Modern fantasy RPGs often place players at the center of the universe, casting them as legendary heroes destined to save the world. Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call, which releases on Steam on July 17, 2026, takes a different approach. Instead of becoming a chosen savior, players step into the boots of a mercenary navigating a brutal world shaped by political conflict, personal ambition, and ordinary people simply trying to survive. That philosophy extends throughout the game's design, influencing everything from its handcrafted worldbuilding and quest structure to its classless progression system and combat sandbox.

The project has been in development for more than a decade, giving the team ample opportunity to rethink systems, refine mechanics, and learn difficult production lessons along the way. Built around a stylized fantasy aesthetic inspired by classics like Fable, the game combines melee combat, ranged weapons, magic, alchemy, traps, and deep character customization while aiming to create a world that feels lived in rather than built around the player. 

We spoke with Craig Smith, Director at developer Titan Roc about creating believable fantasy worldbuilding, balancing a highly flexible progression system, designing stylized environments, building combat through constant player feedback, and why making a story-rich indie RPG taught them that some features simply can't be compromised. 

Forsaken Realms: Vahrin’s Call is set in a handcrafted high-fantasy universe with the city of Vahrin on the brink of collapse. How did the team approach building the world of Leyda and making Vahrin feel like a believable place shaped by conflict, history, and desperation? 

Craig Smith, Director: From the beginning, we wanted to create a universe that felt like a real place. When we first started creating the world of Leyda, I had a real bugbear with how shallow most video game universes always felt compared to, say, books (bearing in mind games have come a really long way since this started back in 2014). 

You read books like The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings, and they feel deep. Every new village has a new story, its own quirks, mannerisms, and unique characteristics, much like how the real world works, and we really wanted to try and capture that. To create a city on the brink, but with a narrative that’s unique to just this one city, with personal stories and characters that are all going through their own things within the bigger narrative.

The game is described as a narrative-driven third-person fantasy action RPG. How do you balance authored storytelling, player freedom, exploration, combat, and contract-based progression without letting one element overwhelm the others? 

Craig Smith: One of, if not the biggest goals we have with the Forsaken Realms, is to allow players to be a part of the story but that it doesn’t revolve around them. There’s no "Dragonborn” or ”Chosen Ones” here. You play as a mercenary in a brutal world, and you’re there to earn coin.

We went through several iterations over the years with this. Early on, we tried multiple branching choices and even having NPC sidekicks that would talk to you and fight alongside you in story beats, larger battles, etc.

Overall, we found a lot of this detracted from the goal of just letting players get on with playing as much as possible. We had created far too many non-skippable story components that we felt would be fun the first time but would kill any kind of subsequent enjoyment or future playthroughs.

This is, of course, directly at odds with trying to then create a core narrative that sets up what we hope will be a multi-game-spanning epic narrative experience. Extremely easy to achieve on a self-funded budget, right?

In the end, we settled on a narrative structure that’s always present, but we try to deliver it organically through conversation and exploration rather than endless exposition. We want players to feel like active participants in the world, which is difficult to achieve with lengthy cutscenes.

The classless character progression system seems to be a major part of the game’s identity. How did you design a system where players can mix weapons, armor, abilities, alchemy, traps, and magic while still maintaining balance and meaningful build variety? 

Craig Smith: Honestly, I can’t think of a game that has a system similar to ours. I guess something like Kingdom Come or the Elder Scrolls are the closest. Whilst the mechanics have changed between starting out and final release quite substantially, our underpinning design philosophy has remained the same, even surviving the shift from being co-op to a single-player game, and is something we’re proud of. It’s designed to be compartmentalized or fragmented so to speak.

A new character will be able to do the basics of everything; they’ll have access to all skill specialisms, so they can swing a sword, shoot a bow, cast a fireball spell, etc.

As they use these things, they level up the relevant specialism, and throughout the world they can find abilities, ingredients, skill books etc that allow them access to ever stronger mechanics and stats.

But they can’t master everything; eventually you’ll run out of skill points and must start deciding what type of character you want to be… How are you going to overcome the most difficult parts of the game? Have you been investing in using bows and want to max out everything within the bow specialism to be able to fire all the different types of arrows available? What about Alchemy alongside this to craft some unique potions to weaken enemy resistances and heal yourself when you’re in trouble? Maybe trap-making too; traps are usually handy for archers, right?

Because each specialism is designed from the ground up to be its own thing, we can start from scratch and build a unique playstyle with each one. Sword and Shield, for example, is incredibly defensive, offering lots of bonuses to guarding.  The Great Sword specialism, by contrast, offers lots of wide sweeping attacks that help when trying to fight multiple enemies at once.

Our vision for this is that we can carry forward the things that really work and then remove, replace, or revamp the things that maybe aren’t received as strongly. 

As we grow the franchise and expand the world with each game, we could even have race- or faction-specific specialisms.

Imagine an order of zealous knights that only allow you access to their specialism by devoting yourself to their god, Sol? What about a warband of angry orc-like folk that has a rage mechanic specialism, or dwarves that fire magical guns?

The hardest part is certainly making each one feel useful and worthwhile, and we truly hope we’ve done that with Vahrin’s Call.

Can you walk us through the combat design process? How do you tune melee attacks, ranged combat, spellcasting, enemy behaviour, dodging, timing, and player feedback to make encounters feel satisfying? 

Craig Smith: Good question, we’ll let you know if we figure out the golden bullet on that one! But for now, it’s certainly a tough one. Particularly in early playtests, there were playstyles and builds that allowed you to essentially overcome parts of the game with relative ease. But that’s why playtests have been by far the most informative thing we’ve done throughout development. Each and every one provides us with huge amounts of feedback and balancing information that’s allowed us to constantly refine the gameplay and combat loop into something that allows for a substantial variety of builds without any single one breaking the game… that we’re aware of.

From an art direction standpoint, how did you define the look of Forsaken Realms: Vahrin’s Call? What were the main visual pillars for the game’s stylized fantasy characters, environments, creatures, lighting, and UI? What does your environment art pipeline look like, from early worldbuilding and level blockout to final assets, lighting, set dressing, and in-engine polish?

Craig Smith: Fable? Can I just say that as our answer? Okay. Well, we’re huge fans of the stylized world they created. I remember reading an interview with one of the developers once and they said every single asset they create in Albion has a personal touch. I absolutely loved that and it’s become integral to the artstyle for the Forsaken Realms. Our hope is that we can continue to push stylised realism even further with each game and create something that still allows people to feel like it’s a real place, but that also holds up graphically for many years to come.

What software and tools does the team use for concept art, modelling, sculpting, texturing, animation, VFX, level design, and final implementation?

Craig Smith: Vahrin’s Call has been in development so long that when we first started, we were using x-gen for normal maps and a Quixel Photoshop plugin for texture work! Our current 3D workflow, however, tends to be pretty straightforward: Photoshop for concept art, Blender and ZBrush for modelling/sculpting and animating, Substance Painter for texturing.

Then when things call for it, we make use of more bespoke software for shorter periods as the needs arise. Embergen, for example, is unbelievable at creating fire and smoke VFX sprite sheets. I highly recommend it, it’s great! We also have a Rococo motion capture suit that we've used to record all of our cutscenes. Another amazing and affordable piece of kit!

The game features grotesque insect-like creatures called the khraiax, along with other threats in and beneath the city. How do you approach creature design in a way that supports both gameplay readability and the darker fantasy tone of the world?

Craig Smith: Within the Forsaken Realms, there isn’t a single big bad. The world isn’t created with a single threat in mind, e.g., the Demon armies of hell or Yokai or surviving the zombie apocalypse, etc.

What we instead wanted to create was a living, breathing world full of stories, people, and creatures, much like how our own world works. 

Just because there’s a war taking place in Vahrin, that doesn’t mean the whole world revolves around it. This is just a small part of what’s happening throughout the world and if we’re fortunate enough to continue the narrative beyond Vahrin’s Call, it was important to ensure that we didn’t become known as that dark game where you fight the zombies, demons or in our case, the khraiax.

We’ve carried this through to our enemy design as much as possible. There’s a faction within the world that is intent on chaos. They believe they’re doing their gods' bidding, and to lean into that chaotic nature, they dress almost jester-like. Their clothing is purple; they wear masks and sow discord wherever they go.

Aethspawn are another threat throughout the world; these are spirits that linger in the world, either unable or unwilling to move on. Whilst spirits are blue, blue zombie-like creatures running around would have looked incredibly odd. What we decided on in the end was a yin and yang kind of approach where pure spirit is light blue and spirit mire (their bodies) is dark and oily. This allows for the spirit to shine through their body where we need it to. We can use this in several ways, easily showing that the spirit is still in there from a lore perspective. Mechanically, it allows us to create incredibly obvious weak spots.

The Steam page highlights alchemy ingredients, traps, weapons, armor, and anything else players can use to survive. How do these systems interact, and how do you encourage experimentation without making the game too complex for new players? 

Craig Smith: This goes back to what I was saying before about our skill specialisations. We’ve tried creating a progression and character build structure that will only ever be as complicated as the individual specialism is. There is of course synergy amongst them; casting Icy Weapon allows your weapon attacks to cause the chilled status effect, for example.

What we’ve seen, and what we hope to continue refining as we move forward, is just how unique and fun a specialism can be without getting bogged down by what already exists or came before. In Vahrin’s Call, there’s a giant frying pan weapon that’s classed as a Great Blunt weapon and falls under that specialty. In the next game, it could be that giant frying pans are their own specialism with completely unique techniques. Who knows where it’s going to lead us, but I’m excited to find out.

As an indie team building a story-rich fantasy action RPG, what have been the biggest production challenges so far, and what lessons have you learned while bringing Vahrin’s Call from early concept to its 2026 release?

Craig Smith: Where to begin… We’ve pretty much made every mistake in the book getting here. Feature creep, going too big, no budget, you name the mistake, and we’ve done it.

I think if I had to pick one, though, purely because we never seem to learn our lesson and keep repeating it, seems to be trying to do a toned-down or smaller version of something ‘because we’re indie’, only to realise as we were making it that it just isn’t good. Then we go back and have to do the thing we wanted to make to begin with.

For example, we were never planning on having voice acting because of costs, time, etc. Well, how do you have a narrative game without voice acting these days? You can’t. So, when scoping, just be brutally honest about what your game needs. If you’re going to add something to your game, it needs to be done properly. There just aren’t any shortcuts when making games.

Craig Smith, Director at Developer Titan Roc on Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call