I mean the niche best known for Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls III, IV and V.
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(Fantasy) The setting is a fictional world with fantastical elements, and a comparable level of societal progress as the 1600s or earlier.
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(Character Creation) You create your own role: character and class. It is a permanent character.
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(Action) You have direct control over your characters actions in real time.
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(Open World / Sandbox) You aren't forced to do the main story and can roam around the whole map finding items and doing side quests.
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(Single player) Not having to accommodate for multiple players, your choices can make a lasting impact on the world.
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(Alive world) There are events that can happen by chance, like meeting people on the road.
Less importantly, they are first person. This connects you more to the character, but downside is you don't see how cool armor you are wearing. First person combat might also keep it from reaching high action potential, although games like Mount&Blade and Kingdom Come Deliverance features good First Person fencing.
What are the competitors in this genre of single player, open world, fantasy, RPG?
Baldur's Gate is not an action game.
The Witcher forces you into a premade character and thus I don't consider it Free Role Playing.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is not fantasy and you are a set character.
Elden Ring has few NPC interactions, choices and well executed quests. The world is heavily hostile. I don't see it fulfilling the niche quite, but it fills my craving per now.
With Oblivion and Skyrim being real hits, why aren't there more competitors in the Single Player, Open World, Fantasy, RPG niche?
There's a video essay that covers this topic: Where are all the Skyrim Killers
The big takeaway is that it's really expensive to do, and it's only gotten more expensive since Morrowind with the expectation of fully voice acted dialogue and complex schedules. Not even Skyrim has full schedules for all NPC's tbh.
Ok, tangent time: I have to wonder if another factor is public perception. Look at discussions on Starfield that pop up and you inevitably get people with... interesting takes.
I've seem people argue that Bethesda's formula is outdated, which is ridiculous. There's plenty of people who still enjoy going back to old games or renewing old formulas. Just look at boomer shooters, which also rely on an "antiquated formula".
Then there's people that haven't picked up a Bethesda game since Skyrim, and complain about how the Creation Engine is outdated. They don't realize that it's gotten a lot of improvements over the years, such as updating it to a 64-bit instruction set for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition, which has drastically increased stability. Or creating ESL and ESP-FE plugins that effectively add 4095 plugin slots since the original 255 was too restrictive. Or the improvements in gunplay with Fallout 4 and Starfield. Or all the modifications they did to make Starfield even possible.
That being said, I think Bethesda should look into releasing the Creation Engine into open source. There's some impressive work the modding community has done to add in features they care about using SKSE plugins or Community Shaders