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.
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.
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.
Also, here are some of the nice icons I made for the maps. Gotta stretch my graphic design muscles on occasion!
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, 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.
We’re getting through the year, but there are still some big games ahead. Games such as the astonishingly successful and excellentBaldur’s Gate 3. This game was covered jointly by Hayden and Whitney, who covered a dizzying number of topics, on everything fromromancing Karlachtolosing your eye.
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.
At around this time of the year, we sadly said goodbye to Rebecca and Hayden. Rebecca defected and joined our sworn frenemies over at VG247, while Hayden was wrenched from our grasp by the interminable machinations of the UK’s higher education system.
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 (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.
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.
