Can I say Privateer? As an open-ended Sandbox, it becomes shallow pretty quickly after you've done everything, but to get to the point where it becomes boring is a long and glorious journey. I just love the locations, the atmosphere, the customisation and the quirky characters.
I wouldn't say Privateer is my favourite WC game, though certainly, apart from Armada and SO, it's the one I spent the most time playing (and, ahem, I wasn't really
playing SO when making UE and Standoff, so…). But I very strongly agree about atmosphere. It had tremendous atmosphere. I suppose some of that comes down to the game giving you a lot of time to get used to itself. The amount of time you spent in your average mining base in Privateer far, far exceeded the time we spent on the Tiger's Claw, Concordia, Victory, Midway and so on. In fact, depending on how long someone played Privateer, it may have exceeded the time spent on all those carriers
combined. It's ironic, but repetition in some ways contributes to building atmosphere. Just compare Privateer and Privateer 2 - the latter was also quite a big time investment, but because its locations were so much more varied, you end up spending less time in each of them, whereas in Privateer… well, if every mining base looked the same, then the result was that they all get lumped together in our memory as one, much longer, experience.
And music. I recently came to the surprising realisation that of all the musical soundtracks of all the WC games, the one I enjoy listening the most is actually Privateer. The gameplay music especially is beautifully weird and messy - so much so, that UE/Standoff's professionally trained musician hated it with a passion
. Equally intriguing - to me - is the fact that Armada's music comes a close second for me. Both of them beat George Oldziey's orchestral tracks from WC3/4/P, even though those are wonderful in their own right. They also beat the WC1/2 soundtracks, which, the more I listen to them, the less interesting I find them, unfortunately.
What would
my favourite WC game be these days? Very hard to say, because I've not played any of them for more than a decade (not counting Standoff, obviously - but you don't really play a game while making it, so that doesn't count either). I'm sure it definitely wouldn't be WC3 or WC4 - I never liked their visual style, and in the case of WC4, I very strongly disliked the one-missile-kills-you gameplay. My default answer to this question always
used to be WC2, but I don't know how I'd feel about it now; I hate to say it, but perhaps at this point, WCP would win for me, in spite of its clearly inferior story. In terms of gameplay sophistication, WCP is the best there was in the series - the high-budget pinnacle of development, surpassing all the games before it, but also easily beating SO, which in terms of gameplay never really grew past that phase where it was originally just a WCP expansion.
What I can say is that there are two games I
wish I could enjoy more - both in the sense of having more time to play them, and in the sense that I know their various flaws obscure their potential for greatness. Those two games are Privateer and Armada.