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The RPS guides team looks back at 2023Here are the games and guides that defined 2023 for us
Here are the games and guides that defined 2023 for us
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
And thus, we arrive at the end of another year. A year filled with somevery excellent games, and somevery not excellent games. And through it all, the RPS guides team has been quietly toiling away, appeasing The Beast That Is Google with medium-rare slabs of SEO meat, and providing the answers to oft-asked gaming questions.
It’s important to me to have a moment in the year where we can step into the light for a little bit and celebrate everything the guides team has accomplished this year. Usually we stay well out of the spotlight, because people only like seeing guides if they’re actively searching for it. But today, we’re staging a coup. We’re taking centre stage, and threatening the lighting technician with all manner of disagreeable bodily experiences unless they keep the spotlight fixed firmly on us for the duration of this post.
2023 has been an amazing standout year for guides. Let’s take a look at the games that have defined the year for us, and celebrate some of the fantastic work our team has published.
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Let’s start with the quantity. This year, we published over 1000 guides, which is more than any year in RPS’s history. That’s pretty special, and I’m very confident we’ll smash that record next year too. A good, oh, 365 of those guides are dailyWordlehints, of course, but that’s still a massive accomplishment.
Hayden’s Dead Space walkthrough is a truly terrific resource. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/EA
After that, the year began in earnest with theDead Space remake. I want to highlight Hayden’s (RPS in peace) work on the massiveDead Space Remake walkthrough- a 12-page guide which confidently leads the player through every aspect of the game’s story. We don’t often write comprehensive campaign walkthroughs like this at RPS, so I’m very happy with how this one turned out.
The early part of 2023 was also a very exciting time for us, because we were playing around for the first time with our new interactive mapping tool. Using this tool, I created our first maps forSons Of The Forest,Tchia, and later onDiablo 4. Having interactive maps on RPS has been a dream of mine for years, and now we’re living that dream, our maps - and the tool itself - will only get better as time goes on.
Also, here are some of the nice icons I made for the maps. Gotta stretch my graphic design muscles on occasion!
Some icons I designed for our interactive maps. Can you guess what they all represent? |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Join the Dark Side. We have exquisitely designed hilts. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / EA
We also spent a lot of time playingStar Wars Jedi: Survivor, and compiling a painstaking spreadsheet of over 1000 collectible locations and screenshots to aid our variouscollectible locationsguides. Whitney also put together a fantastic, amazingly comprehensiveJedi: Survivor walkthroughwhich I’m very proud to have on the site. I’m also personally quite pleased with my own guide on thebest lightsaber designs in Jedi: Survivor. I always love the chance to get a bit creative, and hot damn, you can make some pretty lightsaber hilts in that game.
Rebecca did a fantastic job with all our Honkai: Star Rail guides this year. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/miHoYo
Rebecca, meanwhile, did a huge amount of work putting out endless guides forHonkai: Star Rail- a game that I was genuinely scared of covering, because HoYoverse games are dense, complex, impermeable monstrosities to try and cover. But Rebecca delivered time and again with 30-odd guides covering everything from thebest charactersto the various confusingcurrenciesandpity system.
Karlach is the best Baldur’s Gate 3 companion, and it’s not even close. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Larian Studios
Starfieldwas even bigger for us (rubbish game IMO though), and despite getting access to the game later than most, we delivered a herculean effort and wrote nearly 50 guides ready for Starfield’s release. And then over the next month, we increased that number to well over 100 guides. In particular, I’d like to take a beat to ask for a moment of silence for the hours of my life spent cataloguingall 1692 planets in Starfield. Was it worth it? No. No, it was not.
Our new full-time guides writers,Kiera and Jeremy, have only been part of the team since the end of October. But they’ve both got off to a roaring start, repairing the cracks in the walls of many an old guide series, and putting out more than a few of their own excellent guides.
Jeremy (not pictured) is as much of a hero as Price (pictured) for all his work on Modern Warfare 3 since joining the team. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Activision
Jeremy (with help from our newest freelancer Grace Dean) took point on ourModern Warfare 3guides, helping us reach a dizzying total of 131 guides - mostly on guns. Lots of guns. Jeremy should be particularly proud of hisMW3 best guns guideandbest Assault Rifles guide, both of which do a fantastic job of making sense out of the stupefying selection of weapons in the latest Call Of Duty. And Grace also deserves a shoutout for her many gun guides, as well as explainers on topics fromMW3’s Zombies modeto the choice ofkillstreaks or scorestreaks.
Kiera has been killing it with the Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora guides this month. |Image credit:Ubisoft
Kiera, meanwhile, got stuck into playingAvatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, another game that is deeply confusing in its own way. But unfazed, she released an excellentAvatar tips and tricks guide, which goes well beyond the basics to deliver some very practical and useful advice. Add to this a plethora of other Avatar guides on everything from thebest weaponsandarmourto findingSwamp Hive Nectar, and she - along with Jeremy - have well and truly made their mark on the site for 2023.
I, meanwhile, spent what sometimes felt like the entire winter putting together thisCyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty endings flowchart. I won’t show it here, because spoilers, but it’s quite pretty.
And that, in a nutshell, was 2023 from the perspective of the guides crew! It’s been quite a year. Lots of very busy times, but also lots to be proud of. And quite rightly, we’ll finish off the year with a look ahead at all theupcoming PC games of 2024. Here’s to another strong year for RPS guides!
