Electronic Arts and subsidiary BioWare have announced the release date for the latest Dragon Age fantasy RPG. The video game, recently retitled Dragon Age: The Veilguard, is due for release in autumn this year. They have also released a gameplay trailer.
The Veilguard is the fourth full game in the series, following on from Dragon Age: Origins (2009), Dragon Age II (2011) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) (though some count Dragon Age: Origins' massive 2010 expansion, Awakening, as an additional full game in the series as well since it is about as large as Dragon Age II). The series is set on the continent of Thedas and chronicles the battling of the player character and various allies against a series of large-scale threats to the continent and the world. Each game in the series has its own antagonists and cast of characters, with relatively light continuity connections between games, although a few characters do appear in multiple titles.
The series so far has acted as something of a travelogue of the continent, with Origins and Awakening set in the kingdom of Ferelden in the south-east; Dragon Age II in the Free March of Kirkwall in the central-eastern region; and Dragon Age: Inquisition in the Empire of Orlais in the centre of the continent. The Veilguard takes place in the Tevinter Imperium, a huge, mage-controlled empire in the central-north region. The game specifically opens in the capital city of Minrathous. The plot follows a new adventurer - yourself - joining forces with a band of seven fellow heroes to save the world from the Dread Wolf, a fallen elven god who banished his fellows and plans to now restore them, despite the fact this will tear open the Veil and release thousands of powerful demons into the world.
The game feels like a bit of a make or break moment for BioWare. The once-lauded RPG powerhouse was famed for its long run of hit games: Baldur's Gate (1998), Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000), Neverwinter Nights (2002), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), Jade Empire (2005), Mass Effect (2007), Dragon Age: Origins (2009), Mass Effect 2 (2010) and, despite an iffy ending, Mass Effect 3 (2012).
However, the wheels seemed to fall off after BioWare was purchased by Electronic Arts (during the development of Dragon Age: Origins). They mandated a quickie Dragon Age sequel, resulting in the controversial Dragon Age II (2011), and both a move to cash in on the open world craze and using the Frostbite Engine, which was not well-suited for open world environments. Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) had a mixed reception, with praise for its story and DLC, but criticisms of its vast amount of filler content; Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) had a similarly mixed reception and disappointing sales. Anthem (2019) was a move to a multiplayer-focused, online style of game which was a bizarre choice for a developer known for deep, single-player roleplaying games. The game was heavily criticised and died almost immediately.
Although Dragon Age II and Inquisition both sold well, Andromeda and Anthem were both flops. This means that BioWare is betting the farm on The Veilguard and a forthcoming new Mass Effect game; if these both do badly, then BioWare's future may be in doubt. More ironic is that the Dragon Age franchise has moved away from the deep, party-based tactical combat of the original game to more of an action game, but Larian's Baldur's Gate III - a sequel to BioWare's own series - sold over 20 million copies by leaning very hard on party-based, tactical combat and even being turn-based.
Whether The Veilguard can stop the rot and rescue BioWare remains to be seen. The game will launch later this year.
Netflix has released a trailer for its animated series, Dragon Age: Absolution, and confirmed it will launch on 9 December 2022. The show is a tie-in with BioWare's Dragon Age series of fantasy CRPGs, the fourth of which is expected to be launched in 2023.
Mairghread Scott is producing and writing the show, which will consist of six 30-minute episodes. The show is set in the Tevinter Imperium, which is also the setting for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, the new game in the series. To what degree the TV show ties in with the game or sets it up remains to be seen.
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is apparently now feature-complete and has passed its alpha milestone, so hopefully it will launch in 2023 (or early 2024). BioWare has also begun teasing its new Mass Effect game a bit more, although that is still a few years off. BioWare has a steep hill to climb to restore player confidence after years of mismanagement and underwhelming game releases, so hopefully the two new games in its signature franchises will deliver.
BioWare have confirmed that the next game in their Dragon Age series of fantasy CRPGs will be called Dreadwolf, but the game has no release date as yet.
Dreadwolf will be the fourth game in the series. It began with Dragon Age: Origins in 2009 and then continued with Dragon Age II (2011) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014). Set on the continent of Thedas, the games initially chronicled the invasion of the civilised lands by a monstrous race called the Darkspawn. Subsequent games have focused on political intrigue and the conflict between wizards and the world's religious orders. The games have spun off a number of novels and comics.
According to BioWare, Dreadwolf will focus on the character of Solas, a character from Inquisition, who will serve as the titular Dreadwolf and the game's main antagonist.
BioWare have been working on the game since Inquisition's release, but development was complicated by several ideas and builds for the game being scrapped and then started over. Staff were also seconded to help on Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) and Anthem (2019). The direction and format of Dreadwolf has changed several times during development, with a strong multiplayer focus being scrapped in favour of being a single-player-only game.
BioWare have not set a release date for the game, but it is not expected before 2023 at the earliest. BioWare are also working on a new Mass Effect game.
BioWare and EA have released teaser trailers for new games in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series.
The Dragon Age IV teaser hints that the game is still set in the mage-realm of Tevinter and will focus - once again - on a new hero arising to stand against the forces of evil, backed by familiar characters like Varric. The trailer ends with the name "Dragon Age," hopefully just a placeholder and not an indication that BioWare are going to rename the game just Dragon Age to confuse people. The game has been in development for some years, although the team was co-opted to help finish both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. The game now appears to be in full development at BioWare, but no release timeframe has been given.
The Mass Effecttrailer features as Asari walking through a snowy wasteland with a destroyer Reaper in the background, after a camera pans across wreckage and the ruins of a Mass Relay, hinting that the game will take place after the events of Mass Effect 3 rather than following up on the other-galaxy shenanigans of Mass Effect: Andromeda. This new Mass Effect game is very early in development.
The move is hoped to restore confidence in the fanbases of both games after the heads of both franchises resigned from BioWare last week.
In a surprise move, the heads of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises have quit BioWare and its parent company, Electronic Arts.
Casey Hudson, who is the BioWare General Manager and head of the Mass Effect IP, and Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah, are both departing the company ahead of their next releases.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition, a HD/4K remaster of the original Mass Effect trilogy, is currently scheduled for release in the first half of 2021, whilst Mass Effect 5 is in early pre-production. Dragon Age 4 is in development for a believed 2022 release.
EA and BioWare have confirmed that the franchises will continue under new management.
Hudson joined BioWare to work on MDK2 in 2000. He subsequently worked on Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000), Neverwinter Nights (2002), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), Jade Empire (2005), Mass Effect (2007), Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012). He left BioWare in 2014 and spent more than two years working for Microsoft Studios before returning to BioWare in 2017.
Darrah has worked with BioWare almost since its founding. He created the Infinity Engine's combat system for Baldur's Gate (1998), which subsequently was used in numerous other games (including Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series, for Black Isle, as well as Baldur's Gate II). He also worked on Jade Empire (2005), Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (2008), Dragon Age: Origins (2009), Dragon Age II (2011), Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) and Anthem (2019).
BioWare has been in difficulties recently, with both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem under-performing in sales and critical acclaim compared to expectations, and the studio not delivering a bona fide hit game in six years. Their last few games have had exceptionally difficult development processes, and numerous reports about Dragon Age 4's torturous development process have surfaced.
BioWare and another formerly critically-lauded studio, Blizzard, have both been held up as examples of once-great companies that have withered and declined under corporate ownership, since the former's buy-out by Electronic Arts in 2007 and the latter's acquisition by Activision in 2008. Both studios have struggled to release games matching their pre-acquisition quality ever since, with widespread reports of corporate interference. Both companies have been hemorrhaging talent for years, with dozens of major Blizzard developers quitting the company in the last few months to found new studios.
It's a busy week for some of gaming's biggest franchises and most interesting developers.
First up, and most interestingly, is that Obsidian will finally unveil their mysterious "Project X" that they've been working on in the background for the past three or four years whilst releasing smaller games like Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity. This game is the brainchild and a labour of love for Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the co-creators of the Fallout franchise and numerous other classic RPGs, including Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscure. Boyarsky was also a creative lead on Diablo III and its expansion Reaper of Souls for Blizzard, whilst Cain worked on games for Obsidian including Fallout: New Vegas.
The images revealed so far don't give much away, but hint at an SF RPG set in a retro-futuristic setting, possibly influenced by the likes of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. We'll find out for sure tomorrow when the game is fully unveiled.
Following that, on Friday, Ubisoft will unveil the future of the Far Cry franchise. The previous five games in the series have been - more or less - contemporary open world games with a very light dusting of science fiction and fantasy ideas, along with a couple of spin-offs (Blood Dragon and Primal) that had the licence to go much weirder. Far Cry 6 - assuming that's what the game will be called - sounds like it will be a full-on post-apocalyptic story, following on from the "good" ending to Far Cry 5 where the United States is (extremely randomly, as it had nothing to do with the plot of the game) devastated by a nuclear surprise attack launched by, er, North Korea. On the one hand, this may freshen up an increasingly bored franchise (Far Cry 5 was one of the weakest games in the series to date), or it may just be a case of the exact same game with a different paintjob. We will find out more on Friday.
Coming later this month, Electronic Arts and BioWare are poised to reveal some more information about the next Dragon Age game. BioWare's fantasy roleplaying series began back in 2009 with the solid Dragon Age: Origins and continued through the interesting-but-flawed Dragon Age II (2011) and the awful Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014). BioWare, once the great market leader for Western-style RPGs, has seen its thunder thoroughly stolen first by Bethesda and more recently by CD Projekt Red. Its last few games (Inquisition and last year's Mass Effect: Andromeda) have been underwhelming in the extreme, and there is little excitement for its next game, a generic multiplayer-focused, story-lite action-SF game called Anthem, due for release in March 2019. Dragon Age IV, or whatever is finally announced, has got its work cut out for it if it is to regain the stronger critical and commercial performance of earlier games in the series.
Based on reports from Kotaku and Polygon, it sounds like the fate of BioWare, once one of the most critically-feted development studios in video games, is hanging by a thread. Everything may be resting on the fate of their next game, Anthem, an online shooter which, right now, has not done much to get people excited about it.
It has been clear for many years that BioWare has become a pale shadow of its former self. Like many developers before it, BioWare blazed a trail of innovative and interesting games which got noticed by the big publishers. Electronic Arts, the biggest of the big, swooped in and made BioWare an Offer They Couldn't Refuse back in 2007, buying out the company with grand promises that they wouldn't interfere with the company or its ethos. They almost immediately, of course, began interfering with the company and its ethos.
BioWare was originally founded in 1995 in Edmonton, Canada, and hit the jackpot with only its second game, the expansive and epic Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, Baldur's Gate (1998). Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) confirmed the first game's promise and is regularly still cited as both BioWare's best game and one of the finest CRPGs of all time. BioWare went on to release Neverwinter Nights (2002) and Knights of the Old Republic (2003), the best Star Wars video game of all time.
At that time the company was riding high with millions of games sold and tens of millions of dollars in the bank, but it was feeling a little creatively stifled. All of its games so far had been based on pre-existing universes and worlds. BioWare couldn't really shine, they felt, unless they created their own universe. And that's what they did in 2004, moving development of Knights of the Old Republic II and Neverwinter Nights II to their former colleagues at Interplay who had regrouped as Obsidian Entertainment and shifting course to create three brand-new worlds from scratch.
The results were Jade Empire (2005), Mass Effect (2007) and Dragon Age: Origins (2009). Jade Empire, an atmospheric beat 'em-up/RPG hybrid, is easily the most underrated game in the BioWare canon but its sales were unspectacular and plans for a sequel were shelved. Mass Effect, a shooter/RPG hybrid planned as the start of a trilogy, was a much bigger success, helping drive sales of the X-Box 360 console and convincing Electronic Arts to buy out the company. But Dragon Age: Origins was a much more ambitious game, a vast, sprawling fantasy RPG that hearkened back to the glory days of the Baldur's Gate series. Whilst Jade Empire and Mass Effect streamlined (or "dumbed down," for the less charitable) the hardcore RPG experience for consoles, Dragon Age was complex, deep and extremely long (clocking in at almost four times Mass Effect's length). Making this game was neither cheap nor fast: the game cost several tens of millions of dollars (at a time when game budgets were much lower than today) and took a startling five years to develop. Even more surprising, the game was intended to be a PC exclusive at the precise moment that PC gaming was arguably in the weakest state it has ever been in.
When Electronic Arts took over, they were less than impressed. They mandated console ports of Dragon Age, which were awkward because the game was not designed with controllers in mind, and also ordered that a sequel be put in fast turn-around on a strictly limited budget to help ameliorate the cost of the first game. They ordered that Dragon Age IIdrop its large and impressive (and console-straining) engine to use Mass Effect 2's engine instead, as well as its conversation wheel and other features that the Dragon Age franchise was, arguably, not a good fit for. This rolling back (or "dumbing down," to the less charitable) of the game's design ethos saw one senior BioWare designer ragequit the company. The game was slammed by fans on release, for its small scope, tiny number of locations and overall pervading feeling of cheapness. Later retrospectives have been kinder, focusing on the very solid story and characters, but it's hard to argue that the gameplay was lacking.
Worse was to come. In 2011 BioWare released The Old Republic, an MMORPG set in the Star Wars universe. What was actually a decent multiplayer online game was roundly condemned and slated for not being a third "proper" Knights of the Old Republic single-player game. The game sold very well - by some metrics it's the second-most-successful MMORPG of all time, behind only World of WarCraft - but it later went free-to-play and the Grand Star Wars Canon shakeup of 2012 has left the game's official status in doubt (which Disney has done little to alleviate, constantly dodging the question of whether the game is canon).
In 2012 Mass Effect 3 was released, concluding BioWare's grand space opera trilogy. Although the game was very decent, its ending was enormously controversial. It didn't really make sense and removed a lot of the player agency and choice that been the cornerstone of the trilogy. Although later DLC and patches resolved some of the issues, it couldn't resolve all of them and trilogy's reputation was marred as a result (although, again, retrospectives taking into account the three games as a whole have been kinder).
In 2014 Dragon Age: Inquisition was released, and sales and criticism-wise seemed to be something of a righting of a listing ship, although not completely. The game was large and expansive, but it was also criticised for being too blatantly an attempt to cash in on the success of Bethesa's open-world RPGs, such as Skyrim and Fallout 3. BioWare games had always been focused on character and story, with optional side-stories but always an urgency to the storytelling. Inquisition was criticised for throwing this out in favour of vast zones packed with repetitive, MMORPG-style grinding and fetch quests. It was an attempt to cynically meld BioWare's signatures of great storytelling and memorable characters onto Bethesda's open world design and it was a poor fit. Worse was to come in 2015 when The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released and did exactly what Inquisition had tried to do - a character-focused narrative in a vast, morally murky open world with tons of side-content - and did it with seemingly effortless style, humour and warmth.
Still, the game sold well and reviews were stronger than for BioWare's two proceeding games, but these positive signs were undercut when a new RPG in development behind the scenes, Shadow Realms, was suddenly cancelled. Mass Effect: Andromeda was then released in early 2017. Riven with technical problems, unengaging characters and an unexciting storyline, the game was also set in a different galaxy to the first three Mass Effect games and none of the trilogy's characters or storylines were featured. The game sold poorly, the first genuine BioWare bomb, and suddenly the future of the company seemed in doubt.
BioWare's future now rests on three games: Anthem, Dragon Age IV and an untitled Star Wars game. Dragon Age IV is still relatively early in development and internally the game has been described as a "reboot". What that means, given that the Dragon Age franchise has always been pretty loose in terms of storytelling between games and each title has (more or less) stood alone anyway, is unclear. The Star Wars title is shrouded in secrecy but its future is doubtful, given that Visceral Games were developing a story-based, single-player-focused game that was canned and it was believed that this was also going to be the focus of the Star Wars game.
Anthem, on the other hand is in an advanced stage of development and is expected to be released in about a year. But the game has singularly failed to engage much in the way of pre-release excitement. The game is an action title with limited or no RPG elements. It's an online title without the narrative depth that BioWare is famed for. With its SF, post-apocalyptic vibe, the game also rather strongly resembles the Destiny franchise from EA's arch-rivals Activision, which has itself been rather divisive (although it has sold well). Anthem may luck out and pick up players disappointed with the rival game, but there seems to be a much greater fear at BioWare that people are simply not that excited about the game. Whilst a brand-new BioWare franchise would have once had gamers salivating in expectation, now it barely merits a shrug.
If Anthem fails to resonate, it may mean the end of BioWare, a very expensive studio which has never actually produced a mega-selling game. The entire Mass Effect series, all four games, have sold only about half the number of copies of Fallout 4 or Skyrim by themselves, for example. Dragon Age has done a bit better, but it's now been comprehensively overtaken by the Witcher franchise, a series from what was once a small Polish distribution company based on a series of novels that no-one west of Paris had heard of which has now sold 30 million copies and really does have people salivating for the follow-up, an epic SF game called Cyberpunk 2077.
BioWare's passing would be a shame, as they brought back the Western RPG from the brink of extinction, paving the way for many classic games both from their catalogue and others. Without them, it's arguable if Obsidian and CD Projekt Red (whom BioWare helped launch The Witcher back in 2007) would have taken off like they did. Even Bethesda may owe BioWare a debt of gratitude: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1997) had not been a massive success and it was partially BioWare's resurrection of the CRPG that inspired them to revisit the series with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002), whose success led to where they are today.
Still, this may be premature. Anthem may turn out to be a fine game, EA may let them actually make a great Star Wars RPG and we could still see Dragon Age IV after all. Watch this space.
Ex-BioWare writer David Gaider has joined Beamdog, the development team made up of ex-BioWare and ex-Black Isle staffers working on the new Baldur's Gate game, Siege of Dragonspear.
Gaider joined BioWare in 1999 and wrote material for both Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and its expansion, Throne of Bhaal. He worked on Neverwinter Nights and its two expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, on which he was lead writer), as well as the critically-acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
However, Gaider's main claim to fame was working on the Dragon Age franchise. Preliminary development of the franchise began in 2002, when BioWare decided not to make any more Dungeons and Dragons-based games and needed a home-grown, replacement world to set fantasy CRPGs in. Gaider played a very key role in creating Thedas, the continent where the action of Dragon Age takes place, and developing the background lore, politics and key characters of the setting. He also wrote key characters including Morrigan, Alistair and Shale for Dragon Age: Origins and Meredith, Fenris and Cassandra for Dragon Age II. Gaider worked as a writer and designer on Dragon Age: Origins, its expansion Awakening and then on Dragon Age II. He moved up to the role of lead writer on Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Gaider has now come full circle, with Beamdog employing many ex-BioWare personnel including Trent Oster and Brent Knowles, the Dragon Age franchise co-creator who quit the company in 2009 in disquiet at the controversial, action-heavy direction mandated for Dragon Age II by Electronic Arts. Beamdog have recently reissued updated, enhanced editions of Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II (and their respective expansions), Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II. They are currently finalising work on Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, an "interquel" set between BG1 and 2 and expected for release in Spring 2016. Gaider is joining too late to work on that game (which was recently described as feature-complete and now in QA and testing) but will likely play a key role in whatever project Beamdog develop next, including the much-rumoured Baldur's Gate III.
BioWare have been hemorrhaging a lot of talent recently. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, two of the company's co-founders, resigned in 2012. Jennifer Hepler, another writer, left in 2013. Casey Hudson, the director of the successful Mass Effect trilogy, departed in 2014. Although a lot of talent remains, BioWare have no announced projects underway beyond further expansions for Star Wars: The Old Republic and a new Mass Effect game, Andromeda, slated for release later this year or in early 2017. An all-new game, Shadow Realms, was cancelled last year. It is unclear what BioWare will be working on in the future, although rumours persist of a new, single-player focused Star Wars RPG and further Dragon Age games.
There are several ways of enjoying epic fantasy. You can read books, you can watch TV shows, you can go to the cinema or you can sit down with some friends to play Dungeons and Dragons (other fantasy RPGs are available). But in the late 1970s the development of home computers allowed fans of the genre to enjoy it another way: to delve into fantasy worlds on screen, take control of characters and armies and make their own decisions about what happens. Fantasy has gone on to be a huge genre for the medium, fuelling action games, role-playing titles and text adventures.
Zork
It's arguable what the very first fantasy game was, but Zork has a strong claim. The game was created in 1977 by computer students at MIT, impressed by a primitive text adventure called Colossal Cave Adventure. Zork rapidly expanded beyond their original plan, which was to simply update Colossal Cave Adventure with more advanced technology, and ended up being absolutely massive in size. Playable by MIT students on the university mainframe in 1977, the game was released for home computers in 1980. It was too big to fit into one title, so it was split, epic-fantasy style, into three distinct games: The Great Underground Empire (1980), The Wizard of Frobozz (1981) and The Dungeon Master (1983), better-known as Zork I, Zork II and Zork III respectively.
The games depict the player as an unnamed adventurer exploring the ruins of a once-mighty subterranean empire. Using text descriptions and commands, the players moves deeper into the ruins, gaining treasure, defeating enemies, solving puzzles and eventually assuming control of the underground lands as the Dungeon Master. The trilogy is extremely hard, with solutions to puzzles only becoming obvious through trial and error. Being trapped in a tunnel without a light source is also invariably fatal, with the game notifying the player that they have been "eaten by a grue". Despite its toughness, the game soon won a devoted audience who praised the freedom of the game, which allowed players to explore the dungeon as they wished and approach puzzles from multiple angles. The lore and storyline behind the game was initially fairly sketchy, but later editions of the game and the numerous spin-offs would come with manuals and booklets filling in the history of the world in some detail, mirroring how early fantasy novels are often light on such details but then fill in the worldbuilding later on.
The developers of Zork went on to found Infocom, the trendsetters for the adventure game genre. Numerous titles followed, among them the highly-acclaimed adventure game version of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Leather Goddess of Phobos, but Zork was where it began.
You had to bring a lot of imagination to these early games.
Ultima
Released in 1981, Ultima was one of the very first computer roleplaying games. It used primitive graphics to depict a fantasy kingdom named Sosaria (renamed in later titles as Britannia), with the player controlling their character from above. The game had a fairly involved plot (by the standards of the time) with the player having to fight the evil wizard Mondain for control of the kingdom. In doing so, they won the allegiance of the noble Lord British, who would go on to appear in subsequent games in the series. Later games would retcon the player as the Avatar, a vitally important warrior who holds the fate of the world in his hands.
The game was developed by Richard Garriott as a spiritual successor to Akalabeth, an earlier (1979) roleplaying game with a Tolkien Estate-baiting title. The first three Ultima titles are predominantly action-driven games with most situations resolved through violence. However, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985) introduced the "virtues" systems of morality and encouraged players to experiment with dialogue and puzzle-solving as alternatives to killing everything in sight. Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990), which was the first game predominantly targeted at more advanced home computers such as PCs and the Commodore Amiga, went a step further by having Britannia invaded by Gargoyles but then encouraging the player to find a peaceful solution through diplomacy and investigation (although a certain degree of combat is unavoidable).
In 1993 Ultima Underworld was released by the acclaimed Looking Glass studios. This spin-off, which was more of an action-focused game set underground, used an ahead-of-its time 3D game engine which allowed for unprecedented player freedom in how they handled situations. The developers of the game would go on to create such historically important titles such as System Shock, Thief: The Dark Project, Deus Ex and the BioShock franchise.
The Ultima series became hugely influential again in 1997, when the developers released Ultima Online, the first big multiplayer online roleplaying game. A forerunner of EverQuest and World of WarCraft, it allowed players to join forces together to battle foes, work in mundane professions (such as blacksmiths) and own property.
The series has been important in the development of roleplaying games overall, with the developers of the recent Divinity series noting it as a huge influence. The last single-player entry in the series was the poorly-received Ultima IX: Ascension (1999). Richard Garriott is now working on Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a spiritual successor to the series.
Yeah, screw those Small Humanoids. They suck.
Wizardry
Contemporary with the Ultima games, the Wizardry series similarly depicts adventures in a fantastical realm but takes a different approach. It is mostly set underground and featured a then-unusual first-person viewpoint. It also allowed the player to create an entire party of characters rather than just one. Compared to the Ultima series, the lore and story were initially light but came more to the fore later on. As well as its primitive 3D viewpoint, the Wizardry series also became rather experimental in later games. The fourth title, for example, is set from the POV of one of the main villains from the earlier games as he attempts to escape from prison and has to fend off adventuring parties seeking to kill him.
The Wizardry game proved unusually successful (for early western games) in Japan, with both the Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy series being heavily inspired by it. The series concluded with Wizardry 8 (2001), although several further spin-off games have since been released for the Japanese market.
Thorin! That helps no-one at this time!
The Hobbit
Somewhat inevitably, when making early games and trying to bring the fantasy genre to the medium, developers turned to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Initially daunted by The Lord of the Rings, the team at Australian developers Spectrum Holobyte decided to adapt The Hobbit as a text adventure, released in 1982. Using a more advanced text system than the Zork titles, with later versions of the game adding graphics in the form of static illustrations for each area, The Hobbit was both quite difficult but also fiendishly addictive. It was also clever in how it adapted the book, with readers of the novel getting a leg up in some scenarios only to find themselves stymied by sequences which deviated from the text. Indeed, the early release of the game was accompanied by copies of the novel in an early and successful example of cross-medium marketing.
The game remains one of the stronger games based on Tolkien, mainly for its lack of violence and success in capturing the spirit of the book, even if Thorin didn't sing about gold nearly as much in the novel.
So far beyond cutting edge in 1984 it was off the map. Now you can play it on your phone.
Lords of Midnight& War in Middle-earth
Early video games tended to be focused on a single protagonist or, after Wizardry, a small party of adventurers. This made for some fine games, but arguably the scope of epic fantasy was missing from them, limited by both technology and ambition.
Lords of Midnight, released in 1984, had no truck with such limitations. The game employs an RPG approach, with the player guiding a party of adventurers across a hostile landscape to defeat Doomdark, the evil Witchking of the North, but also has a strategy mode in which the player can recruit other kings and generals into siding with them and then sending their armies into battle. In this manner the game can be played as a roleplaying game, a strategy game or an epic fusion of the two. The scope of the game is enormous, with numerous variations in strategy and approach possible. In fact, if it hadn't been for the near-simultaneous release of the space trading game Elite, Lords of Midnight would likely have been the most influential and important game of the year. It was followed by a sequel, Doomdark's Revenge in 1985.
More insanely, the game was the creation of a single games designer of singular vision: Mike Singleton. Singleton was constantly intrigued by the idea of simultaneously combining the micro and macro viewpoints in games, a design he continued to favour in his classic Midwinter trilogy (Midwinter, Flames of Freedom and Ashes of Empire, released between 1989 and 1992) which took the philosophy onto an island controlled by a dictator where the player has to undertake sabotage and assassination missions whilst helping the local rebels achieve their grander strategic goals.
Between the two series, in 1988, Singleton was given the opportunity to work with the Tolkien licence. War in Middle-earth was similar to Lords of Midnight in that it allowed the player to control hero characters (in this case, the Fellowship of the Ring and allies such as Eomer) in an RPG/adventure-like mode, but also moving armies around on a map of Middle-earth. The game was particularly successful in that it allowed readers of Lord of the Rings to replicate the strategy from the books and gain victory, whilst also allowing for experimentation and changes to that strategy (having Frodo and Sam accompany Aragorn to Rohan and Gondor, for example).
Singleton sadly passed away from cancer in 2012, although successful mobile remakes of Lords of Midnight had brought his work to the attention of modern gamers. He was a visionary in gaming and it's surprising that more games haven't tried to combine the large and the small scale in the manner that he (and the best epic fantasy) managed.
"I don't want to play the bard!"
"You have to, it's your tale!"
The Bard's Tale
Released in 1985, The Bard's Tale was a fantasy computer RPG that, in many respects, was a straightforward challenger to the likes of Ultima and Wizardry. However, it featured more of a sense of humour, more originality (using a magic system based around music) and more of a sense of place, with the game starting in the town of Skara Brae which would serve as a constant source of refuge and resupply between dives into the nearby dungeons. Three games were released in the 1980s for Electronic Arts before the development team made a post-apocalyptic title in a similar vein (only much larger and more ambitious), Wasteland. The team then went solo to become Interplay, with a failed attempt to create a Wasteland sequel instead leading them to create one of the greatest and most influential RPGs of all time, Fallout. But The Bard's Tale remained close to their hearts and in 2016 they hope to release The Bard's Tale IV, which will continue and conclude the storyline from the venerable original games.
The Bard's Tale is a very solid fantasy adventure series, and a stirring riposte to the traditional CRPG notion that bards suck.
Might and Magic
In 1986 game designer Jon Van Caneghem self-published his game Might and Magic: Secrets of the Inner Sanctum. An RPG heavily in the Ultima and Wizardry moulds, Might and Magic did do some things differently. It was extremely large and the game also made a note of the player's choices in the type of party they created, taking gender and race into account in the reactions of other characters and enemies. The game also had a bizarre cross-genre slide into science fiction, with the player discovering that his or her party had been drawn into a battle between an escaped alien prisoner and his pursuer. As the series continues, it is revealed that the various fantasy worlds the player explores are in fact artificial planetoids or environments on huge starships.
The Might and Magic series continued through five games, developing a complex backstory as well as an epic, ongoing narrative. That narrative concludes in the fifth game with the final defeat of the evil Sheltem. The huge success of the games, however, led the publisher to commission a series of spin-offs. Set on a different world and (at least initially) unconnected to the main RPG series, the Heroes of Might and Magic series featured turn-based strategy and adventuring. After three successful spin-off games, the core series was rebooted in 1998 with Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, set in the same world as Heroes of Might and Magic III and with references confirming that all of the games were set in the same universe. Might and Magic VI mixed fantasy with SF more strongly than ever before, with the characters gaining access to advanced laser weapons towards the end of the game.
The core Might and Magic series ended in 2002 with the appalling Might and Magic IX. The series had always been relatively light on a strong narrative drive compared to other RPGs, and the series was looking increasingly archaic in light of other RPGs. Sales had also dropped significantly compared to the Heroes series, which continued (Heroes of Might and Magic VII was released in 2015). Fans were therefore surprised when Might and Magic X: Legacy was released in 2014. A retro-RPG which eschewed modern conventions in favour of turn-based combat and grid-based movement, the game was reasonably well-receive and now it looks like new titles in the main series could follow.
And so it began.
The Legend of Zelda
Very few video games, let alone fantasy roleplaying ones, crossed over into the mainstream. Almost all of the above titles were successful and sold well, but nothing like what happened in Japan in 1986. Shigeru Miyamoto was already famed as the creator of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers when, along with Takashi Tezuka, he created an action roleplaying game called The Legend of Zelda. Set in the fantasy realm of Hyrule, the game saw the player take control of the hero Link in his attempt to rescue Princess Zelda from an evil villain. The first game was light on lore and background, but sequels rapidly expanded the realm of Hyrule and its enormous cast of heroes and villains. The first game, released in 1986, went on to sell a truly mind-boggling (for the time) six million copies, helping drive the Nintendo Entertainment System into millions of homes across the world.
A large number of sequels and prequels followed, although some are non-canon and others are set in parallel timelines. The Zelda series remains one of the biggest and best-known fantasy franchises in the world, and several of the games in the series (with Ocarina of Time, arguably, as the most critically-acllaimed) are generally held to be among the greatest games ever made.
With the first game, the title actually made sense. The most recent single-player game in the series was Final Fantasy XIII 2, which did not.
Final Fantasy
Released in 1987 by Squaresoft, Final Fantasy was a Japanese roleplaying game featuring turn-based combat in a fairly standard fantasy world. Nothing too original, except that the fusion of adventuring and combat was particularly well-done. The game was a huge hit and a sequel - somewhat nonsensically given the title - was demanded. The developers hit on the idea that each game would be set in its own universe with its own characters and magic system, with nothing other than Easter Eggs and the basic underlying gameplay (real-time adventure and turn-based combat) linking them together. This formula proved successful but unchanged up until the very well-received Final Fantasy VI.
For Final Fantasy VII (1997), the first game in the series developed for the more powerful PlayStation console, the developers decided to shoot for the heavens. The gameplay was adjusted to feature 3D sprites moving over beautiful, hand-painted 2D backdrops with dynamic music and gorgeous, lengthy and animated cut scenes. These improvements was also used to sell an unusually powerful story about a world threatened with destruction through blind greed and hubris. Even for a series famed for it, the characters were extremely well-drawn and a particularly tragic, unexpected death a third of the way through the game completely stunned players (becoming effectively the Red Wedding of CRPGs). The story was also noted for both its actual complexity (an unreliable narrator is implied, and at one time the entire backstory of the game has to be thoroughly reexamined when it is revealed to have been a lie) and its thematic musings on identity, loss and power.
Vincent and Yuffi clearly didn't get invited to the afterparty.
Although hamstrung by a poor English translation and occasional graphical limitations, Final Fantasy VII went on to become one of the biggest-selling and most critically-feted video games of all time up to that point. It is generally regarded as the point that RPGs came of age, and set the scene for many games that would follow.
Additional Final Fantasy games have been released, but their quality has been highly variable. Final Fantasy XV is set for release in 2016, but for many fans the real excitement is building over a remake of Final Fantasy VII for the current generation of consoles and home computers.
As well as its 3D viewpoint and real-time gameplay, Dungeon Master also popularised the "Crush monsters in door" mechanic, sadly abandoned by newer titles.
Dungeon Master & Eye of the Beholder
In 1988 Dungeon Master was released. Despite the lawsuit-baiting name, the game was not affiliated with the Dungeons and Dragons franchise, although players might be forgiven for getting confused between them. This game saw players taking control of a party of four characters and delving deep into a multi-level dungeon in search of treasure and enemies that needed to be defeated to win that treasure.
The game was unusual in several respects. First, it was completely set in real-time from a first-person viewpoint (although your character moved from invisible square-to-square, without full, smooth 3D movement). No turns, no pauses, just constant action with some spells and attacks taken time to recharge, a mechanic used in, well, pretty much every modern action game. It also featured much more sophisticated graphics than any prior RPG, the result it being released exclusively for the brand-new 16-bit home computers, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. Even more impressive was the fact it required a monstrous 1MB of memory to run, at a time when the BBC Micro (with 32K of memory) and Spectrium (with 48K) were still popular. The game was not very hot on backstory or hand-holding, with casting spells only accomplished by parsing archaic runes and coming up with combinations of runes to unlock new spells. As the game continued the puzzles became more fiendish, the monsters more powerful and the challenge ever more formidable.
For quite a while, Dungeon Master clones were all the rage, especially as the game's own sequels were fairly underwhelming. There were science fiction variants like Captive and a version riffing off popular British fantasy TV gameshow Knightmare. There was Bloodwych, which split the first-person viewpoint between the four characters and allowed them to move around independently of each other (this ended up being more confusing than helpful). The most successful was Eye of the Beholder, released in 1990. This was an official Dungeons and Dragons game set in the Forgotten Realms universe and saw the players delving below the great city of Waterdeep in search of a tyrannical beholder crimelord. It was followed by two sequels, and then a series of "spiritual successors" in the Lands of Lore series (created by the same personnel as the first two Eye of the Beholder games, but not using the D&D licence).
These games were important for making the action more dynamic and allowing for time-based puzzles. However, some players bemoaned the move away from a greater focus on tactics that had been allowed by the previously-dominant turn-based type of combat. Recently this style of game has been making a bit of a comeback via the retrogaming scene, most successfully in Legends of Grimrock and its sequel.
Dwarven exposition in a pub is a common fantasy video game trope.
Betrayal at Krondor & Discworld
Novel-to-game translations have not been unknown, although the majority have been horrific. The less said about the Shannara video game, the better. However, two of the better ones were released in the mid-1990s.
Betrayal at Krondor (1993) was based on Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar novels. Taking place in the narrative gap between A Darkness at Sethanon and Prince of the Blood,
the game features a massive threat to the Kingdom of the Isles (as
usual) and the player taking the role of one of several characters
charged with defending the kingdom. This mission takes the player and
allies into several dangerous regions of the Triagia continent and
blends real-time, 3D adventuring with turn-based combat. The depiction
of the game world was impressive, the combat satisfying and the story
very well-done. Amusingly, Feist himself adapted the game into his novel
Krondor: The Betrayal (1998), which is easily the worst thing he has ever written. A sequel to the game, Return to Krondor, was also released in 1998 but was not as successful as the original title.
Talking to the guards (guards!).
Discworld
(1995) was based on Terry Pratchett's novels and was more successful
still. A point-and-click adventure made with input from Pratchett and
voice acting by Eric Idle as Rincewind, it was a fun game that nailed
the spirit of the novels despite some very bizarre and obscure puzzles. A
direct sequel followed, Discworld II: Missing, Presumed...!? (1996). A third game, Discworld Noir
(1999) completely abandoned the style of the previous games and was a
3D adventure featuring an original character investigating a spate of
crimes in Ankh-Morpork. The game was a marked departure from the
previous titles and was also easily the best of the three, replicating
as it did the book approach of taking a genre and series of tropes and
poking fun at it whilst also telling a compelling story with well-drawn
characters. Mystifyingly, given the critical acclaim and sales
of the early games, no further Discworld video games have followed.
Yup, even the first game started with you in prison.
The Elder Scrolls
In 1994 Bethesda Studios released The Elder Scrolls: Arena. It was a bit of a departure for the company, who had previously made shoot 'em ups and hockey sports games. Arena was a full 3D RPG, allowing for total freedom of movement and real-time combat. It also had an absolutely massive gameworld, sprawling across the entire continent of Tamriel, and an extremely elaborate and detailed backstory drawn from one of the developer's pen-and-paper roleplaying campaigns.
The game was a big hit and was followed in 1997 by The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Daggerfall was set in just a small corner of Tamriel, but the scale was insanely increased: without fast-travel or magic, it would take days for a player to walk from one side of the map to the other. This was possible due to procedural generation, where the game could generate towns, scenery and dungeons from numerical values rather than everything having to be hand-created. It was technically impressive, if a bit buggy, but the real draw was the game's lore, storyline and the immense freedom it gave to the player to do what they wanted.
Aware that Arena and Daggerfall's vast size was offputting to some players even as the freeform, "open-world" gameplay was attractive, Bethesda decided to make their following games smaller but more hand-crafted and personal, mixing a strong central narrative with lots of interesting side-quests. The result was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released in 2002 for both PC and the original X-Box. It had an impressive 3D game engine and a much more focused style of gameplay, but still easily allowing enough freedom for hundreds of hours of adventuring. The game was hugely acclaimed. It was followed in 2006 by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, an early title for the X-Box 360 and the PlayStation 3. This was the game that finally allowed the series to cross over to a general audience, with a starry voice cast (featuring Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart), jaw-dropping graphics and a splendid mix of a central storyline, side-quests and optional adventures found through simple exploration. Hardcore RPG fans muttered about the game being dumbed down (and some of the game mechanics, such as levelling, are nonsensical), but the millions of sales that followed showed that Bethesda were onto a winning formula.
The Elder Scrolls, 2011 style.
This formula was repeated with their next game, Fallout 3 (2008), a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game with the same engine as Oblivion and a similar story/quest/adventuring structure. Both Fallout 3 and its outsourced follow-up, New Vegas (2010), sold tens of millions of copies, transforming Bethesda into one of the biggest games developers in the world. But even this success was dwarfed by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Released in 2011, the game featured the player as an inhabitant of a frosty northern land of Skyrim, fending off giants and dragons as the player got involved in complex politics and a bloody civil war. Released just after Game of Thrones became huge, the game capitalised on the massive increase in popularity of the fantasy genre.
The online-only prequel, TheElder Scrolls Online (2014), developed by an outside studio, is the latest release in the series but has not attracted the same level of success as the single-player games. Bethesda released Fallout 4 in 2015, and will likely be turning their attention back to The Elder Scrolls series soon. Although hardcore RPG purists may bemoan the more "dumbed down" nature of the roleplaying experience in this series, it has nevertheless sold the fantasy of being a hero in a fantastical world more completely and more successfully than almost any other game.
Extremely accurate.
King's Field & Dark Souls
Due to their complex mechanics, stats and increasing graphical complexity, the most successful early RPGs had mostly been released on home computers. In the late 1980s Japanese developers cracked some of those problems to create engrossing roleplaying experience on consoles, despite the more limited number of options available due to having controllers with only a few buttons rather than a full keyboard. In 1994 a Japanese studio called FromSoftware went a step further by making a game that was more of an action title, but then encouraging the player to develop more tactically nuanced skills to handle increasingly tough enemies.
The game was called King's Field and was something of a cult hit, applauded for its hardcore attitude, stripped-back setting and generally dark atmosphere. Several sequels of varying degrees of success followed before the series was rested in 2001. In 2009 FromSoftware released a spiritual sequel called Demon's Souls for the PlayStation 3, which updated the King's Field gameplay with modern graphics and greater tactical complexity. This in turn was then followed by Dark Souls, released in 2011.
Dark Souls was a massive, worldwide hit. It completely took the gaming world by surprise because it challenged the very foundations of what modern, big-budget action gaming had become focused on: easiness, hand-holding, lazy cut scenes, awful writing and blandness. Dark Souls was ludicrously tough, punishing characters for the slightest mistakes or misjudgements. Death was not just possible but also frequently commonplace. The worldbuilding and writing was subtle to the point of being able to completely ignore it, and the focus of the game on atmosphere over plot was unusual. A sequel followed in 2014, along with a further spiritual successor (this time in a steampunk setting), Bloodborne, in 2015. A third Dark Souls game will be released in 2016.
The Dark Souls games use a very different kind of fantasy to what has been seen before in games, one that is bleak and unremittingly harsh - even grimdark - with stripped-back, minimalist storytelling. It'll be interesting to see how much it influences the genre going forwards.
Blizzard: Creating cut scene promises the game can't deliver on since 1998
WarCraft & Diablo
In 1994 a relatively small and obscure company called Blizzard Entertainment released a game called WarCraft: Orcs and Humans. It was an early title in the burgeoning "real-time strategy" genre, in which players built and commanded armies in real-time rather than taking turns as in many previous strategy games. The RTS genre had been effectively created in 1992 with Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis by Westwood Studios, but WarCraft was an early attempt to muscle in on the genre and do things a bit differently, by employing both a fantasy setting (heavily - and I do mean heavily - inspired by the Warhammer miniatures wargame from Games Workshop) and focusing a bit more on story and lore. The RTS genre would firmly be pushed forwards in popularity by Westwood's own Command and Conquer, released in 1995, but this would then by trumped by WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness in the same year. Blizzard would then step things up with their SF variation of the same idea, StarCraft, in 1998, followed by WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002.
The WarCraft universe is centred on the traditional fantasy conflict between the kingdoms of man and roving warbands of orcs. However, the spin of the games is that neither side are good or evil. Instead, both sides have heroes and villains and they are plunged into conflict due to a mixture of racism, politics and manipulation from outside forces. As the series unfolds, an increasingly detailed backstory (unfortunately, one prone to inconsistent and convoluted retcons) reveals the scale to which both sides have become the playthings for demonic entities, undead spirits and other factions. WarCraft III has the various sides teaming up to defeat the Burning Crusade, an invading army of demons from another dimension.
In 2004 Blizzard unleashed World of WarCraft, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game using the background lore from the strategy games. The game was a success on a massive scale. By 2015, more than 100 million accounts had been created for the game, tens of millions of boxed copies had been sold and the game's popularity had peaked with over 12 million simultaneous players. Although it wasn't the first MMORPG, being heavily influenced by the earlier Ultima Online (1997) and especially EverQuest (1998), it was by far the most successful. Indeed, the failure of any other MMORPG to come close to its popularity has been placed on the game's utter domination of the field and the reluctance of players to commit to more than one MMORPG at a time. More than eleven years after its release, the game remains popular and a sixth major expansion for the game has been announced for 2016.
However, Blizzard have also found time to create another fantasy franchise. In 1996 they released Diablo. This was an action-roleplaying game, with the roleplaying elements tone down in favour of loot and fast-paced, increasingly epic combat. The game was a huge success and was followed by Diablo II in 2000 and Diablo III in 2012, as well as games it inspired, most notably the Torchlight series from some of the same developers. The Diablo games are noted for considerably more restrained worldbuilding and lore than the WarCraft games, as well as a much darker and grimmer tone (although this was lightened somewhat by Diablo III).
Rumours persist that Blizzard are planning WarCraft IV, a new strategy game that will move the narrative forward from the events of both WarCraft III and World of WarCraft. A big-budget WarCraft movie will also be released in the spring of 2016.
The game includes everything you could wish for,
including minions, dominatrixes, bile demons, minions, gold, traps,
minions and magic. Did we mention that it gives you minions? It gives
you minions. Mwahaha.
Dungeon Keeper
Some
earlier fantasy games had experimented with allowing you to be the bad
guy, or at least choose an evil or amoral path. But none had quite
embraced the concept like Dungeon Keeper, released by the mighty
Bullfrog Studios in 1997. The game pitted the player not as the
adventurers breaking into the dungeon but the demonic entity/thing
charged with keeping the place running. The player had to hire monsters,
build lairs and training rooms for them, keep them
happy/amused/tortured and build up a line of defence against invading
heroes whilst also taking on rival keepers in an underground world.
The result
was a phenomenal game, macabre and darkly hilarious whilst also
embracing tricky strategy and confirming what we had all suspected
along: that there is nothing more diabolically evil than middle
management.
An equally excellent sequel followed in 1999, but there hasn't really been a satisfying follow up (despite the best efforts of Dungeons and Overlord) since.
Meet a bunch of perfect strangers, bond over slaughtering hobgoblins.
Starting in the 1980s, various Dungeons and Dragons-based video games had appeared. There was a series of RPGs released in stirring gold boxes in the late 1980s such as Champions of Krynn and Pools of Radiance which attracted a hardcore fanbase and in 1990 the Eye of the Beholder trilogy won over gamers with its faster action and first-person viewpoint. However, in the mid-1990s video games based on the franchise became less consistent, likely resulting from TSR's financial problems. Descent to Undermountain and Blood and Gold, both released in 1996, were critically and commercially unsuccessful and it looked like the golden age of D&D video games was over. In fact, it hadn't even started.
BioWare was a new company with a single action game to its name, Shattered Steel. The game had done reasonably well for the publishers, Interplay, who asked BioWare for more ideas. BioWare presented a demo for a new engine they'd been working on, which got Interplay extremely excited. Having recently purchased the D&D video game licence, they asked BioWare to work on a game set in the Forgotten Realms setting. BioWare agreed. Interplay was so impressed with the engine BioWare had created that they licensed it themselves for use by their in-house RPG division, recently renamed Black Isle Studios following the success of their first two Fallout games.
Released in 1998, Baldur's Gate was both a critical success and a bestseller. The game prioritised narrative and character whilst also allowing a great deal of player freedom. The game also sold a sense of atmosphere and place, using fantastic artwork, stirring music and ambient sound effects to draw the player into its complex, morally murky storyline. RPGs had focused on character and story before to great success (most notably in the preceding year's Final Fantasy VII), but usually only through railroading the plot. Baldur's Gate managed to incorporate a number of side-quests and character-specific missions to break up the narrative and give each player a slightly different experience. Baldur's Gate was acclaimed for allowing players to live out their pen-and-paper fantasies in a richly detailed game world and setting.
This was followed in 1999 by Planescape: Torment, from Black Isle Studios. Planescape: Torment was not strictly an epic fantasy, instead being set in the weirdly metaphysical world of the Outer Planes, where ideas are weapons and wits can win wars. The game featured a masterfully-executed narrative and plot, with tortured and sympathetic characters and environments and ideas unlike anything scene in a fantasy game before. It is often still cited as the greatest roleplaying game of all time.
The third series spawned from the Infinity Engine began in 2000 with Icewind Dale, also from Black Isle. Unlike the narrative-focused Torment and Baldur's Gate, which mixed combat with roleplaying, Icewind Dale was heavily focused on dungeons, loot and action. There was a reasonably good story and some superbly-realised locations and music, but killing things and levelling up was front and centre, and surprisingly well-done.
The single finest game using the engine was released at the end of 2000: Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn utterly dwarfed the original game in the series in its number of locations and major characters. The plot was labyrinthine and complex, drawing a party of well-drawn heroes (some returning from the original game, many completely new) into a conflict with the enigmatic Jon Irenicus. Voiced with skill by veteran actor David Warner, Irenicus would become one of the most iconic of all CRPG villains, and was noted for his well-developed backstory and, unusually for a video game villain, his own personal story arc.
The game was colossal, with storylines varying depending on the player's character, race and class. The game would give the player a huge stronghold to develop and defend, with its own attached storylines, and the type of stronghold and attached storyline would vary by character class. The title would also track a startling number of possible combinations of companion characters, resulting in burgeoning friendships, friendly rivalries and even deadly enmities. The game even allowed romances to develop between members of your party, with a huge number of possible outcomes. Even a relaxed playthrough of the game and its titanic expansion, Throne of Bhaal (2001) would consume dozens of hours and an exhaustive one would easily top 200 hours. This was very much the Lord of the Rings to the original game's Hobbit, and remains arguably the greatest of all fantasy roleplaying achievements on the screen. Not even BioWare's own spiritual successors to the game (Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age) could match it.
Interplay collapsed in 2002 and BioWare had to team with Atari to release their next D&D RPG (and, it would turn out, their last one): Neverwinter Nights. Despite an ambitious new 3D engine, the game was deemed a failure for its storyline, which was never really better than "okay", and its focus on controlling a single player rather than a party of six as in the Infinity days. This was down to the focus being on tools allowing the player to create their own dungeons and adventures. The expansions were much better-received, but BioWare soon moved on to develop a Star Wars RPG, the excellent Knights of the Old Republic. It fell to Obsidian, a company emerging from the ruins of Interplay and Black Isle, to develop Neverwinter Nights II and its superb expansions. The first of these, Mask of the Betrayer, was soon heralded as the finest D&D game since Baldur's Gate II itself.
Following this period making a big, sprawling RPG became almost prohibitively expensive, limiting their development to just a handful of companies. However, in the early 2010s the advent of crowdfunding allowed a number of successors to these games to appear, most notably Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin and Torment: Tides of Numenera. But more on these later.
Jade Empire
Released in 2005, Jade Empire was highly significant as BioWare's first roleplaying game not based on a licensed property: their previous roleplaying games had been set either in the Forgotten Realms or Star Wars settings. Jade Empire was instead set in a new world heavily influenced by Asian mythology and films, mixing magic and martial arts with their traditional, character-focused storytelling.
The result is one of their most visually stylish and overall cool arms, with a superb sense of place and a visual design which is unlike anything they've done before or since. The game was not a massive success, however, with fans criticising the company for "dumbing down" on the RPG mechanics. There is no inventory management, very little to spend money on and the game is reliant on real-time, directly controlled combat rather than pause or turn-based clicking. It was a divisive game, with its fans appreciating its streamlined and focused approach but others less keen, especially when its RPG-lite style of gameplay continued into the Mass Effect science fiction series.
Despite that complaint, Jade Empire is a fine epic fantasy story, all the more successful for employing Asian tropes rather than the over-familiar European ones, and is the most underrated game in the BioWare canon.
The Witcher III is both the most critically-acclaimed and one of the biggest-selling video games of 2015, a remarkable achievement for a small Polish studio producing a game based on books that remain obscure in the English-speaking world.
The Witcher
Released in 2007, The Witcher was a video game based on Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher novels and short stories. Developed by Polish developers CD Projekt Red and using a game engine borrowed from BioWare, it was released in a monstrously buggy state. The fact that the game prospered is amazing, but it did so. The developers fixed the problems and released an "Enhanced Edition" which repaired the most egregious bugs and fixed the biggest gameplay issues. This allowed the game to be reassessed and enjoyed for its much more low-key and morally murky storyline than was in most fantasy games, along with its focused character development.
The game's rough edges were smoothed off for The Witcher II: Assassin of Kings (2011), a shorter but much stronger game about politics, racism and war. The game crossed over to consoles, winning over new fans, and was praised for its reactivity: the entire middle third of the game is set in a totally different area depending on choices you make earlier in the game, and the alternate location can be only be visited by reloading a save from earlier.
However, both games were but tasters for The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (2015). This game moved into an open-world setting (instead of a linear series of areas) and was vastly bigger than the first two games combined, featuring hundreds of hours of content. It took on both Skyrim and Dragon Age head-first and won, thanks to a much better story and jaw-dropping graphics. It remains, for now, the last word in fantasy adventuring in video games.
Dragon Age
BioWare released Dragon Age: Origins in 2009 after five years of development. Stung by criticisms of Neverwinter Nights, BioWare decided to develop a game that was much bigger but also more focused on their strengths with narrative and character. The result was an epic fantasy game that was huge in scope, impressive in visuals and, er, clunky as hell, especially on the rushed console versions.
Dragon Age: Origins certainly isn't a bad game, but it's one that suffers badly from comparison with BioWare's earlier titles. On just about every level bar visual, it's a weaker title than Baldur's Gate II, featuring simpler and less inspired mechanics, less interesting characters, much less of a sense of place and an inconsistent design style. It's certainly a far better single player game than Neverwinter Nights, but its interface is stodgy and ridiculously less customisable than that game, despite being seven years newer. It's also trivially easy even on the hardest difficulty levels and its combat is poor.
The franchise also suffered due to BioWare's takeover by Electronic Arts. Plans for a bigger, more epic sequel were thrown out by EA who mandated a quickie sequel to help moderate the original game take so much time and money to develop. BioWare responded with style, making Dragon Age II (2011) a conceptually fascinating and stripped-down fantasy game (which demanded a huge, epic scale whilst being limited to a small handful of locations) with memorable characters, but also completely wrecking the sense of immersion the original game had. Arguably the series didn't really manage what it was aiming for until Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), but even that suffered from being far too large with, bafflingly for a single-player game, too many ideas and mechanics inspired by MMORPGs. It was then promptly upstaged by The Witcher III's release a few months later.
Dragon Age feels like the epic fantasy gaming series that just couldn't quite satisfy, despite the fact it's a reasonably enjoyable series and has sold very well. But it's certainly a series that has been torn between chasing old glories and trying to copy its rivals rather than just doing its own thing, and has suffered for it.
Dishonored fulfils all of your rogue/assassin fantasies in an unusual world.
Dishonored
Released in 2012, Dishonored is a steampunk fantasy epic. It takes place in a single city, Dunwall, but gives that city a sense of place and purpose missing from almost every fantasy city created for games. It's a pseudo-Victoriana nightmare of slums and corruption, drawing from the New Weird as its primary fantasy inspiration. A game set in China Mieville's New Crobuzon using this engine would be incredible.
The game was also impressive for reversing POV and presenting the same events from the perspective of one of the villains in the two expansions, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, with an even more twisting narrative. Dishonored II, which will pick up some years later and featuring the princess you rescue in the first game as a major playable character, will be released in 2016.
Triumph, tragedy and desperation are superbly evoked through a beautiful style in The Banner Saga, proving the best ideas don't need a billion dollars to be realised.
The Banner Saga
Over the course of the 2000s, game development costs went through the roof. Publishers became less keen to back more experimental and "different" games, instead demanding more sequels, franchises and games that were similar to other games.
The solution to this creative decline was simple: take it to the fans. Small game companies used platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo to directly ask fans to fund their projects and they responded. Early successes included the post-apocalyptic Wasteland 2 and the adventure game Broken Age, as well as retro-RPGs Shadowrun Returns, Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera.
One of the less famous but still accomplished games in this period was The Banner Saga (2013). Made by ex-BioWare veterans, the game is set in a world being consumed by the steampunk robot-like Dredge. The forces of civilisation stand against them but are swept away, with both humanity and their titanic Viking allies, the Varl, being forced to go on the run. Evacuation caravans have to make it through hostile territory and overcome their own internal divisions to survive, even as the Sun itself prepares to die. This is a desperate game of survival, immensely nuanced characterisation and strategic combat, all told in an old-school, 1950s animation style which is remarkably beautiful. This really is an epic fantasy, with a world-shaking plot but related through fascinating characters and making minimal use of established genre tropes.
The Banner Saga II will be released in late 2015 or early 2016, and will be followed by a concluding game in the trilogy. Not quite like anything else out there, it's well worth a look.
Pillars of Eternity embraces old-skool, epic adventuring.
Pillars of Eternity
The most recent big epic fantasy game on this list, Pillars of Eternity is a deliberate throwback to the isometric RPGs of yesteryear, particuarly Baldur's Gate. Like that game, Eternity features a cast of well-drawn characters brought together by the player to help combat a threat to the land. It's set in an original and interesting world and was created by a team of veterans of many previous RPGs, including the Fallout and Icewind Dale series, as well as Planecape: Torment and Neverwinter Nights II. It's not flawless - the game refusal to reward you for defeating enemies, only completing objectives, makes combat feel rather pointless - but it's a game of narrative depth and ambition that could only be made these days via crowdfunding.
Epic fantasy has become a dominant genre in gaming, with many fine titles allowing fantasy fans to fulfil their dreams of taking part in a fantasy story. However, nothing can be more immersive than a book. By the late 1990s that suggestion seemed to be unfashionable, with commentators pointing towards the falling number of readers and in particular fewer children taking up reading at a young age, lured away by video games, cartoons and movies. In 1997 a book was released that completely changed that argument and launched the single most successful work of fantasy in history.
