Crimson Desert and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are among the games that remind Konrad Tomaszkiewicz (director of The Witcher 3 and Blood of Dawnwalker) of the 1990's RPG golden age in the sense that there are multiple hits in the genre that differ wildly from each other, but still open folks up to "an unknown experience."
Speaking to GamesRadar+ about the games that might have inspired his upcoming vampiric RPG Blood of Dawnwalker, Tomaszkiewicz emphasizes that he's been playing games since he was a child, so he was naturally shaped by old-school RPGs like The Eye of the Beholder, Stonekeep, and Betrayal at Krondor. His taste is so classic that Baldur's Gate, "which is an ancient story for most people," is kind of new for him.
Tomaszkiewicz's not stuck in the past, though, as he took the time to shout out more contemporary narrative games. "Dispatch was a great storytelling game [with] how it approached writing dialog to create characters which you believe in," he says. "I'm playing Crimson Desert and checking how they [Pearl Abyss] approach freedom from the system perspective, because it's a different type of game, different type of RPG, but also really interesting when you play it, because you see that you can achieve totally different emotions with the game [without being] story heavy."
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"And I think that there is a lot of space to still upgrade this genre," he adds. "But I also feel that it's really cool that we are in the place where we are. When we spoke about the games from last year and this year, like Crimson Desert, Dispatch, Clair Obscur, it reminds me of the '90s, early '90s, where every game which appears was sometimes similar in the meaning of genre, but really different in the meaning of how you control this game, how you experience stuff."
With all the varied and interesting RPGs coming out nowadays, Tomaszkiewicz believes that the genre is in a similar place to where it was in the '90s "where those doors are again open" for relatively smaller companies to experiment while still competing with AAA games.
It's also a vastly different climate to the one that existed a few years ago. Tomaszkiewicz says that, for a while, many RPGs "had really similar experiences," but devs are more encouraged now to make "something which opens an unknown experience for you" and stand out from the crowd. "It's really cool, and I will try to promote it and be the company which, from game to game, delivers this kind of experience," he says.
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