

Secret of Mana. Bought it right before I went into boot camp and had zero idea what it was other than it had SQUARE on the box. Holy jesus did that game deliver.

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That blew me away too. Borrowed it from some dude solely because it said square (I had just beaten ff6 and CT)

I'd say Earthbound. I didn't know what to expect since I was used to typical JRPG trope being put out on the SNES but the storytelling and characters in that game are so monumentally better than any other JRPG on the SNES that it made the other games feel (ironically b/c of the tone and artstyle) childish compared.

Utnayan said:

Batman Arkham Asylum. Up until this game, there had NEVER been a good comic game. This changed that.

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X-men.

x-men vs streetfighter, as well as TMNT-Turtles in time. both are stretching "comic game" admittedly though. TMNT is more based on the cartoon at that point. And, VS. is a fighting game first.

Diablo (the first one).
This was the one game that I bought "because Blizzard".
I didn't know what to expect. The ads were cool, and this game came out in the era before you could watch a Let's Play. (Or, at any rate, before I learned about the concept of a Let's Play).
So ... a rogue-like with cool graphics and awesome atmosphere (especially the music)? I was so hooked.

Utnayan said:

Batman Arkham Asylum. Up until this game, there had NEVER been a good comic game. This changed that.

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Off the top of my head X-Men Legends was well before Arkham Asylum, as was the old Avengers side-scrolling beat-em-up arcade game. There had definitely never been a good Batman game though.

*edit*

Surprises for me?

Shadowrun: Dragonfall. I love me some Shadowrun, but Returns left quite a bit to be desired. I was completely blown away at how much of an improvement Dragonfall was over Returns.

XCom 2. Pretty much the same as how Dragonfall surprised me, but an order of magnitude higher. XCom EU/EW was a fantastic revival of the core IP, but it was still an incredibly flawed game. The Long War mod did a lot to help address those flaws, but some of the problems were just the way the game was designed.

XCom 2 was easily the biggest improvement by a sequel I've ever seen in my life. Sequels are often a complete crap shoot as to whether they are a better or worse than the previous game, but they really knocked it out of the park with XCom 2. Reasonably robust mod support also means the game has incredible longevity. It has been years and years since the last time a game caught me with 'just one more turn' so bad that I didn't realize how much time had passed until the sun started coming up.

Only one person in this thread mentioned FTL? I'm disappointed.

Earthbound

Mega Man 2

Everquest

Im with a lot of others on Rocket League. I was super reluctant to buy the game when a friend was trying to get me to play. However, i have 100s of hours into the game and its amazing how im still learning the nuances of every single mechanic. It is impossible to be perfect at that game.

One quick shout out to Harvest Moon SNES, i rented it once and was just thinking it'd be some wierd noncombat rpg but I was and am still hooked to that series.

The Witcher 2 for me. I played through the first Witcher, which was kind of like NWN2, and loaded up the Witcher 2 with no real knowledge of it or the series.

All of a sudden I am hit in the face with amazing graphics and storytelling orders of magnitude past the first one and I was like, woah. Where the fuck did this come from, how did it happen? By far the most surprised I have ever been by a game.

In the last few years, definitely Rimworld. It's just fun to build and manage resources and defenses. Doesn't hold your hand too much like so many modern games, learning the hard way is half the fun. On top of that it's highly replayable, moddable and still in active development