As was prophesised in the ancient texts (well, yesterday), Bethesda Game Studios have announced and released their remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the same day. The game is available right now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
French studio Virtuos created the remaster, working under the watchful eye of Bethesda. The game features a completely reworked graphics engine, with Unreal Engine 5 now handling rendering, though the original GameBryo Engine is apparently still working somewhere under the hood. Every graphical asset in the game was recreated from scratch and some areas have been given a serious glow-up. The game's infamously janky levelling system has been reworked, and combat is more responsive. The game has added new combat animations and physics reactions, and the voice cast has been hugely expanded with many new voice actors added. However, the original voice actors' performances (including Sir Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean) have also been preserved. As expected, the remaster includes both the Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles expansions.
The Skyblivion remake mod team can take some heart from the fact that Oblivion Remastered appears to not have thoroughly reworked area design or the game's infamously samey dungeons. Skyblivion has focused on expanding those areas of the game, which should be a major improvement. Skyblivion has committed to a 2025 release date as well.
The same leaks indicating the existence of Oblivion Remastered a few months ago also claimed that Bethesda are working on Fallout 3 Remastered, which is also a very interesting prospect.
Bethesda have confirmed they will be making a big announcement about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered tomorrow, April 22nd 2025, at 11am EST, 8am PST and 4pm BST. This follows weeks of speculation and leaks about the game, and widespread rumours the game would be "shadow-dropped" (released with absolutely no preamble or warning) today.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was originally released in 2006 as, obviously, the fourth game in that venerable series, following on from Arena (1994), Daggerfall (1996) and Morrowind (2002). Only one additional game in the mainline series has been released since then, the infamous Skyrim (2011), although The Elder Scrolls Online (2014) has kept some attention on the franchise. Bethesda have confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI (no subtitle confirmed) is their next project but no release date has been mooted.
Oblivion was noteworthy for its very impressive graphics (for the time), its status as a unit-shifter for the Xbox 360 console (the game was later also released on PlayStation 3), its huge open-world environment, outstanding and quirky side-quests and its employment of top vocal talent, including Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. The game eventually saw some criticism for its weird levelling mechanics, the tiny pool of voice actors (often leading to two NPCs with identical voices talking to one another) and the irritating Oblivion Gates, which had a tendency to crop up and interfere with whatever side-quest the player was trying to do at the time. The game was also seen as too much of a standard fantasy, after the extremely weird Morrowind; Skyrim was seen as a more halfway house between Oblivion's conservatism and Morrowind's bizarre experimentation. Finally, Oblivion was the first high-profile game to feature paid DLC, in the form of the infamous "horse armour" upgrade, which some players despise to this very day. Still, Oblivion was well-regarded for its atmosphere, rich assortment of weaponry, interesting bestiary of enemies and its extremely epic conclusion.
Given the number of times that Skyrim has been upgraded, remastered and re-released, fans had been speculating for years about the same attention being given to Oblivion, giving it broadly shares similar technology and a graphics style to the later game (Skyrim's Creation Engine being only a moderate development of Oblivion's GameBryo Engine). Bethesda themselves always seemed cool on the idea, saying they'd rather spend time working on a new game and pointing to numerous fan projects doing similar things. Oblivion has had mods available for many years to improve its mechanics and graphics, to a point.
However, Bethesda may have been slightly disingenuous, having outsourced development of the remaster to Virtuous Studios whilst maintaining oversight from afar.
News broke in 2023 that Bethesda were planning remakes of both Oblivion and Fallout 3 as far back as 2020, as well as considering a Dishonored 3 from their subsidiary studio Arkane. Dishonored 3 never happened - Arkane instead released Deathloop and Redfall, and are now making a video game based on the Marvel character Blade - leading to scepticism about the other claims. These were emphasised by the impressive and sterling work done on the unofficial fan remaster Skyblivion, which was of a very high quality and had committed to a 2025 release, leading to speculation that Bethesda might consider that project for an official release.
Based on the (mostly credible) leaks, Oblivion Remastered will include expansions Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles (and, yes, the horse armour) and will release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, and will be available on Game Pass on both PC and Xbox. The game's graphics have been reworked from the ground up, possibly in Unreal Engine 5, with significant visual upgrades. The UI, combat and levelling also appear to have been reworked for a more modern feel. To what degree other elements have been upgraded is unclear; Skyblivion has redesigned every fort, cave and dungeon in the game to be larger, more expansive and more unique, but it's unclear if Remastered has gone that far.
It's also unclear if tomorrow will be an announcement about the remaster or just the actual straight-up release of the game. We will need to see how that unfolds.
The developers of fan mega-mod Skyblivion, which seeks to update venerable fantasy RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) to modern-ish standards, have re-committed to releasing the game in 2025, as they originally promised two years ago. The project is almost feature-complete, with developers and testers now able to run through entire quests, as they have demonstrated in a new video.
The original idea behind the project was to remake Oblivion in the upgraded Creation Engine of its successor, Skyrim (2011). However, the project stalled after several years and was relaunched before the pandemic under new management. The title is somewhat misleading, as the game now features improvements from later versions of the engine and features from other modders, including better 4K textures and enhanced lighting. The mod is also not a straightforward remake, as it redesigns and enhances some areas of the games, for example replacing the identikit caves with different designs based on their descriptions (i.e. mines and random caverns no longer look identical) and making the infamously tiny forts larger and more imposing. The city of Leyawiin, which was massively scaled back in development, has been returned to its original, imposing design straddling a major river with a drawbridge to allow ships to pass.
The creators have kept in touch with Bethesda during development to confirm what they can and can't do: they've kept the original soundtrack and even added to it with new material, but have had to re-record all dialogue for legal reasons (presumably the need not to pay Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart lots of money again). This will probably be a boon, as Oblivion infamously had a tiny voice cast, and it wasn't uncommon to stumble across three people with the exact same voice talking to one another, which was weird.
Playing the mod will require the player owns copies of both Oblivion and Skyrim. As noted before, the plan is to release the mod before the end of 2025 via Steam, GoG and Nexus Mods. A console version is currently impossible due to the massive size of the new files (which outsizes the limits Bethesda put in place for console modding).
In 2023 it was rumoured that Bethesda were considering their own remaster of Oblivion, which sounds like an exercise in futility compared to the scale of Skyblivion. It'll be interesting to see if that project is actually something that's happening.
A leaked schedule for Bethesda video games from 2020 suggests that the company was at least planning remasters for two of their older titles, as well as a new game in one of their biggest franchises.
The leak appears to have been an accidental release of information as part of Microsoft's ongoing battle to clear international legal hurdles preventing its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. The schedule has known projects on which did eventually release (such as Redfall and Starfield), as well as unannounced games including Dishonored 3. The leak also suggests that Microsoft envisages just a three-year wait for The Elder Scrolls VI, the follow-up to the much-acclaimed 2011 title The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Even though the list is official, we should take it with a grain of salt as it is very clearly outdated. The list is pre-COVID, and the COVID pandemic caused massive delays and multiple project cancellations in many companies. It's not clear which of the projects on the list remain extant (beyond the already-confirmed Elder Scrolls VI).
The list also indicates that both The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) and Fallout 3 (2008) are to be remastered, not remade. This would likely be a moderate graphical overhaul and some minor technical and UI improvements (similar to the recent, somewhat underwhelming Red Dead Redemption remaster) but otherwise leaving the games alone.
This is notable as a group of fans have been remaking Oblivion for the past decade with considerably more advanced graphics and a full UI overhaul drawing on later Bethesda games like Fallout 4 (2015, itself already confirmed as getting a next-gen remaster and re-release next year). This project, known as Skyblivion, is currently due for release in 2025 and has Bethesda's support (as well as persistent rumours that Bethesda may make it an official release if the quality is high enough). An Oblivion remaster may be redundant in that case, but it's worth noting that back in 2020 there was widespread scepticism over any of these fan remasters actually being finished. Three years later and with more in-depth coverage of the project's development, Skyblivion does indeed appear very close to completion.
Dishonored 3 is a welcome idea. Dishonored (2012) and Dishonored 2(2016) are two of the greatest video games of the last decade and cemented Arkane Studios' reputation for great game design and fantastic worldbuilding. Deathloop (2021) - set in the same world albeit in a different game genre - also did well. However, the underwhelming commercial performance of Prey(2017) and Redfall (2023) has somewhat damaged Arkane's reputation, alongside the departure of much of the OG team at the company behind its earlier games. There will be likely scepticism that the remnants can deliver a worthwhile successor, especially as stand-alone expansion Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017) delivered a pretty final ending to the story of the series. Deathloop takes place in the same world and does open up some more narrative possibilities for that setting, so a further game in the series might have some legs to it.
Finally, the list suggest that The Elder Scrolls VI will follow three years after the release of Starfield. Given Starfield's two-year delay from the list, that suggests they may be envisaging a 2026 release date for Elder Scrolls VI. With Bethesda only recently spooling up full-time work on the game, that feels very optimistic. Many fans have been projecting a release date of 2028 on the low end to 2030 on the higher.
The leak is interesting, but as yet none of the projects mentioned on it beyond Elder Scrolls VI and the Fallout 4 remaster have been formally confirmed.
Bethesda Games Studios director Todd Howard has indicated that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has passed 60 million copies sold. The news comes a few weeks after CD Projekt Red confirmed their similarly open-world mega-RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has passed 50 million copies sold.
This would make Skyrim the seventh-biggest-selling video game of all time, and would drop The Witcher 3 down to a still-very-respectable joint-tenth (with rough sales parity with Blizzard's Overwatch). Ahead of Skyrim are Minecraft (238 million sales), Grand Theft Auto V/Grand Theft Auto Online (180 million), Tetris (100 million), Wii Sports (82 million), PUBG: Battlegrounds (75 million), Mario Kart 8 (62 million) and Super Mario Bros. (58 million). Note these lists do not include free-to-play games like World of WarCraft and Fortnite, which both have conservative estimates of at least 100 million players apiece since their respective launches.
Launched in 2011, the game casts players into the northern, subarctic province of Skyrim, part of the Empire of Tamriel, where they have to deal with a civil war, an invasion of dragons, stirring undead in ancient ruins and the vagaries of the weather. The game was enhanced with several expansions (Hearthstone, Dawnguard and Dragonborn) and has since been re-released twice with upgraded graphics and features, as well as being ported across three generations of video game consoles and PCs, with re-releases and ports becoming so commonplace that it became a meme that even the developers commented on.
Skyrim is the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls fantasy series, which also consists of Arena (1994), Daggerfall (1997), Morrowind (2002), Oblivion (2006) and spin-off games Battlespire (1997), Redguard (1998) and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014). Oblivion is currently getting a fan-led remaster called Skyblivion, with a planned release date of 2025. The Elder Scrolls VI is currently in pre-production, and the hope it will be out before the end of this decade.
Bethesda are also the studio behind the Fallout post-apocalyptic series, having developed Fallout 3 (2008), Fallout 4 (2015) and Fallout 76 (2018), as well as publishing Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas (2010). Bethesda's next game is the science fiction epic Starfield, which is due for release on 6 September this year.
Whilst The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been remastered for more platforms than you can shake a stick at, its 2006 forebear has gotten much less official love. However, Oblivion has been getting a major makeover thanks to a large collection of modders and fans who took it upon themselves to remake the entire game in Skyrim's engine, whilst also upgrading that engine considerably.
The result, the slightly-painfully-named Skyblivion (I would give Bethesda serious money if they give them permission to just call it "Oblivion Remade" or something), has been making serious progress for the last couple of years, with increasingly impressive dev diaries and YouTube videos exploring the rebuilt version of Tamriel's Imperial Province of Cyrodiil.
The team have now confirmed a 2025 release date. If that seems a bit far off given how much progress they've made recently, the team agrees and notes this is a worst-case scenario date and they don't get any more resources to help bring the game across the finish line. However, if they are able to recruit more people to help out, they might be able to shave some months off that and bring the game out in 2024 instead.
Skyblivion has ported the entirety of Oblivion into the upgraded engine, but the team have gone back and recreated almost all of the textures, models and effects in the game. Some of the geographic areas have been reworked and resized to make a bit more sense, and the city of Leyawiin has been almost completely redesigned in line with its original, more ambitious, concept art. The biggest change will be with the dungeons. Oblivion used very repetitive and simple dungeon designs, with even some dungeons being simple copy+pastes of others. Every dungeon in Skyblivion has been redesigned and many are now larger and more sprawling. The game will also use Skyrim's more balanced level-scaling system rather than Oblivion's deranged version, but will retain the original game's spellcrafting mechanics.
Skyblivion will launch by 2025 at the latest, and will require the player to have purchased copies of both Skyrim and Oblivion. Bethesda themselves are working on their brand new, space-based roleplaying game, Starfield, which should be out later this year. Bethesda are also in pre-production on The Elder Scrolls VI, but that is many years away.
Microsoft have passed the last regulatory hurdles and, as of this morning, now own Zenimax Media and all its subsidiaries, namely the Bethesda Softworks family of video game developers. This includes Bethesda Game Studios itself and developers such as Arkane, Studios, id Software, MachineGames, Roundhouse Studios, Tango Gameworks and Zenimax Online.
This unites a significant number of video game titles under the Microsoft banner. The Zenimax/Bethesda portfolio includes franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, Prey and The Evil Within, as well as a slate of new titles being released over the next few years which may or may not launch larger franchises: Starfield, Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo.
Microsoft declared its intent to buy Bethesda in September, but the deal had to wait until regulatory approval had been given by the relevant authorities in both the United States and Europe before it could proceed.
The deal is worth $7.5 billion and is the second-largest video game acquisition in history (behind only Tencent's acquisition of Finnish mobile developer Supercell in 2016, for $8.6 billion). The deal expands Microsoft's portfolio of video game development studios to 23, representing a formidable concentration of creative firepower.
Microsoft's existing studios include 343 Industries (who handle the Halo franchise), the Coalition (Gears of War), Double Fine Productions, inXile Entertainment (Wasteland), Mojang Studios (Minecraft), Obsidian Entertainment (The Outer Worlds, Grounded, Avowed), Rare (Sea of Thieves), Playground Games (Fable), Turn 10 (Forza Motorsport), Undead Labs (State of Decay) and World's Edge (Age of Empires).
According to Microsoft, the acquisition is primarily designed to enhance and increase the appeal of their X-Box Game Pass service, a subscription service that gives gamers access to a large library of games for a nominal fee every month (essentially a Netflix for video games) via PC and X-Box consoles. This has left some Bethesda fans who game primarily on Sony's PlayStation platform concerned that future Bethesda games will not launch on their console. Microsoft have confirmed that Bethesda games they were exclusively contracted to Sony on console will still launch on that machine, including Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, but the fate of other Bethesda games will be decided on a game-by-game basis. In particular, PlayStation gamers fear that future games in the mega-popular Elder Scrolls and Fallout series will be X-Box-exclusive.
The first test of Microsoft's plans may appear sooner rather than later. According to rumour, Bethesda are planning to launch their new IP, Starfield, either this year or next, likely to be confirmed at the virtual E3 convention this year (or - hopefully - an in-person convention next year). Whether that game - an open-world RPG like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4 - will launch on PlayStation or not may represent a statement of intent over Microsoft's plans moving forwards. Previously Microsoft's highest-profile IP was Halo, but The Elder Scrolls and Fallout are even larger franchises and making them exclusive to the X-Box and PC platforms would give them formidable added value.
A fan-made remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivionhas released a major update on progress, for the first time making positive noises about completion in the not-too-distant future.
The remaster is called Skyblivion, although that's become a bit of a misnomer. The starting point was remaking Oblivion in the somewhat updated engine of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but in the years since then they have also redone the lighting and rendering engine, so it's even better than Skyrim and looks a lot more modern.
At the moment the exterior worldspace is almost complete and the team are working on the dozens of dungeons and shops in the game. For the dungeons they are going beyond just recreating locations but also redesigning dungeons to be larger and more interesting (Oblivion's dungeons were infamously tiny, often not being more than very modest caves). They are also creating new art assets for the entre project and have integrated every quest from the original into the game, although there are lots of issues and bugs they are tracking down and resolving.
No timeframe for completion is given, but from the look of it and bearing in mind this is a small team working in their own time, this may now be down to a couple of years away. Impressive given the mod's long, long-gestating status.
Bethesda themselves have been supportive of mods, especially mods that update and upgrade their older games. Despite re-releasing Skyrim on multiple platforms with updated graphics, Bethesda have indicated a reluctance to go back and update Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, noting that the technical compromises they made to get those games out were severe and they'd feel the need to completely remake them, which would be a huge amount of work they'd rather divert to working on their new games.
Bethesda are currently working on a new game in a new franchise, Starfield, and Oblivion's successor, The Elder Scrolls VI. Neither project has a timeframe for release at the moment.
Bethesda have posted an image hinting at new developments in their Elder Scrolls line of fantasy RPGs.
The Elder Scrolls is a bestselling series of video games, comprising the main games Arena (1994), Daggerfall (1997), Morrowind (2002), Oblivion (2006) and Skyrim (2011); and the spin-offs Battlespire (1997), Redguard (1998) and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014). The last main series title, Skyrim, is one of the biggest-selling games of the last decade, with over 30 million copies and sold and being ported to multiple platforms. With this year making the ten-year anniversary of the last game in the series, fans are increasingly antsy over when a sequel will be released.
Bethesda released their last big single-player CRPG, Fallout 4, in 2015, whilst a secondary team at the company developed a controversial multiplayer spin-off, Fallout 76, which was released in 2018. Bethesda also confirmed in 2018 that they are working on two new single-player games, a new IP title called Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI, although they cautioned that the latter game was in a very early stage of development. Bethesda have repeatedly said that Starfield is their current main project and will precede The Elder Scrolls VI by several years.
For this reason, it is highly unlikely that the image Bethesda has posted has anything to do with Elder Scrolls VI, or if it does, it will be fairly obliquely, since Elder Scrolls VI is likely still many years away.
More likely is that the image refers to recent and possible future plans for The Elder Scrolls Online. The map has a candle located over the city of Solitude in Skyrim Province, a key setting for the recent Dark Heart of Skyrim expansion; other candles located near a set of coins, which were given away as collectibles for the recent Greymoor expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online (set in Skyrim), and a candle burning in the province of Hammerfell. We know the next expansion for Online is The Gates of Oblivion, and will tie in with the other-dimensional realm of Oblivion as well as possible new content in the Imperial Province of Cyrodiil (probably non-coincidentally tying in with the 15-year anniversary of the release of Oblivion), although intriguingly the map is oriented so Cyrodiil (south-east of Skyrim and east of Hammerfell) is not a focal point.
The candle burning in Hammerfell though may be a nod at The Elder Scrolls VI, as that province has been long-rumoured to be the main setting for the game. Hammerfell is the home of the Redguard, an important faction in the Empire, and a likely flashpoint between the Empire and the rival force known as the Dominion, whose machinations drove much of the main plot of Skyrim. This would also explain the game's long-rumoured working title, Redfall (although recently a freelancer who worked on Skyrim and may be working on Elder Scrolls VI has said that this is not the title, implying Bethesda secured the IP for another project).
I suspect we won't learn much more about The Elder Scrolls VI for a long, long time. In the meantime Bethesda are hard at work on their new IP, Starfield, reportedly a large-scale science fiction game set in the distant future and which will allow players to visit different planets. Bethesda Vice-President Pete Hines has hinted that we will get more news about Starfield this year, which excited some fans who noted that Bethesda's last two games have been formally announced and had release dates set within only four months, which has helped them avoid the problem of "overhype" which has beleaguered some other recent releases.
In seismic news, Microsoft have acquired Zenimax Media, their games division, Bethesda Softworks and no less than eight subsidiary development studios in a huge deal worth $7.5 billion or, for context, almost twice what Disney paid for Lucasfilm in 2012.
The deal is the second-largest video game acquisition in history (behind only Tencent's acquisition of Finnish mobile developer Supercell in 2016, for $8.6 billion) and sees Microsoft take over the operation of Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, Zenimax Online Studios, Arkane Studios, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog and Roundhouse Studios. Combined with Microsoft's recent acquisition of studios including Obsidian Entertainment and inXile, this means that Microsoft now owns 23 games development studios, a formidable concentration of creative firepower.
It also means that Microsoft now owns many of the biggest IPs in gaming, including The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, Dishonored and Prey, among many others.
The immediate fallout (so to speak) is to place the release of the next games in those franchises on the PlayStation platform in some doubt. Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo, in development at Arkane and Tango Gameworks, respectively, are timed PlayStation 5 exclusives and presumably those contracts with Sony will have to be honoured, but the question is whether other games like Bethesda's next big CRPGs - Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI (the sequel to uber-hit Skyrim, rumoured to have the working title Redfall), not to mention the further-off Fallout 5 - will remain multiplatform or become X-Box and PC exclusives.
Another strength of the deal is that it allows Microsoft to share out the franchises with other studios. Obsidian, for example, developed the critically-acclaimed Fallout: New Vegas for Bethesda in 2010 and it's been speculated that they might collaborate again in the future. The acquisition of Obsidian by Microsoft meant that was unlikely, but the new deal now makes it entirely possible for Obsidian to work on, say, Fallout 5 at some point in the future (something that would please many fans).
The news comes ahead of the November launch of both the X-Box Series S and X consoles and also Sony's PlayStation 5. In the runup to launch, the X-Box had gained a narrow technological lead over the PlayStation, but the PlayStation's lineup of exclusives was more impressive. With Bethesda's catalogue potentially becoming X-Box exclusive, that may convince some waverers to support Microsoft over Sony. It'll be fascinating to see how this develops.
Update: Microsoft have confirmed that they will honour the PS5 exclusivity contract over Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo, and have not ruled out future games appearing on PlayStation as well.
A legal tussle between Bethesda Softworks, their owners Zenimax Media and a small-press publisher may have inadvertently given away the subtitle of their next Elder Scrolls video game.
Bethesda filed a trademark claim for the name "Redfall" over a year ago, prompting a response from BookBreeze, the publisher of author Jay Falconer. Falconer had written a series of post-apocalyptic novels under the Redfall banner title.
After the threat of legal action, Zenimax and BookBreeze reached an out-of-court settlement (read: money exchanged hands) in May 2019 which appears to allow both Zenimax to use the title in the future and for BookBreeze to continue publishing books under that name.
The story has resurfaced in recent weeks due to a series of alleged leaks about The Elder Scrolls VI, most of which later turned out to be false. However, the "Redfall" title tussle is one of the view hard pieces of information we have about the game. Based on the very brief teaser released two years ago, it is widely expected that the game will take place in the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, the home of the Redguards, who loom large in Elder Scrolls lore. There is also the matter of a side-quest in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), which hints that a "red plague" is currently loose in High Rock and a character is headed back there (Bethesda had previously lined up Skyrim with repeated references to that province in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion back in 2006).
The Elder Scrolls VI: Redfall or Whatever will very likely not be released until the middle of the next decade, as Bethesda are still hard at work on their epic SF CRPG Starfield, as well as further expansions to online survival shooter Fallout 76.
Following the presentation of Fallout 76, a controversial online-only spin-off from the popular single-player RPG series, Bethesda Game Studios also confirmed long-standing rumours that they are developing two new single-player epic RPGs.
First up is Starfield, the first new franchise launched by Bethesda Game Studios since the original Elder Scrolls: Arena in 1994. Details were thin on the ground, but Starfield will be in the science fiction genre and will be set in space and on alien planets.
Long-standing rumours about Starfield suggest that the game will be set predominantly on a gigantic space station, with the player undertaking missions and solving quests in the standard Bethesda manner. At key points, the player can also leave the space station and travel to other planets to undertake extra mission objectives. This makes the game sound very similar to the Mass Effect franchise from BioWare, although presumably Starfield will use Bethesda's traditional first-person perspective and will focus more on solo play than forming parties. The same reports claim that Starfield is set in the far future of the Fallout franchise and may link that universe to the Elder Scrolls setting, although this sounds less likely, especially after Todd Howard's insistence that this is an all-new and totally new franchise.
Starfield has no release date as yet, but late 2019/early 2020 seems feasible given that the game has been in full-time development since Fallout 4's release in 2015, and was in pre-production for some years before that.
Secondly, and far further in the future (as the game is listed as only in "pre-production"), is The Elder Scrolls VI, the follow-up to the immensely successful Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which has sold approximately 40 million copies since its release in 2011, making it one of the most successful individual video games of all time. Apart from a logo, a brief burst of the series theme music and a landscape flypast, the teaser video didn't reveal very much. Fan speculation based on the landscape seems to be that the game will be set in High Rock - the southern coastal region of which appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall back in 1997 - with Valenwood as an outside, alternative possibility.
A website called Map to Globe allows budding fantasists to transfer their flat maps onto a sphere so you can see what your fantasy world looks like as an actual planet.
I've been playing around with it using some famous fantasy worlds.
A Song of Ice and Fire
This doesn't work entirely well because the maps of the North and the lands beyond the Wall need to be adjusted so they work on a globe. So this is a very rough and ready look at Westeros and Essos. It works really well for Essos and the Jade Sea, though (the coastlines of Sothoryos, eastern Essos and Ulthos are non-canon and speculative though).
(note: may not be working: either the maps time out after a while or I linked this in too many places and it's getting hammered).
The Malazan Book of the Fallen
This works really well, because Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont were clever enough to stay away from the poles, which introduces a lot of distortion.
This was easy because mapmakers ProFantasy created a globe of the Forgotten Realms for their Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas CD-ROM released in 2001. The base maps from that CD-ROM still splendily wrap around a sphere like they were supposed to.
The world of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. The base map is not tremendously detailed and the artist did not draw Seanchan to the correct scale (the south of the continent extends much further east, explaining better why they chose to invade the Westlands from the west rather than the east).
This is the world of Conan the Barbarian, which is based on Earth many thousands of years ago. This map is rough, since I didn't line up the features of the Thurian continent with the real Eurasia.
Bethesda have confirmed that a sixth game in their Elder Scrolls fantasy roleplaying saga is in development, surprising absolutely no-one. However, they have stressed that this is not a formal announcement of the game, merely the fact that they are working on it. The setting, title and what kind of game it will be all remain to be seen.
The previous Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, was released in 2011 and was enormously successful, selling tens of millions of copies. A new version of the game, with upgraded graphics, will launch this October on PS4 and XB1. Bethesda's last game, Fallout 4, was released at the end of 2015 and has also been a huge success. Partner company Zenimax Studios released The Elder Scrolls Online two years ago which has been more of a moderate success, and panicked some fans into thinking we weren't going to get a new single-player Elder Scrolls game. This announcement fortunately confirms that this isn't the case and a new CRPG in Tamriel will - eventually - arrive.
According to Bethesda, their plans for the new game are extremely ambitious and rely on technology that is still in development. This suggests that Bethesda may - finally! - be working on a new engine to power the game. They have also said that the game is a long, long way off. I suspect we'll be lucky to see it this side of 2020.
Bethesda have also confirmed that they are working on two other "large projects", and we may hear more about these before The Elder Scrolls VI is officially announced.
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.
