It’s hard to imagine a time where dark fantasy wasn’t a game industry heavyweight that permeates every fiber of my being—who doesn’t love tales that leave you in a moral quandary for days on end? The perceived level of complexity that you’re getting into can be challenging to overcome, but over the last decade more and more games in this vein have transformed from niche outliers to something more accessible.
Baldur’s Gate 3 remains one of the biggest RPG surprises of recent years. The franchise rose from a twenty year slumber, and through the power of nuanced storytelling emerged from the CRPG weeds as the undisputed champion of the genre—and, in some ways, of all genres.
But prior to that, at the time of The Witcher 3’s release, the natural comparison was, of course, Skyrim, which had recently redefined the open world RPG—full of experimentation, freedom, and floating cheese.
Skyrim may have had some decidedly dark elements, but The Witcher 3 leaned into it hard—a potentially risky move at the time.
“First of all, there are always other great games on the market, secondly, you can learn from those games, but like in music videos, you need to be fresh [and] innovative. So you cannot be a copycat,” explains Adam Badowski, CD Projekt’s joint CEO.
“We knew that [The Witcher 3] was a completely new offer for players [but] I had a lot of worries about the game as a business […] The whole development was expensive and challenging, plus, we had only one game in development back then, and Witcher is dark fantasy. I remember that it wasn’t that popular, and I was worried if people would understand the concept of dark fantasy.”
Standard fantasy and high fantasy have always been successful, but dark fantasy narratives were less common: “High fantasy was super, super well known and appreciated by players. Everyone played World of Warcraft, but something has changed after Game of Thrones.”
It’s impossible to deny the impact Game of Thrones has had on bringing such grand storytelling to more mainstream audiences, increasing the appetite and palatability of dark fantasy’s morally ambiguous themes—even FromSoftware saw a boost with Elden Ring thanks to a whisper of George R.R Martin’s name. “[Suddenly] people understood that they really liked that dark fantasy. So [Game of Thrones’ success] was a great moment for me, that’s [when I thought] okay, okay, there’s great potential.”
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