Martin Klima, co-founder of Warhorse Studios, does not have much patience left for a certain style of role-playing game. In a recent remark, he made clear that the endless supply of RPGs built on pure wish fulfillment has worn him down, calling them power fantasy trips made for teenagers.
The line travels fast online because it names something plenty of players have felt but rarely say out loud: that the genre’s biggest titles increasingly hand out godhood as a reward for simply showing up.
The complaint in plain terms
His frustration is not aimed at RPGs as a form. It is aimed at the fantasy they tend to sell. In most big-budget releases, you start out as someone special — a prophesied figure, a dragon-blooded heir, the only soul who can seal the gate or stop the invasion. Levels follow, then legendary gear, then spells that turn battlefields into fireworks displays.
That loop, in Klima’s view, is dull. He is hardly alone in the room. Developers have long admitted that escalating power is the simplest way to keep people hooked: the numbers climb, the enemies grow bigger, the reward centre in the brain keeps firing. It works. It also flattens the stakes until nothing you do carries weight.
Why grounded games hit differently
Warhorse walked the opposite road with Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Set in Bohemia around 1403, the game hands you Henry, a blacksmith’s son with no destiny, no magic and no noble blood. He cannot swing a sword properly at the start. He loses fistfights. For long stretches he is just a young man trying not to die.
That choice shapes everything else. Combat is slow and punishing, reading an opponent matters more than stacking damage numbers, and a single bandit camp can end a run if you rush in. The world does not orbit the player. Most of the time it barely notices him.
The sequel kept that philosophy and reached a large audience, which chips away at the assumption that players only want to feel invincible.
A quieter appetite among players
I share the sentiment behind Klima’s remark. Overpowered heroes with super powers have lost their pull for me, and I suspect I am not the only one who feels that way. What appeals right now is the opposite setup: a game where you are not the chosen one, just a nobody trying to get through a chaotic world with whatever you can scavenge, borrow or steal.
There is a different kind of tension in that. When your character can die from a bad decision, every road at dusk, every unfamiliar face and every half-empty purse becomes a real consideration. Survival stops being a mechanic and starts being a mood.
This is not a war on fantasy
None of this means high fantasy should disappear. Dragon-slaying and spell-slinging have their place, and a well-built power curve can feel genuinely satisfying. The point is balance. A genre that only offers one flavour of hero eventually tastes thin, no matter how polished the combat is.
Interesting things happen when studios step sideways. Pentiment turned a murder mystery in a sixteenth-century Bavarian town into a slow study of memory and consequence. Disco Elysium made its protagonist a wreck of a man held together by bad habits and stubbornness. Neither game asks you to save the world, and both landed with critics and players alike.
What studios might take from it
Klima’s comments are blunt, but they arrive at a useful moment. Production budgets have swollen to the point where a single flop can hurt a studio badly, and chasing the same saturated fantasy has become a risky bet. Carving out a niche with a game that trusts its audience to enjoy weakness, failure and slow progress is no longer a strange idea.
Whether Warhorse keeps pushing that direction remains to be seen. For now, the studio has at least put a name to a feeling that has been drifting through the RPG audience for years: not every adventure needs a chosen one at the centre of it. Sometimes a nobody is enough.
Source: IGN News