Alternity was definitely the last interesting scifi ttrpg. Traveler's Third Imperium setting has its odd jobs in space sandbox, but Star*Drive added in a lot of interesting elements like politics, national backgrounds, psionics, mutants, cyberware, alien invasions, frontiers, etc. Dark•Matter has its "all conspiracies are true" setting that mixes in freemasons, illuminati, rosicrucians, satanists, cyborg pod people, vampires, Roswell grays, ghosts, demons, etc. Nothing made since has drawn my interest and I've gone through a lot of them.
I feel like ttrpgs in general have taken a huge nose dive in depth and creativity in the late 2000s, although they've been declining since at least the mid 90s when the market as a whole started crashing due to competition with console video games. All the IPs that survived from before then are pale shadows of themselves that just repackage the stuff they wrote in the past. Tabletop can't compete with video games, so most publishers have resorted to scummy mtx vtts and video game adaptations to maintain revenue, if they weren't already bought by video game companies aiming to mine their IPs and that's has been hit and miss.
Did you read the title at all? We're talking about gaming.
Yes I read the title and what I said is true, especially in the tabletop space. TTRPGs of the 1990s were objectively worse than the 1980s. That's also when you had the tourists invade using systems produced by White Wolfe.
Unless you think people playing dress up as goths and spreading STDs is an improvement.
Yeah, that period of elitist goths thinking they were better than D&D players was horrible and I'm really frustrated that it's been swept under the rug. The surviving fandom is still horrible and the new recruits who weren't there when things went down are the worst. Most of them have never actually played the tabletop, haven't even read the pretentious text of the actual books (like I did during my pretentious angsty teen phase, which I regret to this day) but got all their information from heavily abridged and biased wiki pages. Maybe they played some Redemption or Bloodlines if they're lucky. Doesn't stop them from singing praises and claiming "the Paradox games would be totally perfect if they followed these plans in my imagination that don't disappoint me."
