When you think about role-playing games, what kind of world comes to mind? Let’s narrow it down: when you think about role-playing video games, what do you imagine?
More than most other genres, this one lives and dies by the strength of its world-building. In the decades since its inception, it has explored all kinds of settings across hundreds of games from thousands of people with unique perspectives on what would make a good foundation for an engaging and satisfying story.
A World to Live In
A genre as devoted to its narrative layer as an RPG wouldn’t work well in the abstract way a well-designed strategy or a tense twitch shooter would. Action is, of course, a large part of many games in the genre, but they tend to be punctuation marks between conversations with characters and exploration of an immersive world.
Final Fantasy VII wouldn’t be as memorable on the strengths of its ATB alone, and The Witcher 3 wouldn’t be as big a hit without its vibrant setting providing thematic texture to the open world.
Although every world is very different, there are certain broad categories we could put them into. Let’s talk about them!
The Alleged Default
Perhaps the most popular, by fame and volume alike, are the “classic” fantasy worlds. You know the type: they tend to have villages with a burly blacksmith, a dragon hugging a nearby mountain peak, as well as elves and dwarves likely engaged in some more or less good-natured ribbing.
Of course, it’s grossly reductive, and the classic “fantasyland” contains multitudes. Both Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Witcher 3 take place in such a world, but they set the dials to very different things despite shared traits. The Witcher loves its gritty, relatively low magic setting, with major conflicts being driven by politics and ideals. Meanwhile, BG3 is steeped in the high fantasy sauce of the Forgotten Realms, and while it doesn’t stray from political and societal turmoil, much of the plot is driven by gods and monsters hatching their nasty schemes.
Machines and Outer Space
Let’s take a wild leap into a genre that couldn’t be more different! Science fiction! Specifically, the cool, technologically advanced science-fiction. We’ll talk about the other kind soon enough, don’t worry.
For years, the poster child for this kind of setting was Bioware’s space epic Mass Effect, but in 2020, the world finally saw the release of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, which, a few years later, received a major expansion that completed the game’s redemption arc.
Mass Effect, with its galactic-scale adventures fueled by faster-than-light travel, technomagical powers, and alien species, reads the SF playbook very differently than CDPR’s adaptation of a famous tabletop RPG. Cyberpunk’s themes include aggressive social and economic stratification, exploration of body modification through cybernetic implants, and the game itself revolving around the idea of capturing identity on a chip… that’s an entirely different science fiction.
Reality+
Fantasy this, science fiction that, not all things play it straight like that. Sometimes, an RPG is keen to take us on an adventure that could be happening next door, just when we aren’t looking.
Often, such RPGs dabble into the paranormal side of things, like the cult classic Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, which puts you in the shoes of a fledgling vampire tangling with secret vampiric politics of nighttime Los Angeles. Another example is Persona 5, which tells a riveting story about teens who, by day, are usual Japanese high schoolers, but by night, they use their psychic abilities to fix the corrupted hearts of adults.
The appeal of such settings is similar to reading “behind the scenes” footage: a glimpse into the world we are not normally privy to.
After the End
Bringing things back around for another slice of science fiction, sometimes the morbid curiosity takes hold. In such moments, instead of various power-fantasies we seek an entrance into a world bereft of comforts, trying to keep on trucking among the remnants of civilization left after a devastating cataclysm.
The post-apocalyptic settings tend to be more popular in action and survival games, but they do have a very strong representation in RPGs as well, largely thanks to the long-running Fallout series and its immediate predecessor and inspiration: Wasteland. The latter doesn’t have quite as many installments, so it hasn’t been in the public eye as strongly, but it has earned sequels for a reason.
Fuzzy Boundaries
What must be restated, however, is that the categories are not only broad, they are also more like colors of paint, rather than secure drawers. As a result, they are quite easily mixed in order to create new ideas.
Add a coat of science fiction to fantasy, and you’ll get Star Wars, exemplified by the immortal classic Knights of the Old Republic, which, despite the trappings of science fiction, actually tells a story that would be more in line with the fantasy genre. Do it the other way, and you’ll get Shadowrun (for instance, in Shadowrun: Dragonfall), which adds fantastical creatures to a fundamentally urban, cyberpunk setting.
Post-apocalyptic worlds have their own themes, but by the nature of the apocalypses, they are doing some genre-bending themselves. Fallout is a science-fiction post-apocalypse, yes, but Grim Dawn (which does skew towards Diablo’s side of “action RPG”) is a post-apo world caused by a magical mess. Fantasy post-apocalypses aren’t common; the genre prefers the post-post-apocalypse, but they do exist.
At the same time, we also have the everything-bagels like Warhammer 40.000, recently seen in the cRPG form thanks to Owlcat Games’ Rogue Trader. The WH40k world has it all: high-science fiction mech suits, reality-twisting sorcery, dystopian technological megacities, demons, psychically potent bugs, and gigantic elven colony ships. 40k doesn’t have a genre, it has all the genres.
A World for Every Theme
For the past decade or so, the RPG genre has been experiencing something of Renaissance, surging back from the niches out into the mainstream, eager to try new ideas and explore untapped nuances of seemingly exhausted classics.
The highest of high fantasy of Baldur’s Gate 3, the politically conscious Disco Elysium, the equal parts fantastical and science-fiction setting of the Final Fantasy VII remakes… Even then, the 1990s and 2000s were a better time to use role-playing video games as your gateway to adventures, not just because the options were more limited but also because now you can get both the evergreen classics and modern productions at attractive prices, thanks to incredible deals offered on the G2A.COM marketplace.
What kind of world would you like to be transported to? Role-playing games can probably take you there.