12 Great 2000s RPGs That Were Ahead Of Their Time

Highlights

• RPGs of the 2000s broke new ground and set standards for modern games to follow, like The Witcher and Mass Effect.
• Games like Valkyria Chronicles and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines were innovative for their time, influencing future genres.
• Titles like Diablo 2 and Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind revolutionized RPG gameplay with diverse classes and open-world exploration.

RPGs have been prevalent within gaming since the dawn of the medium. They continue to evolve with the passing of time, with elements of the genre often making their way into other types of games.

The momentum from the genre’s explosion in the ’90s did not slow down after the new millennium arrived, with many classic RPGs coming out at the turn of the century. The following RPGs from the 2000s are not just fantastic; they broke barriers and did things that would only become the standard years later. Some might say modern games have yet to catch up to these all-time greats.

Updated on August 13, 2024 by Mark Sammut: The best 2000s RPGs that broke new ground are still mostly playable today, even if they might be a bit rough-around-the-edges in places. This article has been expanded with more context for the projects, along with galleries.

12 The Witcher

Dense Writing & Focus On Moral Ambiguity

CD Projekt Red has had some incredible ups and downs throughout its history as a developer. After the massive success of The Witcher 3, they stumbled big time with the release of Cyberpunk 2077. If gamers are still sour about them, they should perhaps look back to the company’s past and try out the first Witcher game.

It is not easy to get into these days after playing the third entry in the franchise, but it showcases an ambition that would be better fulfilled later on in their catalog. Released in 2007, The Witcher introduced moral ambiguity into action RPGs when the choice was still very much between being evil and a paragon of virtue. The gameplay does not hold up, but the story is still top-notch. Fortunately, CD Projekt Red recently announced a remake of the title.

11 Valkyria Chronicles

Blends Third-Person Shooting, Visual Novels, & Strategy

Valkyria Chronicles had a unique take on the turn-based strategy genre before it became more popular. Instead of moving characters around on a grid and having an infinite amount of time to make decisions, players move freely in the play area for a certain distance.

If players moved in the way of enemy fire, the adversaries would automatically reign bullets on the character. The same goes for enemies walking into the player’s team. With games like Mario + Rabbids introducing their spin on the genre, it makes one wonder if Valkyria Chronicles would be more popular today if it came out ten years later. As it stands now, the series is only for the biggest fans of the niche genre.

10 Final Fantasy 10

A Progression System That Provides More Freedom

In an age where players still expected very specific features from a JRPG, Final Fantasy 10 changed the formula in a big way. The game features no world map and is surprisingly linear until the endgame where players are free to roam around more freely.

Additionally, traditional levels are replaced by the Sphere Grid, which gives the party more freedom about how each character progresses. Anyone skeptical of these changes immediately had their worries put to rest when they started playing.

9 Mass Effect

A Trilogy With Choices That Continue From Game To Game

Released in 2007, Mass Effect was one of the more ambitious projects any studio had undertaken. The idea of a trilogy of games where players’ decisions echoed throughout sequels was pretty much unheard of at the time. BioWare pulled it off, however.

The Mass Effect series was in a dark place for a while after the release of Andromeda, but the trilogy’s re-release and the upcoming continuation have put it back in fans’ good graces. Going back to the original entry reveals some limitations that would be fixed, but it is surprisingly tight for such an old RPG.

8 Vagrant Story

In-Depth Crafting System

Square has always had graphically impressive games, and Vagrant Story represents the technological apex of what the company was able to do with the original PlayStation.

It is a dungeon crawler, opting to focus purely on combat and dungeons rather than shops and towns. With this concentrated design, it was able to do things other action games couldn’t, such as including an in-depth weapon and armor crafting system.

7 Deus Ex

Immersive Sim

The immersion present in this cyberpunk opus was unprecedented back in 2000. Every level was an intricately detailed sandbox where players could approach a situation in any variety of ways, depending on their imagination and the character’s abilities.

Directed by Warren Spector, it is exactly the evolution one would have expected from the mind who brought Thief and System Shock to the gaming industry. Even after a sequel and a reboot, many consider the debut entry the best of the series.

6 World Of Warcraft

Established MMOs As A Worldwide Phenomenon

MMOs were pretty niche in the 90s and hard to access. With the increased ubiquity and accessibility of the Internet, it was only a matter of time before World of Warcraft came along and swept up a large chunk of gaming culture along with it.

One could not go to a gaming website or open up a magazine without reading something new about the game in the first several years of its release. 20 years later, and WoW is still a titan in the now-crowded genre.

5 Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

A World Influenced By The Player

Some games are too ambitious for their own good. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is brimming with innovative ideas, but without fan patches, the game barely works. That said, the available content is generally fantastic, particularly during the opening half of the campaign.

This is the price one pays for trying such an ambitious 3D RPG in 2004. The characters players create, along with their actions, affect multiple aspects of the world. Hopefully, the sequel can create the same experience, only with fewer technical issues.

4 Final Fantasy 11

Cross-Platform Play

Two years before World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 11 broke ground by not only being the first MMORPG in the franchise but also the first to include cross-platform play. PlayStation 2 players could interact with PC players on the same server.

By today’s standards, it is extremely hard to get into, but it managed to be extremely popular in its day. While FF11 still playable on PC, most have moved on to Final Fantasy 14, which is arguably a superior overall game in its current state. Still, FF11 was a big release for its era, and it tends to be overlooked in this day and age.

3 Diablo 2

All-Around Innovative; The Class System Was Huge

The dungeon crawler series from Blizzard removes most of the superfluous story and boils the genre down to combat and loot collection. Not only was it endlessly entertaining, but the game saw regular updates for years, making the long wait for Diablo 3 more tolerable. Other dungeon crawlers like Borderlands would follow a similar structure.

Diablo 2 was just a ground-breaking game in general, including innovations that became staples of the isometric action RPG genre. The game transitioned to open-level design, filling the overworld with content that ensured players always had something to do. Diablo 2‘s classes are far more diverse than its predecessor’s option, allowing for unique builds tailor-made for different playstyles. This was a massive game-changer for the RPG genre.

Ambitious Large-Scale Sandbox Built On Exploration

The Elder Scolls always prioritized player freedom to an extent, but Morrowind pushes that concept well beyond its predecessors’ reach. Along with showcasing that PC-style RPGs could work on consoles, Bethesda’s game presented an open-world sandbox that seemed massive for the era, and it is still impressive to revisit in this day and age.

In some ways, Morrowind is a precursor to something like BOTW. Both games encourage players to explore for the sake of it, rather than just giving them points to tick off a map. The RPG allows and encourages mistakes, and it is not afraid to just let players do their own thing without hand-holding them.

1 Demon’s Souls

The Birth Of The Soulslike

The game that put FromSoftware on the map and made Hidetaka Miyazaki a household name in the industry, Demon’s Souls introduced numerous innovative ideas into modern games. The extreme difficulty and ambiguity came at a time when many big-budget games were becoming easier and more forgiving. The campaign’s structure emphasized repetition and studying the enemies’ moveset, forcing players to improve their skills rather than just bulldoze their way to victory by leveling up (although stats are still part of the equation). The combat system was not only far more involved than most Western action RPGs of the era but was also prioritized, to the point of the game barely telling a conventional story.

While it certainly has its quirks and future games from the studio improved upon the style, the foundation laid by Demon’s Souls is still solid, as evidenced by the recent remake by Bluepoint Games on the PlayStation 5.