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2023 was a memorable year for fans of RPG titles, and the foreseeable future looks brighter than ever after the recent Summer Game Fest event. The biggest contribution comes arguably from Xbox Game Studios, thanks to Microsoft's investments in some of the most successful RPG studios and franchises. But there's a lot more coming to market - let's take a look at the next couple of years, beginning with the latter half of 2024.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is set to have sprawling skill trees for each class that take inspiration from Final Fantasy 10's Sphere Grid and Final Fantasy 12's License Board.
Giving the best build for the Harmony Trailblazer in can turn this already great and F2P (free-to-play) character into a superb one that can substantially increase the presence of the team’s DPS on the field. The Trailblazer is the main character for HoYoverse’s turn-based RPG and unlike most of the units in the game, they are adaptive. This means that they can change their Path and their element on the spot – they are different from characters with multiple yet distinct forms, like Dan Heng and Imbibitor Lunae, which are treated as separate characters.
Before he owned videogames growing up, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki loved tabletop RPGs and their source books full of quests and monsters. It's not hard to see that passion reflected in any of the games he's designed at FromSoftware, but Elden Ring particularly so: Its sprawling map echoes the kinds I loved to pore over and draw myself (poorly) as a kid, from Lord of the Rings' Middle-earth to Warcraft's Azeroth. Elden Ring also seems to directly connect back to the RPGs of the '80s with its skeleton-filled catacombs, like tabletop-style dungeons ripped straight from the pages of an AD&D campaign.
Fantasy MMO Tibia launched all the way back in 1997, and like contemporaries Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Runescape, the dang thing is still going. There was just something special about that era of MMORPGs; they don't die.
We recently went hands-on with the first half-hour of gameplay in STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl running on PC. After a brief story-heavy introductory cutscene, we were sent off running through dark corridors at our own pace with danger not far behind. As one that has had more than a short break from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (Shadow of Chernobyl and the L.U.R.K. mod were honestly my last real in-depth experience with the series nearly a decade and a half ago, although I did dabble in a bit of Clear Sky back at release), so much of the world and inventory feels right at home. Name one other RPG where random bottles of vodka and tinned cat food are just as essential in your inventory as spare bandages and bullets.
When members of artist collective turned game developer Studio ZA/UM thanked Marx and Engels in their 2019 Game Awards acceptance speech for the RPG triumph Disco Elysium, I felt like I was looking at the future, the ecstatic debut of my new favorite developer, but that isn't how things panned out. Disco Elysium has been #1 on our yearly Top 100 games list four years in a row, but for much of that time, ZA/UM has been engulfed in an existential crisis.
This story is part of our Summer Gaming Marathon series.