The Best Videogame Stories Ever

The Story: 
Planescape: Torment is the story of the Nameless One, who wakes up on an embalming table with no memories and stripped of possessions. You'll discover that you have been living for thousands of years, and each time you die you wake up healed but with complete amnesia. Rather than being a typical dashing young hero, your body is covered in tattoos and scars - many that should have been fatal - that have been accumulated over many lifetimes.

Through deranged clues left behind by your previous incarnations you'll figure out that in your first life you committed an act of such unforgivable evil that true death would doom you to an eternity fighting the Blood War. Eventually, in the climactic end of the game, you battle your own mortality.

Why it’s the Best: 
You won't find any elves or dwarves shooting fireballs and crossing +4 daggers in an enchanted forest, despite the fact that Planescape: Torment is part of the D&D universe. Instead, you'll explore a unique and creative setting on par with a high fantasy novel. The game's script is over 800,000 words according to a 1994 estimate from PC Gamer UK and the amount of writing serves the player by enriching the 2D settings with intricate descriptions and creating characters and dialogue that remain memorable for years.

The most remarkable city, Sigil (where you begin), is a city made up of physical places shaped by its inhabitants' thoughts. The city is famous for its portals, which are invisible until you happen upon them with the correct key. A key can be a word or gesture, or the knuckle or a skeleton or particular thought. You'll use them to travel across streets and across dimensions. Every location is delightfully clever as you go from the first layer of hell, mazes trapped between planes of existence to a pregnant alleyway in Sigil, which you have to induce into labor before the way forward will be made open.

Your companions are also an unusual bunch. Morte your longtime friend and first cohort, is a talking, floating skull who equips different sets of teeth as weapons. He also frequently spouts out his memorable brand of know-it-all sarcasm, like, “We should get some female zombies to join our party, right chief?" A succubus, pyromaniac mage, Nordom from Modron and a suit of armor are some of the other companions you can travel with. Every one is memorable and unique, although several are easy to play through the game without ever meeting.

You won't get everything out of Planescape: Torment on the first time through, but you'll want to know each of the NPCs and find every location because they're genuinely interesting - not because of a compulsion for getting 100 percent completion or a need to find the best equipment. We love this game because of the quality and detail put into it, and years after finishing the game we still think about the riddle that tortures the Nameless One throughout the game: "What can change the nature of a man?"

 
The Story: 
It’s the year 20XX and the world is in ruins after America and China’s nuclear World War. Some have survived in underground Vaults, protected from the radiation and horrors of the wasteland. You’re the descendent of the original Vault Dweller, a hero who left his vault to save its inhabitants, and it’s up to you to find a miracle machine that will save your tribal village. Upon finding the machine you return to find your village has been kidnapped by the sinister Enclave to be experimented on with a virus designed to ‘purify’ humanity. You infiltrate the Enclave’s offshore headquarters on an oil tanker and free your village, destroying the base in the process.  
 
Why it’s the Best: 
Fallout 2’s amazing opening scene mimics its predecessor, explaining the nuclear holocaust in simple terms, as something we all knew was inevitable, a battle for resources and two super powers finally losing their cool and utilizing nuclear weapons. “War, War never changes.”

As a simple tribesman who has never left your village you have almost nothing but a name and a city to go on. The huge void of Northern California that is your map is completely unrestricted - you can go anywhere from the very beginning, though you do so at your own peril. A tribesman with little but a jumpsuit and a spear is no match for the brutal reality of the wasteland. Fallout 2 creates a vivid post apocalyptic world that captures the feeling of chaos and anarchy after disaster.

When you enter small villages, you feel their sense of desperation, a small group of people struggling together for nothing more than survival. As you arrive in the larger settlements of New Reno and San Francisco you find more organized but no less dangerous places, where black markets and criminals operate openly and the streets are littered with addicts and prostitutes.

Fallout 2 was unlike any other game before it in that aside from a few mandatory plot points, getting to the end of the game could literally be a different experience every time. Because of its open format there was a beginning, middle, and end but it was up to you to fill in the rest. Depending on how you created your character, the story could be a smooth talking con man who manipulates people to his own ends, a scientist who hacks into computers and builds robots to fight for him, or even a mentally deficient brute who’s too stupid to converse with anyone and just pounds his way through the wasteland. Such true player freedom had never been delivered like this, letting you push the story forward any way you wanted.

While the game’s main story involves your battle against the Enclave and other corrupt institutions, the history behind them and the wasteland at large are hidden all throughout the world, in abandoned computers and in the minds of survivors. This makes the story as deep, or as vague, as you want it to be. The way the Fallout 2 lets you discover the story on your own adds to its mystery, drawing the player into the game.   

Ultimately Fallout 2’s story is the best ever because of its realism, freedom, and fantastic writing. While many games now have open worlds and plots, Fallout 2 manages to do both yet still maintain its doom-filled ambiance. All the side quests and plot tangents feel like they’re still part of a whole, and not just tacked on to bump up the play time. When the bombs finally drop and the world is reduced to nothing but ash and marauding mutants don’t be surprised if it looks a lot like Fallout 2.