So clearly, Mass Effect has been very popular also, right? I guess the other bit with sci-fi is that it's often traveling space. Starfield might change that now, so we'll see. “Traditionally, what you've seen is that fantasy has sold more than sci-fi, I think. So that's the reason, because the risks are very large in making them, so you’ve got to be really sure about yourself if you go elsewhere in that space. When it comes to RPGs, fantasy is the traditional one, because you know there's a wide market for it. “It doesn't mean that we're going to make one, but there's a lot of. “I think there's an enormous amount of stuff in sci-fi that has not been explored…I would be lying if I didn’t say that I have plenty of sci-fi RPGs in my head,” Vincke says. Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke, who has found great success through fantasy RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin and Baldur’s Gate 3, says that sci-fi RPGs are risky.
Todd Howard allegedly described Starfield as “irresponsibly large.” Mass Effect Andromeda was partly sunk by its inability to make good on its initial vision of expansive space exploration. Mecha anime was hugely popular in Japan in the 1980s, but the earliest Gundam RPG was basically a reskinned Dragon Quest game.ĭevelopers who do try and make space RPGs frequently find their ambition getting the better of them. Tamriel was created out of a tabletop campaign Final Fantasy lifted the D&D bestiary wholesale. Its origins can be traced back to Dungeons and Dragons, which itself drew heavy inspiration from The Lord of the Rings. The role-playing genre itself is steeped in fantasy. Game boxes were a lot simpler back in the mid-80s! RPGs are steeped in fantasy It’s no coincidence that Star Wars, one of the most popular space franchises around, is more fantasy than sci-fi. Science fiction, especially stories set in space, have a tendency to be colder, more intellectual, more machine-like. A Guardian article titled “The triumph of fantasy fiction” delves into all of the ways that fantasy fiction satisfy a desire to venture into other worlds the ways that they can titillate with sex and violence. Fantasy in general seems to have more crossover appeal than sci-fi. Digital Extremes said many times that WarFrame was a nightmare to pitch, no Western publisher had interest in their setting.” Say that The Outer Worlds plays too safe, but The Technomancer and Kenshi are too weird. People can reject Starfield because it has no aliens, or complain that Shadowrun has elves and orcs. “Sci-fi is way trickier, way more controversial. It is a very broad setting, can be something wild like Planescape: Torment or Shin Megami Tensei, but you can also just do people with swords in pseudo-Europe killing dragons and people will be happy,” says CRPG Book editor Felipe Pepe. “I think it's because fantasy games have a clearer blueprint.
But while Mass Effect, The Outer Worlds, and KOTOR have found success over the years, they’ve been dwarfed by the sheer popularity of fantasy RPGs. You’d think role-playing games that catered to the core fantasy of building a crew and taking to the stars would be more popular given the crossover between Star Trek nerds and role-playing games. Even games that bill themselves as sci-fi RPGs, like Phantasy Star, have a little bit of that swords and sorcery flavor to them. The list of the most popular RPGs are dominated by fantasy settings, from Ultima and Dragon Quest to Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Witcher. But a survey of the modern RPG landscape reveals comparatively few games like it. Starflight’s scope inspired a generation of developers, including a young Todd Howard. “Like, in the same year that I was playing NES Mario games, it was a game that felt limitlessly large.” Despite the limitations of the hardware, Starlight was hugely ambitious. “The sense of immense scale was absolutely mind-blowing and unlike anything I’d ever thought games could do,” one developer who was inspired by Starlight told me. It did all of this on the Amiga and Commodore 64 – machines with less than one percent of the power of modern PCs. Designed by Greg Johnson and published by Electronic Arts, Starflight imagined a fully-explorable galaxy with an astonishing scale.
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