Today video games are expensive.
An industry that used to be about waiting in line at brick-and-mortar retailers to drop £20 for the latest game has turned into a market where the vast majority of titles ask you to cough up £40-£100+ for the privilege of playing, if you take into account the variety of deluxe editions.
So when publishers ask players to spend so much of our hard-earned money, we want to make sure we get our money’s worth!
In recent years, the public has even started to complain when the playtime of an AAA game checks in less than 30 hours. Whether that is a valid complaint or not is a personal choice. However, what is certainly not the case is the fact that the RPGs below are among the best value for money.
These games would have been great value even at launch, thanks to the way they definitely have scope, scale and production value meaning you’ll have hours of quality enjoyment out of them – but in 2022 many of them can be scooped up for less than twenty dollars when you wait for a sale.
Now that’s what we call a bargain!
Now known as the eponymous origin of the historical RPG fantasy series, Dragon Age: Origins still remains the best of the bunch – widely regarded even as one of the best video games ever made. Few games, except perhaps the rest of this list, have better demonstrated the core RPG components of both gameplay and story, with (for the time) beautiful graphics to boot.
The alternate third-person or top-down perspective on combat in Origins is something that many other RPGs no longer implement, but the game’s greatest success lies in the characters and the world.
The various player character creation options actively influence their origin and the way they are treated by other characters in the world, and the interactive relationships formed with companions based on the player’s choices have since become known as a staple of developer BioWare’s releases for their consistent variety and depth.
Thanks to the above, while the core plot of the player being tasked as a Gray Warden to defeat Archdemon and Darkspawn remains largely the same, the different class, background, relationship and side-quest choices that can be pursued means the replayability value is huge.
Despite being released in 2009, this makes Origins more than worth it to still pay to play because even if the graphics don’t quite hold up, everything else is more than that.