For decades, role playing games have existed in two parallel worlds. The tabletop world was full of limitless potential and storyline flexibility while the video game world featured ease of play and breathtaking experiences. Every year, those two worlds come closer and closer.
Lightforge Games looks to bring together those two worlds in a new style of game that lets players use their computers to tell a story together. Veterans from Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment have come together to develop a new way to play games with friends. The company has spent the last two years developing its collaborative role playing game.
“Our launched version of the game will be our core game, a CSRPG or Collaborative Storytelling RPG,” said Lightforge Games CEO and founder Matt Schembari. “Just like ARPGs are RPGs with gameplay that is augmented with action (i.e. hack and slash), a CSRPG is an RPG with gameplay augmented with collaborative storytelling. This gives players the ability to send the game in any direction, make their own stories, respond to any scenario with full freedom, and really experience a new kind of gameplay.”
Collaborative games like this exist in tabletop, such as Fiasco, but few exist in the digital space. Most digital role playing games are focused on action even if their audience tends to focus on story elements or romances. Consider how often fans of Bioware games talk about the characters they’ve romanced versus their characters builds or memorable battles.
“We made a conscious choice to start with gameplay first,” said Schembari. “We really had to answer the question ‘How does a video game work where what you say and imagine is just as important as what you do with the controller? That question opens up a giant can of worms around things like the interaction model, the definition of an adventure or campaign, progression, the role of the guide and so on.”
Lightforge’s approach mixes the traditional with something more open ended. They want players to be able to get into a game without having any prior video game or RPG experience. For example, their game has classes but it won’t have ancestries or races that determine character benefits.
“Classes determine what abilities they have access to along with things like talents, quirks and other aspects of character customization and progression,” said Schembari. “We’re also playing around with subverting some expectations on what classes to expect. One of my favorites is the Spirit Knight, a warrior haunted by some kind of a ghost that they can then use to augment their powers. Right now we’re not utilizing ancestries or races or anything like that. Instead, you can fully customize and morph your character to look however you want without being restricted to specific ancestries like elf or orc. You can certainly make something that looks like what you might expect for an elf or an orc, we just don’t mark them as distinct creature types. The character art team has done an amazing job building tech that gives players incredible flexibility in character creation.”
It’s an exciting time for digital role playing games. 2023 brought Baldur’s Gate 3 which mixed the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons with the ensemble management and romance storylines of games like Mass Effect. Lightforge hopes the success of that game means its work will find an audience receptive to a different style of game.
“I wouldn’t say that [Baldur’s Gate 3]’s success has necessarily changed or influenced our process at all,” said Schembari. “But we’re even more encouraged that we’re building something that will resonate with a large audience. There’s a lot of excitement out there for RPGs right now, and after an amazing year of RPGs a lot of people are asking ‘What’s next in the genre?’. We think a fresh, new take on what it means to be an RPG is exactly what we need next.”
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