>> JGigs' Top 20 ARPGs vs Our Crowd
JGigs installed 20 ARPGs, the Diablo kind, played each for exactly two hours, and ranked them by one thing: how badly he wanted to keep playing when the timer hit zero. His picks cover most of the genre, which makes for a fair fight.
So here are two lists. First his twenty, in his order, each with its beats-% beside it: the share of a typical library it beats across thousands of head-to-head duels. Then the crowd's own twenty, built strictly from the Diablo-like canon of loot grinders, no rogue-likes sneaking in, and free to reach for anything our players rate, whether he ranked it or not.
He benched Diablo II and Path of Exile 1 on purpose, calling it unfair to rank his all-time favourites against a pile of two-hour first impressions. That is why his crown went to Diablo IV. Keep an eye on where those two benched giants land with the crowd.
How JGigs ranked them
His order, top to bottom. These are cult loot grinders, and the crowd bars beside them mostly settle into the middle of the shelf. A few ride on only a handful of duels, which each bar tells you plainly.
The crowd's Diablo-like top 20
The same genre, ranked by our duellers instead of a two-hour timer. This is a thin, devoted corner of Steam, so read the bars with their dueller counts in mind: the top few ride on a handful of votes, while the sturdiest numbers, Path of Exile 1 and 2, Grim Dawn, Torchlight II and Hero Siege, are built on real volume.
Where the two lists part ways
JGigs ranked nearly the whole genre, so the two boards share a lot of names. The fun is in what moves.
The two giants he benched both prove his instinct right: Diablo II Resurrected lands in the crowd's top three, and Path of Exile 1 holds a rock-solid mid-table spot on the biggest sample here. Five games he never got to crash the list anyway, Titan Quest II, Diablo II Resurrected, Minecraft Dungeons, Wolcen and Warhammer: Chaosbane, which is what happens when you cap yourself at twenty and skip the sequels and the newcomers.
And the sharpest disagreement is a fall, not a climb. Undecember, a top-five game for JGigs, does not make the crowd's twenty at all. Neither does Last Epoch. His two-hour hook and the crowd's years-long habit are simply different tests, and those two games ace the first while flunking the second.
Browse the shelves for yourself: Action RPG and Dungeon Crawler. Then sign in with Steam, put your own loot games on the line, and move the bars.
