Part one: What is the best game to come out of the 80s?
Part two: What is the best game to come out of the 90s
This is the third part of the series. This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other decades (10s and 70s) and consoles will come in sporadic subsequent threads.
Expanding on your choice is definitely a plus. I don't think we're gonna get Doom the post this time around.
I'd say Half-Life 2. To me it is, for better or worse, the game that pushed the trend to make games more cinematic/immersive. It was also a technical milestone, having much more realistic animations than other games of its time (and even compared to some today) and one of the first where in-game physics is always in play and feels realistic.
I'd also throw in Runescape for its more general cultural impact. Sure, there were more sophisticated MMOs like WoW, EQ, and FFXI, but Runescape introduced a lot of people to MMO games just because of it's barebones barrier to entry. You didn't need to have a "gaming PC" or go to a store to buy it or pay for a monthly subscription, so for a lot of people that was their first experience with MMOs.
Half Life 2 was one of the first games to ever use speech recognition to rig facial animations for NPCs. It was both a minor detail and a revolutionary step forward. All of a sudden, as long as you have a voice actor record a character's dialog, you could see the character speak it with automatic lip syncing. It made everything seem a lot more realistic, and made the characters you bump into seem a lot more like real people instead of just decorations.