Why Aren’t There More Space RPGs Like Starfield?
Long before Starfield, there was Starflight.
Designed by Greg Johnson and published by Electronic Arts, Starflight imagined a fully-explorable galaxy with an astonishing scale. It did all of this on the Amiga and Commodore 64 – machines with less than one percent of the power of modern PCs.
“The sense of immense scale was absolutely mind-blowing and unlike anything I’d ever thought games could do,” one developer who was inspired by Starlight told me. “Like, in the same year that I was playing NES Mario games, it was a game that felt limitlessly large.”
Starflight’s scope inspired a generation of developers, including a young Todd Howard. But a survey of the modern RPG landscape reveals comparatively few games like it. The list of the most popular RPGs are dominated by fantasy settings, from Ultima and Dragon Quest to Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Witcher. Even games that bill themselves as sci-fi RPGs, like Phantasy Star, have a little bit of that swords and sorcery flavor to them.
You’d think role-playing games that catered to the core fantasy of building a crew and taking to the stars would be more popular given the crossover between Star Trek nerds and role-playing games. But while Mass Effect, The Outer Worlds, and KOTOR have found success over the years, they’ve been dwarfed by the sheer popularity of fantasy RPGs.
“I think it's because fantasy games have a clearer blueprint. It is a very broad setting, can be something wild like Planescape: Torment or Shin Megami Tensei, but you can also just do people with swords in pseudo-Europe killing dragons and people will be happy,” says CRPG Book editor Felipe Pepe.
“Sci-fi is way trickier, way more controversial. People can reject Starfield because it has no aliens, or complain that
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