In 2019, Disco Elysium pushed the RPG genre so far people said it wasn't really an RPG at all. They called it an adventure game, or a visual novel. Disco Elysium really was an RPG of course…�one with roots in CRPG classic Planescape: Torment and the kind of tabletop roleplaying with actual dice but it was revolutionary enough to sail right to the edge of our convenient definitions. It felt like evidence of a genre that was thriving.
While games directly influenced by Disco will take a while to start arriving, it felt like the product of an overgrown RPG greenhouse. Surely that same climate was about to produce even more unusually proportioned fruit?
Maybe not. By contrast, in 2021 the genre felt safe and predictable. For starters, it was dominated by remasters, re-releases, and ports. As well as Disco Elysium's own Final Cut, there was Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Diablo 2: Resurrected, Final Fantasy's pixel remasters, Nier Replicant, Legend of Mana HD, Geneforge 1 - Mutagen, more Kingdom Hearts games on PC than any human could ever actually play, and the incremental update of Skyrim Anniversary Edition. Further ahead, we can look forward to The Witcher 3's next-gen edition and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Remake.
There's nothing inherently wrong with re-releasing old games. It used to be that classics were often lost, either hard to find or hard to get running on modern machines, the history of the medium evaporating behind us. Though games are still routinely delisted these days, overall the industry is better at preserving and valuing its own history than it used to be. (And profiting from that, of course.)
What's surprising is that most of the new RPGs that squeezed out between 2021's herd of re-releases didn't feel like the future, either. They skewed toward celebrations of the past, the kind of games that will inevitably be described as "love letters."
