Alrik,

I think the real problem is that the larger a company gets the more it fears to innovate, honestly.

Games cost more and more money to produce, so games companies want to get maximum return from their investment, so they play safe by following the trends. Occasionally, one will break the mould and try something a bit unusual, then if it does well it will be proclaimed 'The new Big Thing' and done to death by everyone.

You only have to look at the number of franchise titles that basically churn out slight variations of the same game, over and over, to see that's true.

You know as well as I that the people at the top of these companies don't actually talk to gamers. The smaller the company, the more likely they are to actively engage with their customers, get feedback and innovate. The people at the top of the bigger companies are totally walled off and they study their statistics without any proper frame of reference.

So we get ludicrous conclusions like 'Many gamers stop playing our game before Point X, therefore our game is too long' when the real reason is that the lead up to 'Point X' is intensely boring. 'Poor sales must be due to pirates' when they put out a poor game that is so graphically advanced it will only run on one in a hundred PCs anyway... But you get the idea. The top people are just not living in the same world as their customer base.

So what you have is a set of large companies pouring immense amounts of money into games that the top levels of the company - the people okaying all the projects - don't really understand. Of course they slavishly follow fashion. With that set up and that amount of money at risk, what else can they do?

Is it possible to create a High Fantasy game that is as deeply nuanced as Dragon Age: Origins or Witcher 2? Of course it is. But it requires a studio head to realise that the real draw of both is immersive worlds combined with great characterisation (And, in W2's case, great plotting). Fans of Fantasy RPGs tend to like Fantasy RPGs. There are a few people with definite darker/lighter preferences, but most of us don't care.

Sometimes it's the simple things. There can't be too many gamers who don't feel a thrill the first time it starts raining in the Witcher games and the townsfolk all react to it by running for cover. That's not 'Light' or 'Dark' - that's just a really effective way of making your world come to life.

So yes, High Fantasy RPGs could be created as AAA titles by major companies and they would probably do as well as Low Fantasy games. But to get that, you'd need a major studio to abandon their attempts at statistical analysis and genuinely look at what made games like DA:O and The Witcher sell so well. It's never been about 'Dark'; always about 'Depth'.


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