For our recent special edition magazine, PC Gamer: The Ultimate RPG Handbook, we asked game developers about the future of role-playing—how they'd like to see the genre evolve, and what advancements we can expect in the years to come. Here, as a supplement to that feature, you can read Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart's thoughts on the future of RPGs. PC Gamer: The Ultimate RPG Handbook is out now in UK newsagents, and through My Favourite Magazines.

PC Gamer: How exactly would you define “role-playing game”, right now?

Feargus Urquhart: For me, role-playing is what it has always been. It’s about choice. It’s about letting players do what they want to do, and having the game react to their particular way of playing the game. In the early days of CRPGs it was mostly about party choice. Players could choose to have certain classes in their party, but there were always more classes than party slots. So, players made choices, and then had to fight their way through the game with that party. In modern RPGs those choices have become much more about what type of role the player wants to play – are they good, evil, male, female, straight, gay, violent, charismatic, stealthy, etc… We talk a lot in the industry about AR and VR, but often look at the best RPGs as the best way to escape from reality, and immerse yourself in another world.

PCG: What do you think have been the most important role-playing games of the past few years? Which games have inspired you?

FU: It’s probably been more than a few years, but I was always impressed with the Mass Effects. You have to play a more specific role, but they really fulfill the feeling of being James T. Kirk in many ways. More recently, the Witcher 3 did an incredible job of creating a very living world, and it’s cool to play an RPG with a bit more of an action slant. When it comes to Fallout 4, no one does it better than Bethesda in creating a visually dense environment helping to really put you in the post nuclear world of Fallout. I’d also like to point out Spider, another RPG developer, who is still learning the craft, but has made some interesting games with Mars: War Logs and Technomancer. I’m interested to see where they go in the next few years.

PCG: Broadly speaking, what would you say are the topics, types of subject matter or story themes that you think RPGs will explore (or explore more) in the next few years? Are there any kinds of story you personally wish that RPGs would look into more - or less?

FU: Funnily enough, this is something we talk about a lot. We ask ourselves questions like, if Fallout came out now, would it resonate the same way as it did in 1997. Fallout was made by a bunch of Gen Xers – the cold war kids. Now-a-days, I think we should look at how invasive technology has gotten into our lives, where AI is going, what is it to be human or machine (Tears in Rain by Bruna Husky is a cool book about that), hacking biological viruses, could anything we want be printed in twenty years and what would that mean, and what is the natural progression of mega-corporations like Apple and Amazon and their ecosystems? I’m not trying to get all paranoid here, but it’s interesting to take a lot of these things to a logical end, particularly when I think those things are concerning to a lot people.

PCG: Where do you see the most room for growth in terms of game mechanics and systems? And again, is there anything you wish RPG developers would look into more?

FU: I want our games to feel just more real with even more choice for players. I don’t mean real from the standpoint of how they look, but that you just feel a part of the world. It’s not a world that starts and stops as the player enters and then exits an area. It’s a world that feels like it is always moving. A denseness of experience. I read an article about Blade Runner years ago, where one of the guys working on the set sat down in Deckard’s apartment, looked around, and then realized that it truly felt like someone lived there. That’s what I want us to hit not just with how an area looks and feels, but with the choices that players have as well.

PCG: Are there any technologies or platforms you think will strongly affect the evolution of role-playing games at this stage (e.g. VR or distributed processing)?

FU: I like to say that RPGs are probably the most adaptable of the game genres. We’ve been playing them since monitors only had one color, and I think we’ll be playing them into the generation of VR and AR. Ultimately, I always go back to how RPGs are about the experience of choice, which is not about the technology, but about what we let them do.

PCG: How do you think your own projects have contributed to the genre's evolution? If you could do anything differently, what would it be?

FU: I wouldn’t screw up the entire balance of Fallout 1 by inventing the Turbo Plasma Rifle. That was really dumb on my part. Now that’s me personally, and not the fault of anyone else at the time back in Black Isle Studios. What I think we have contributed is constantly pushing player agency, multi-faceted deep companions, and that RPGs can both be non-linear and have compelling stories. I think we can all do more there as well, but I am incredibly proud of what the teams at Black Isle Studios and Obsidian have been able to do when creating what is our own unique flavor of the RPG genre.

RPGs have, for some time, been enslaved by the idea that every decision should be filtered through a lens of good or evil. Who are you, what are your deeds, and how do others view you? Many RPGs grant access to different quests or abilities depending on your morality rating. But Tyranny's reputation system dares to be different, and in the process it creates space for characters that don't need to fit into arbitrary definitions of good or bad. Tyranny's moral relativity proves why the whole system is pointless, and why RPGs should aspire to do better.

In Tyranny, you're the Fatebinder, an agent of a totalitarian empire that's wrapping up a global conquest. Your mission is to bring Kyros' law to her new subjects, but how you interpret and execute that law is up to you. Obsidian Entertainment has made no secret that Tyranny is about what happens after evil has won that pitched battle against good. But slogans like "sometimes evil wins" are misleading because, ultimately, Tyranny isn't really about evil. Sure, Kyros' secret weapon is magical Edicts that can turn entire cities to rubble. But then again, I live next to a popular country that at one time reduced two Japanese cities to nuclear craters. Like in real life, nothing in Tyranny is black or white.

That theme is explored in a complex reputation system that puts your basic morality meter to shame. Instead of judging whether an action is universally good or bad, each major character and faction will filter it according to their principles. Those actions aren't mapped on a single spectrum, but influence two separate meters. For factions, their opinion of you is summarized by favor and wrath. Companions see you through the lens of loyalty and fear. There's no tug-of-war between the two, as each are independent of the other, which allows for very complex relationships. Barik, for example, is so loyal to me I'm convinced he'd fall on his sword if I told him to, but he's also terrified of me probably because I'd consider asking him to fall on his sword. Relationships like these show how firm a grasp Tyranny has on the nuances that can exist in personal relationships.

By avoiding an all-encompassing morality system, Tyranny itself avoids judging my decisions. When I chose to sacrifice a vulnerable character for the good of thousands, a popup didn't alert me that I had gained 25 evil points. It's up to me to wrestle with whether or not that was the right thing to do.

When you compare that to RPGs like Mass Effect, you begin to see how limiting the conventional morality systems can be. By designing choices that are definitively good or bad (or in this case paragon or renegade) BioWare's system quantitatively measures your character's morality in the eyes of 'god' the game itself. In Tyranny, it's measured relative to your relationships. During one of the biggest decisions in Mass Effect, you have to decide whether to save the Citadel Council or sacrifice them to focus on repelling a Reaper assault already you can tell which option is considered good and bad. I don't think it's exactly fair to be considered a renegade because I chose to focus on an imminent threat to the entire galaxy first.

Law of the land 

My problem with a universal set of morals in an RPG is the way it makes my character feel inconsistent. Take Fallout 3 for example, where Bethesda haphazardly defines what's wrong and right in a lawless wasteland. It's perfectly fine for me to saw a woman's head off with a kitchen knife but only because Fallout has made a moral judgment on her: she's a bandit. But if I so much as take an ashtray off of someone's coffee table when they're not looking, I'm a bad person. It doesn't matter how I, my companions, or anyone else feels. Fallout says it's bad, so it's bad.

Because these systems tend to assign points to each decision, it also reduces morality to a basic grade scale with some hilarious and reductive results. I can farm up all the positive karma I want in Fallout 3 and then walk into Megaton and crush a resident's skull with a baseball bat.

"I know he crushed Jerry's head like a watermelon and drank his blood in front of the kids," they'd say, "But I dunno, he did give that homeless man some clean water a few times."

Morality doesn't work like that, and good decisions don't negate our bad ones. Reducing every decision to 'angel points' or 'devil points' ultimately weakens the writing of RPGs because it removes extrinsic rewards and ambiguity. It discourages players from interpreting for themselves whether something was bad, good, just, immoral, or something in between. While Tyranny's reputation system does grant reputation-specific abilities, they don't feel like carrots on a stick meant to entice you one way or the other. No matter what decisions you make, you'll earn extra abilities depending on how factions and characters feel about you.

Roleplaying games, more than any other genre, aspire to create believable characters and situations I feel invested in but they undermine that ambition by slapping a big tacky meter that simplifies who my character is. Morals aren't absolute truths, they're a reflection of the societies and cultures we belong to. The more games start creating systems that better understand this or better yet ignore the idea of a moral compass altogether, the more thoughtfully we can explore choice and consequence.