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In the last two years, two of the most anticipated RPGs of all time launched on PC. Legendary developer Bethesda presented us with an entire new galaxy to explore in Starfield, its first brand new franchise in over 25 years. And the equally iconic BioWare brought us Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a game 10 years in the making that not only brought back one of the most beloved RPG series of all time, but heralded BioWare’s return to the genre after a seven-year absence.
And neither of them felt like a big deal.
Both sit at “Mixed” reviews on Steam. Veilguard sold just 1.5 million copies—half what EA expected and less than the two previous games in the series. Starfield was a sales success, of course—it could hardly fail to be. But it was a long-term failure. Where Bethesda surely hoped for a new Skyrim, something that would continue to grow and remain part of the conversation for a decade or more to come, instead most people seemed to move on within weeks.
That’s not even to say that either game was a disaster. Though I have my misgivings with both, they are each in their own ways lavish, beautiful, and technically impressive. Both have their devoted fans, and understandably so. But it’s hard to deny that they were ultimately disappointing, not only falling short of what the majority of players wanted from them as games, but also failing to make the kind of cultural impact you’d expect from two studios that haven’t just made great RPGs in the past, but between them practically defined what a modern blockbuster RPG even is.
To a degree, both seem to have been victims of internal issues. BioWare has been troubled for over a decade now, with a string of failures and major layoffs, and Veilguard languished for years in a development hell that included not just at least one complete do-over, but a shift from multiplayer to singleplayer. Things seem less rocky at Bethesda, but Starfield had a similarly lengthy development, and the final product bears all the hallmarks of a muddled and insular creative direction.
But really, both were laid low just as much by what was going on around them and before them. Starfield and Veilguard launched into a world whose RPG appetites had fundamentally changed. The first months of 2025 have only crystalised that for me: what gets people excited now is adventures that are weirder, denser, and more ambitious than ever before.
The mind flayer in the room
With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar.
In August 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 launched into 1.0, just a month before Starfield. And that was by design—developer Larian pushed the game’s release date earlier than planned to scramble out of the way of what at the time seemed like a game sure to overshadow theirs. In retrospect, it had nothing to worry about.
As BG3 soared to the kind of mainstream success—and huge prominence in online discussion—that had seemed completely impossible for an old-fashioned isometric RPG in the 2020s, concern bubbled among some other developers and industry figures. With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar for the whole genre—but it was pointed out that declaring it the new standard was unreasonable and unsustainable given how few other developers could possibly rise to meet it.
A very fair point, but alas… for better or worse, the bar has indeed been raised, and last month only proved that. February 2025 saw the release of a new RPG from one of the most beloved studios in the genre, Obsidian Entertainment. Avowed is modest by design, but nonetheless it’s polished, accessible, and visually impressive, with a rich story from some of the best writers in the business—and the backing of Microsoft, one of the most influential and well-resourced videogame publishers of all time.
Yet despite seeming to be a moderate hit, it’s been overshadowed all month by the feverish reception to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2—a janky, messy, and exactingly historically authentic adventure through 15th century Bohemia, from a studio really known only for the previous, much less successful game in the series.
There’s no doubt in my mind at all which of the two games will still be in the conversation in a decade and which will be relegated to “Oh yeah, remember that?” status.
Why? Because, like Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s ambitious, it’s dense, and it’s weird. Even figuring out how to brew a potion is its own absorbing ordeal, and the world is so reactive and detailed that it’s possible to get yourself exiled from society as a branded criminal if you cause too much ruckus. It’s a game full of things to discover, to poke at, to discuss with others, and to break.
There’s no doubt in my mind at all which of the two games will still be in the conversation in a decade and which will be relegated to “Oh yeah, remember that?” status. That’s no knock against Avowed, a game I’ve had great fun with, but it’s clear that the winds have shifted. February 2025 is simply 2023 in microcosm. Another example of RPG fan attention moving away from established studios and major publishers and the polished, safe games they’re producing, and towards unexpected and risky projects from often independent studios far more on the fringes.
A new age
It’s a wider trend than Baldur’s Gate 3 alone can account for. If we broaden our view a little, to look at games outside the very traditional RPG space, what do we see?
We see players embracing en masse the grand and hostile world of Elden Ring, a completely uncompromising and absurdly ambitious action-RPG from a studio that has built its name on doing things completely at odds with the mainstream. We see enormous critical acclaim for Disco Elysium, a game that combined the supposedly out-of-fashion isometric RPG with a wonderfully dense and complicated character study that turned a city block into a playground for exploring the hero’s own brain.
We see awkward and strange but enthralling RPG-inspired survival games like Valheim and Palworld generating huge excitement and success while still in active development, their every rough edge on full display. This month Monster Hunter—an action-RPG series that in the west was once a defacto punchline for jokes about hilariously inaccessible and abrasive game series—is enjoying a new release so wildly successful it will surely end up standing as one of the biggest launches of 2025.
In 2010, it was Mass Effect 2 that set the high bar for RPGs, and for years after it was simply accepted that any blockbuster hits in the genre would trend in the same direction. People wanted more cinematic, modern adventures, and any fiddliness or inaccessibility would be gradually shorn away in favour of action and easy thrills. Even Skyrim—certainly a weird, ambitious, and janky RPG in its own right—refined and streamlined the formula set by Morrowind and Oblivion, rather than expanding on their eccentricities, and that trend only continued in the studio’s following games.
But nothing ever stays the same in the games industry, and now a decade and a half on, the world of RPGs on PC couldn’t look more different. Old standbys are still finding success here and there, but the games that people can’t help but talk about, obsess over, and lose themselves in are a very different breed.
Expectations have climbed so high that we’re now only satisfied by either wild new innovation, or absurd, teetering ambition. Ideally both.
There is a troubling aspect to that. On some level, this is simply players wanting what they’ve always wanted, which is: more, more, more. We’re spoiled by modern videogames—living in an era when gamers have, multiple times, had entire digital galaxies at their fingertips and said “That’s boring”. Expectations have climbed so high that we’re now only satisfied by either wild new innovation, or absurd, teetering ambition. Ideally both. And those are exactly the kind of projects too risky and uncontrollable for major, publicly-traded companies to bet on.
But that’s the other side of the coin. On another level, this is the rejection of major corporate interests, at a time when the big players of the games industry couldn’t feel more oppressively powerful. More and more we’re looking at squeaky clean, safe, and exhaustively focus-tested RPGs and saying “No thanks, I’d rather see exactly how many NPCs I can murder in this one town before the main quest breaks”. Studios like Larian and Warhorse aren’t small, of course, but they’re minnows compared to EA and Microsoft—and yet they’re swimming rings around them.
The future of the genre no longer feels like it can be charted on a graph in a boardroom—it’s wild and unpredictable and rife with opportunity for overlooked developers to make their mark. Perhaps that will bring its own problems, but one thing’s for certain: it’s going to be a very exciting time to be an RPG fan.
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Kurt Indovina
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