Sick of Saving the World?

Indie RPG developer Rampant Coyote has posted a piece on how we have too many save-the-world plots in RPGs.

Having the stereotypical “epic plot” of saving-the-world proportions is pretty common in all computer and console games, and RPGs are no exception. I don’t know if it just caters to adolescent power-trip fantasies, or that those generic epic plots have just proven to sell more copies. But they are definitely in abundance. (To be fair – I’ve not read a lot of fantasy novels in recent years, but back in the day, there was an overabundance of Lord of the Rings wannabe plots, too…)

Stalin said, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” As creepy as that sounds, its generally true. The more epic the scope, the more watered-down the emotional impact of the story (assuming that’s important to you), and the more it becomes about numbers. Saving Kvatch (or what was left of it) was a lot more interesting than saving the rest of the world in Oblivion. And saving the world from Meteor wasn’t half as satisfying as getting a little revenge on Sephiroth.