something like Elden Ring fares much better than something like Black Geyser on currentyear Codex... shameful.
At the end of the day I'm more loyal to 'fantasy' than to 'RPG'. The latter is just the medium. What is the point of deep Codex-approved purity-checked RPG if the game world isn't worth exploring in the first place? Gygax and others were trying to model living inside literary fantasy, at the end of the day. If an A B X Y controller-led action game, along the lines of current year Tomb Raider clone, in the unlikely event, did fantasy better than a full CRPG, it gets my support over any RPG. Hence Quake 1 is a better fantasy game than most explicit fantasies, in my view.
What can I expect from a Western RPG in the current year? Vapid materialism, in which fantasy is reduced purely to a story of mundane factions, rather than metaphysical forces. Sometimes like rival food corporations fighting a trade war; who fucking cares? Quests about shovelling shit for five hours; everything reduced to the human in scale, the unhygenic, the scatological, the ironic. Lampooning the heartfelt ideals of the ancestors, instead of inserting one's mind into their world. A bland profane pseudo-historical setting, which is hardly different than reading an actual history of medieval England, Germany, Czechia or Poland. Sometimes nothing to really explore, since the entire world is mapped and there is a town every 5 miles, and nothing of substance lies beneath. Even the basic fantasy sense of 'exploration' is missing from half of CRPGs.
What can I expect from FromSoft? At least something fantastical, if imperfect. That treats fantasy with seriousness, instead of irony. Caves deeper than the roots of the Earth. Metaphysical forces. A pschological journey into the unknown, without towns every five miles. A door, lone bridge or ruined aqueduct feeling significant. Monsters carrying poetic weight.
Then there is three dimensionality. We don't like to mention this here, because graphics shouldn't be important, compared to the ideas they convey. An indie RPG developer 'should' be able to compete purely on the back of ideas. Yet in truth, isometric RPGs can't even do certain things artistically... and it matters if this is important to the vision. Flat isometric RPG maps simply cannot handle the visceral and vital feeling of actually crossing a narrow precipice, or being surrounded by a 2 km drop on either side. Or plumbing the lowest depths of an underworld.
If the poll is to change, the West needs to step up. Too busy judging how many African Americans they should force into 100% phenotypically white medieval fantasy world to gain someone's precious approval or simping for feminists who hate them and their genre. Can't even think about questions of authenticity when seething about what other people think.