Don't take this as an insult but if you really don't like what you see offered, then try your hand and make something you think is good. If it's good there's a very small chance you'll get noticed and if you're bad you'll get humbled very quickly. Though I have to be honest, most of the narrative people I've worked with were hacks and haven't had an original idea in their lives, so your competition isn't exactly elite. I'm not a narrative writer, but I like to describe good writing the way Justice Potter Stewart described pornography "I know it when I see it". Most of these writers today are checking boxes and writing stories around them and are following by the books styles and dialogue writing. None of them want to take risk or try something unorthodox, they just put unorthodox identities in as a substitute. If any of them had any balls at all they might get somewhere, but ultimately all the great writers tend to have things that can't be taught.
No offense taken. I'm currently trying that, thanks. Unfortunately, I don't have skills relevant to making video games so it's coming along
very slowly. I wouldn't call myself an original or good writer, either. I just have the benefit of foresight from seeing a ton of other attempts and the market itself is unexploited. I just want to put
something out there, to show people that it's possible if nothing else.
The problem isn't a lack of opportunity or skilled devs. There are plenty of games like
Hunt the Night where you play a vampire in a dark fantasy setting. Devs who could make urban fantasy simply aren't choosing to.
This article claims:
Another possible reason could be the lack of an easy to reference template for less creative products. As previously mentioned, anyone who wants to phone in the story of a high fantasy game can easily crib notes from Tolkien, Warcraft and numerous others. Similarly, if writing a sci-fi game, Star Trek, Neuromancer and others provide straightforward baselines for each given branch of sci-fi. Urban fantasy, while a prolific genre, does not have what you might call an archetypical example of the genre that serves as a sort of ‘generic’ template for anyone wishing to do a story in that genre.
In truth, this might actually be a boon for any future urban fantasy games, insofar as said games are more likely to be individually creative, as opposed to simply taking elements from pre-existing properties to make an easily marketable game. Of course, by the same token, it may take until such a property impacts on the collective consciousness for urban fantasy to get its due in gaming.
Perhaps if that ever happened, urban fantasy might even suffer the same fate of other genres of becoming largely homogeneous near-identical releases with the occasional spark of uniqueness in the rough. But even so, at least there’d be even more types of identical games to choose from, making the game industry as a whole that little bit more varied.
This speculation isn't what I would call accurate. Urban fantasy is actually very easy to write (it's oversaturated in prose fiction) and has several templates to choose from.
Harry Potter and
Bloodlines, for example. HP inspired numerous clones on the YA scene. After
Bloodlines almost all the few vampire crpgs that were made, like
DARK or
Vampyr, used the plot outline of "you become a newbie vamp, abandoned by your creator, manipulated by dark forces to cause the apocalypse, etc". At least one visual novel I tried was a shameless ripoff that copied several plot points verbatim, like "blowing up an enemy coven's warehouse full of weapons" or "a whole clique of vampires who are arbitrarily crazy because
Bloodlines did it." The
DARK manual includes a shoutout to
Bloodlines by saying the minor NPCs April and June are sisters to Therese and Jeanette Voerman who run The Asylum in Santa Monica (this is completely irrelevant to the plot and isn't mentioned in the game itself).
I admit that my outlines included a general tone and some plot points inspired by
Bloodlines, mostly because imitation is flattery and attracts fans of that game. But even then I want to do my own spin on the clichés and tropes.
Just off the top of my head, one way to change up is to give the vampire PC a relationship with his creator that persists throughout the game. The creator acts as an exposition fairy who teaches the PC about the magical world and orders him on various errands. Let's add some depth to the creator: what's the creator's reason for vampirizing the PC in the first place? Hmm... maybe it's been hibernating for a while due to immortal angst and isn't acquainted with the modern world, so it vampirizes the PC to learn about the modern world and offload some of its emotional baggage by transferring unneeded memories to the PC. Vampires magically feed on life via blood, so it stands to reason that they absorb the soul/memory of victims. You could use this as the basis for a PST-esque flashback mechanic where the PC can remember things about the master's past victims that can come in handy or add to the atmosphere.
Maybe take some cues from
BloodRayne or
Castlevania and make the PC some kind of half-vampire who doesn't suffer stereotypical weaknesses like sunlight, fire or running water as acutely as full-fledged vampires. Maybe add some lore where the magical people are racist against halfies and see them as slaves/pets barely above mere mortals on the totem pole, which colors interactions with different covens. The decadent high society coven sees the PC as simply an extension of his master's will, while the downtrodden social justice coven treats the PC as a peer.
Add some magicians and shapeshifters and whatever to the milieu of characters to make it look less like a clone of
Bloodlines. Go wild and add characters like fallen angels, tall sexy leprechauns, dragons, demon clowns, elves, animated mummies, possessed puppets, etc.
Urban fantasy is not a genre lacking in inspiration.