In the last weeks of December 2002, you had the opportunity to vote for the best RPGs released in 2002. Nobody knows better what these are then you the player and as such The RPGDot 2002 Awards will look good on any game receiving one.
We thank all those who entered their votes and helped us in making it possible to select the best games.

The RPG Surprise
There are those game, which you are not sure about if you should buy them. But then you decide to buy it anyway and to your surprise this game was worth every cent you payed for it.

The winner: Divine Divinity
With all of the hyped games that came out over the past year Divine Divinity was nothing short of a dark horse. Un-hyped and almost unknown it landed near the end of what has been proclaimed a golden year for RPGs. Though it came late in the year and after many greatly acclaimed RPGs, it certainly made an impression. A very good impression.

Many people expressed disappointment this year over over-hyped games that did not deliver on what the developers or publishers promised. As an virtual unknown, Divine Divinity was certainly free of that burden. The great thing about the game is that it did deliver what the developers said it would. This probably explains everyone's surprise.

(Val)

Runner Up: Elder Scrolls 3 - Morrowind
One of the greatest concerns of the fans of the Elder Scrolls Series was that Bethesda wouldn’t have learned a lesson from Daggerfall. In fact, they did. The number of bugs in the initial release was extremely small compared with the size of the game. And the few show-stoppers were eliminated with the first patch that followed soon thereafter.

Expectations were high for Morrowind. The fact that our readers rank it second place within the category „biggest surprises“ says a lot about the quality of the game.

(Rendelius)

Second Runner Up: Arx Fatalis
It is very hard for me to write down lines about why I have been surprised by Arx Fatalis - because I was NOT! I followed the game for more than a year before its release and was very confident, that it would be a great game. Despite all the PR, RPGDot has given the game, it still seems, the game never got the common acknowledgements it would have deserved. On the other hand, Arx Fatalis ranks within the Top Ten of the Best Single Player category and is the worst among them in the Most Disappointing category (in which worse is good actually :), which clearly shows that those, who know the game really loved it.

(Garrett)

The Numbers
To make it complete we now give you the top 10 as voted by our visitors:

And 11,7% of those who participated were unable to select one of the games.

We, the RPGDot team also voted to create our own top 5:

We all agree on who the winner is and the other places are similar also. What is a surprise is that Geneforge is shown. A shareware game by Spiderweb.... atleast it could be a surprise if you never played it.

Note that percentages are rounded to the nearest number.