Does the advent of games like Horizon Forbidden West into the realm of super-big-budget projects ultimately cause side effects to another genre? By borrowing a little from RPGs, but in a very light way, does Horizon Forbidden West participate in the decline in popularity of the latter?
Better: Is Horizon Forbidden West a new symptom of the gradual death of RPGs in very big budget games? The brand new opus of Guerrilla is just getting ready to be released, but it’s already making a lot of headlines. To get an idea of what we thought of the game, we invite you to find our Horizon Forbidden West test here. Thus, if there is no doubt that this new entry proposed by Sony studios will be a landmark on Playstation and offers a quality experience, it nevertheless allows us to ask some important questions, in particular on the role of the RPG in the game. current video game industry. Indeed, just over a decade ago, big-budget single-player gaming was mostly embodied in games of this genre. For some time now, big-budget role-playing games have become increasingly rare, despite the sporadic arrival of a few quality representatives (The Witcher 3, Skyrim, Final Fantasy). The main reason for this increasingly deafening absence, in our opinion, can be found in games like Horizon Forbidden West.
The advent of the open world
Because if the open world could originally be a way to deepen these RPG experiences (and this was the case for the examples mentioned earlier), it has also had an unexpected effect. Now, most single-player open-world games offer so-called “Light-RPG” type mechanics. By this we mean some mechanics for customizing our heroes (abilities, equipment, etc.), without going all out in the “role-playing” aspect. This is for example the case of the new Horizon gamewhich allows the player to certainly control a little the cosmetic aspect or even some of the attributes of Aloy, but without really going into the depth of customization. So, from the new possibilities that have been offered to developers thanks to the advent of the open world, we have finally moved on to a kind of impoverishment of RPG mechanics over the years.
The light-rpg to the detriment of the real RPG?
The triple A is thus less and less inclined to embark on real RPG adventures over the years. Only a few Japanese studios, diehards of the genre, continue to immerse themselves in these epic adventures, as we saw for example last year with Tales of Arise, and potentially soon with Final Fantasy XVI. In reality, this advent of light-RPG in open worlds only puts the finger on one thing: to find real RPG experiences, it is now necessary to turn to smaller studios, capable of innovating and finding new interesting experiences. We can for example cite Disco Elysium, which has met with great success despite gameplay mechanics not necessarily extremely accessible or attractive to the general public, or even Divinity Original Sin 2.
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