The art of a role-playing game isn’t just about building and preparing the characters, it’s about the immersive world they live in. Today, there is a lot to choose from in the RPG genre that includes standalone games, massively multiplayer online games, and mobile games, which are great for anyone building a character and playing the game.
For the real inhabitants of these game worlds, life may not be that much fun and it probably won’t even last very long. It seems that the game developers were so determined to create an exciting and dangerous world for players that they forgot that real NPCs had to live there too.
6 Azeroth – World Of Warcraft
Not Outland, Northrend, or any of the expansion locations that came later, but the two continents that players often refer to as Old Azeroth have always been ridiculously dangerous for NPCs. Even when the level cap was 60, it was common for players with maximum capacity to storm through a lower level city and destroy every NPC there, just for the dirty fun.
Regardless of players’ inherent danger, Azeroth is a playground for some of the most powerful and destructive forces in the universe, such as the Scourge and the Burning Legion. Unlike the areas populated by higher level characters that came in later expansions, there’s not much an NPC can do about the Lich King of Deathwing, other than duck and cover.
5 Faerûn – The Baldur’s Gate Franchise
It may depend on the mood the Dungeon Master is in when playing a tabletop version of this game, but against a computer, NPCs can expect no mercy. Faerûn is a world characterized as a backdrop in different D&D modules, and it is so dangerous that it appears in other RPG games known for their difficulty, such as planescape.
Faerûn is so confused that not only does it have a God of Murder, but this deity visited the already dangerous land in human form during a period called the Time of Troubles. The result was a whole generation of murder children who roamed the earth, not all of them interested in being heroes. It’s a dangerous enough prospect for a player character, imagine the stress of a regular NPC with no stats or party.
4 Elysium – Disco Elysium
It looks like a quirky alternate reality game set in a 1950s version, but this vision is horrifying once the player understands the nature of Elysium and what kind of place it is. It’s not on a conventional planet, but on a series of islands held together by an ethereal goo called the Pale that drives people crazy when exposed to it for any length of time.
Disco Elysium is scary for everyone, players and NPCs, because it is a game that relies on conversations to move forward instead of fighting, and part of the story is about the main character trying to regain his memory. Not only is the whole environment dangerous, it doesn’t even rely on basic physical laws, and it’s terrifying to think of regular NPCs dealing with reality breaking down on a regular basis.
3 Sanctuary – The Diablo Franchise
Sanctuary is so disgusting and horrifying that it is quickly becoming a satire of horror RPG worlds everywhere. The player cannot walk down a street without wading through leftover bits of human, demon, or whatever while most of the place is in ruins or on fire all the time. There isn’t much in the way of infrastructure, which also begs the question of what the NPCs of this world are growing or eating.
The diablo games have been around for a long time, and Sanctuary always has been, and the helpless danger on the part of the innocent is part of the storyline. The NPCs in this game deal with some of the ultimate suffering as it’s just in lore, so they crawl into some pitiful towns and adapt accordingly when demons burst from their neighbors chest or a burning pit opens up to the house.
2 Pagan – Ultima VIII: Pagan
Players interested in what inspired the infernal environments of diablo and New world need to take a trip on the way back machine and check out the old one? Ultimate spell. It wasn’t until the eighth episode, Pagan, that the game designers decided to bring the horror down to eleven.
Most of the previous Ultimate adventures took place in a fictional world called Britannia, which wasn’t exactly paradise as it was based on the grit and gore of medieval Europe, but at least there was a king, an army, and some sort of government system. Pagan, on the other, there’s a world of burning pits, pentagrams, piles of rot and cobwebs, and distressed NPCs that somehow manage to live here.
1 The Island of Aeternum – New World
What makes this one of the most terrifying RPG worlds for both NPC and player is that it’s based on real lore and much more immersive. The backstory claims that Aeternum is a sort of lost Eden, and therefore death is not permanent, but that brings up certain terrifying conclusions.
As the player travels through Aeternum, they become involved in quests where NPCs have a wide variety of horrific problems when it comes to mysterious, infernal diseases that affect both people and property. Isabella, one of the endgame bosses, used several of her own workers and sailors in filthy experiments. Even NPCs like shopkeepers and craftsmen are not safe from supply chain problems that are inevitable when entire trade routes are cut off by a corrupt attack that comes out of nowhere.
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