THE BEST ROLE-PLAYING GAMES YOU CAN PLAY RIGHT NOW

I have an embarrassing confession. I keep three save files going at once across three different RPGs, and I rotate between them depending on what kind of mood I'm in that night. Tactical brain mood gets the CRPG. Vibe mood gets the action RPG. Talk-to-everyone-in-town mood gets the JRPG. This is not a sustainable hobby for a person with responsibilities, and yet here we are, in 2026, with the genre in the best shape it's ever been in.

The role-playing game category is huge and getting fuzzy at the edges. Action games borrow stat trees, shooters borrow dialogue choices, and somewhere in the middle is a genre that used to be about rolling dice and is now about pretty much everything. So I want to give you my honest take on the RPGs that are actually worth your time right now, across the western and Japanese sides of the aisle, across turn-based and real-time, across pixel art and photorealistic faces.

This is not a ranking. Ranking RPGs against each other is silly because they do completely different things. This is a tour.

Baldur's Gate 3

If you have not played Baldur's Gate 3 yet and you have any interest in the genre, stop reading this and go play it. I will wait. Larian made what is, by a comfortable margin, the most ambitious CRPG of the modern era, and the fact that it crossed over to a mainstream console audience that historically would not touch a turn-based D&D game is one of the great gaming stories of the decade.

The thing that makes Baldur's Gate 3 special is not the combat, even though the combat is excellent. It is the way the game lets you actually play your character. You can talk your way out of a fight, you can shove an enemy off a cliff instead of fighting them, you can polymorph a boss into a sheep, you can refuse to do the main quest for hours while you go romance a vampire and accidentally kill a god. The reactivity is staggering. I am on my third playthrough and still finding scenes I have never seen.

Act 3 has some performance hiccups in Baldur's Gate, the city, but the latest patches have smoothed most of that out. The cross-class multiclassing system is a sandbox for build nerds, and Honour Mode added a difficulty option that has actually made me, a person who plays games for a living, sweat. This is the modern CRPG benchmark.

Disco Elysium

I will fight anyone who tries to tell me Disco Elysium is not an RPG because it has no traditional combat. The skill system in this game is the most interesting take on character building I have ever seen. Your stats are voices in your head. You assign points to Logic, Empathy, Inland Empire, Visual Calculus, and twenty other internal monologues, and they argue with each other and with you about how to handle a murder investigation in a city that has lost its mind.

You play a detective who has drunk himself into amnesia and lost his gun. You have to figure out who you are while figuring out who killed the guy hanging from a tree behind the hostel. The writing is the best in any game ever made. I will stand on this. The political and philosophical themes are handled with a wit and a melancholy that nothing else in the medium comes close to. The Final Cut version added full voice acting and it is now the definitive way to play.

You can finish Disco Elysium in around twenty hours, which is a pleasant surprise after the hundred hour commitments of most modern RPGs. It respects your time. It also respects your intelligence in a way that almost no other game does.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

It is 2026 and The Witcher 3 is still the gold standard for narrative open world RPGs. CD Projekt Red updated it with a next-gen patch that added ray tracing, better foliage, faster sign casting, and a third person camera mode borrowed from the Netflix show. It looks gorgeous. It plays better than it ever has. The Bloody Baron quest is still one of the best questlines in any game.

What gets me about The Witcher 3 on a replay is how grounded the side content is. You are not collecting feathers for an outpost. You are walking into a village where a woman thinks her dead son is haunting her well, and the answer is more complicated than yes or no. Geralt as a protagonist works because he is a guy with a job, and the job is killing monsters, and the monsters are usually less monstrous than the people who hired him.

Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are the two best expansion packs ever made. Blood and Wine alone is bigger than most full RPGs. If you have somehow not played this, you are about to have a very good two hundred hours.

Elden Ring

I wrote at length about Elden Ring in the best open world RPGs in 2026 so I will not retread the whole thing here. But the short version. FromSoftware took the Souls formula, opened it up to the sky, and built the best world for getting lost in that this hobby has ever produced. The Lands Between are designed for discovery, not completion, and the freedom of the open structure means you can route around any boss that is wrecking you and come back stronger.

Shadow of the Erdtree is the expansion and it is roughly the size of Limgrave. It is also harder than the base game, which felt impossible until I played it. Bring a buddy. Bring two buddies. The game now supports better co-op through seamless mods on PC, but the base summoning system works fine if you can stomach the disconnects.

Final Fantasy 16

Final Fantasy 16 is a divisive entry. I think the action combat, designed by the Devil May Cry 5 director, is the best real-time combat any Final Fantasy has ever had. The Eikon battles are the most expensive looking set pieces I have seen in a video game, and a couple of them made me put the controller down and just watch with my mouth open. The dark fantasy political tone is closer to Game of Thrones than to the bright crystal-and-airships vibe people associate with the series, and your mileage will vary on that.

The pacing in the middle drags. There are too many side quests that ask you to walk to a marker and talk to a guy. The cast is mostly great, with Clive and Jill carrying real emotional weight, but the supporting characters do not all land. Still, when this game is firing, it is one of the most spectacular things in the medium. The PC port runs better than launch but still asks a lot of your hardware.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

Rebirth is the middle entry of the Remake trilogy and it is staggeringly good. The combat refines what Remake started with, the open world regions are dense without being checklist-y, and the way it handles the iconic moments from the original 1997 game is going to be talked about for years. I am being deliberately vague because I do not want to spoil anything for the people who somehow do not know what happens at the end of Disc 1.

The minigames are too many. I will say it. Queen's Blood is genuinely great, the card game has more depth than it has any right to, but the parade sequence and a few others overstay their welcome. Push past them. The story payoffs are worth every awkward beat.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

Obsidian's pirate-flavored CRPG is the underrated giant of the modern Infinity Engine revival. You sail around a tropical archipelago, get into ship combat that is somewhere between a text adventure and a tactical board game, and resolve a god-sized conflict that started in the first game. Deadfire is more reactive than its predecessor, has a tighter combat system, and is gorgeous in a hand-painted way that holds up better than a lot of higher-budget games from its era.

The voice acting is partial, which threw some players off at launch, but I came around to it. Reading dialogue at your own pace is part of what CRPGs do well, and Deadfire's writing is sharp enough to carry it. If you bounced off the first Pillars game because of the pacing, give Deadfire a shot anyway. It fixed most of what people complained about.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

Wrath of the Righteous is the biggest, most absurdly ambitious CRPG anyone has made in years, and that includes Baldur's Gate 3. The Pathfinder ruleset is denser than D&D 5e, the build options are overwhelming in the best way, and the Mythic Path system lets you become a literal angel, a lich, a demon, an azata, a trickster, or an aeon, with each path rewriting huge chunks of the game.

It is also a real time with pause game by default with a turn-based mode toggle, which is the best of both worlds for people who cannot decide. The story sends you into a region called the Worldwound, a tear in reality leaking demons into the world, and you crusade against them at the head of an army you build through a Heroes of Might and Magic style strategy layer. It is too much game. It is gloriously too much game. Owlcat are doing things nobody else is doing and they deserve more credit.

Cyberpunk 2077

I am putting this on the list with no asterisks, which I would not have done in 2020. The 2.0 update plus Phantom Liberty turned this into the game it was always supposed to be. The skill trees have been rebuilt from scratch, the police now actually function, the cyberware system has real meaning, and the city of Night City finally feels alive in a way the launch version was clearly aiming for and missed.

Phantom Liberty is the espionage thriller expansion that gives you Idris Elba and a new district called Dogtown, and it is honestly some of the best writing CD Projekt Red has ever done. The branching ending of the expansion is brutal. V's story still hits. The driving still feels weird. But the moment-to-moment shooting, hacking, and dialogue choices are all solid now. If you wrote this game off years ago, give it another shot. It earned the second look.

Persona 5 Royal

Persona 5 Royal is the best entry point to JRPGs for someone who thinks they do not like JRPGs. It is also a hundred hour commitment, so manage your expectations. You play a high schooler in modern Tokyo who balances classes, part-time jobs, friendships, and romantic relationships during the day, and dives into a parallel reality at night to steal the corrupted hearts of adult abusers.

The style is unmatched. The UI alone deserves an award. Every menu, every transition, every battle screen is a designed object that makes most other RPG interfaces look lazy. The combat is a cleaned-up turn-based system with a knockdown-and-followup loop that stays satisfying for the entire run. The social link system, where you build relationships with your party and supporting cast, is the secret weapon that makes the long runtime feel earned.

The Royal additions, including a third semester that radically reframes the original ending, justify the upgrade if you played the vanilla version. If you have not played it at all, just go straight to Royal.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Like a Dragon is the entry point to a series that is otherwise hard to recommend new players jump into. It is the first turn-based game in the Yakuza series, it stars new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, and it is one of the funniest, warmest, weirdest RPGs I have played in years. Ichiban is a Dragon Quest superfan who literally sees the world as a JRPG, which is the in-universe excuse for why your party throws fireballs and why a homeless guy in a cardboard box becomes a viable summon.

The job system lets you respec your party into anything from a Breakdancer to a Bodyguard to a Chef who throws hot pans, and the combat is a clean, accessible take on turn-based combat with positioning and environment interactions. The substories, as ever in Yakuza, are the heart of the game. You will help a man propose to his Roomba. You will manage a struggling business in a minigame deeper than some standalone games. You will cry, unexpectedly, multiple times.

Infinite Wealth is the direct sequel and is also incredible, but Like a Dragon is where I would tell a newcomer to start.

What did not make the cut

Starfield I do not love. I respect what Bethesda was attempting and I think there is a good game in there for the right person, but the loading screens and the procedural emptiness of most planets killed it for me. Dragon Age: The Veilguard has a lot of good combat and some real character work but is a step down from Inquisition in worldbuilding. The newer Final Fantasy 14 expansion is great if you are in that ecosystem, but I cannot in good conscience recommend a new player install an MMO and play through ten years of catch-up content to get there.

Honorable mentions for Avowed, which I am still working through, and for the upcoming Clair Obscur Expedition 33, which has gotten me more excited than any new RPG in a while.

If you want to keep going down this rabbit hole, I have written about open-ended RPGs that let you ignore the main quest and a bunch about how the best worlds get built. The genre is in a wildly good place right now. Pick something off this list and lose a weekend.