Importance of using well known environment/theme

So the game is multiplayer RPG.

The core gameloop is you have a sizable piece of land you can use for resources to create ships and weapons. And combat is over strategic control of a number of islands/small continents. Combat takes place on land and sea. It's multiplayer.

What I'd like to do, to open up creativity, is avoid using known environments like medieval. I already started going down that path a bit, but I'm thinking of just going all the way. It definitely would solve some of the challenges I've been having. Like more freedom for players in building stuff, and just more creative things I can do in the land/sea combat system where I don't have the constraints/expectations that I think would normally apply if you are going with a well known fantasy setting.

But I'm concerned that if it's too different from anything known, players will just not relate, they won't feel grounded in it like in a known fantasy setting.

I think it works really well for some games, and others not so much, like I've played rpg's that I just can't get into because it's too different. But I have years of bias here from playing rpg's, so curious what others think.

 

If I correctly recall the blurb from Scott Rogers' Level Up!, he recommends going weird on only one of three things: character, setting, or story. This way you can be innovative without completely alienating the player.

Plenty of games are set in other familiar environments that aren't the usual Middle Earth / Star Wars tropes: pirates on the colonial seas, Victorian steampunk, 1920s art deco, etc.

 

The more new you add, the more work you are going to have to do to ground the player.

If you are already going to be teaching them a bunch of new mechanics specific to your game, is it worth also teaching them an entirely new setting? On the other hand, if your mechanics are a clone of an existing game, then go ahead and mess with the setting.

 

I would say the mechanics are well known. I'm leveraging it in areas like player ship building, to allow for more creativity there.

Also using it for weapon and combat design generally. For example ranged weapons are bows and lobbers. And you can do combos using one then the other, and lobbers can lob anything that fits. At least for me it's made it easier to get more creative. Not that I'm thinking of new stuff really, more like it's easier to picture mechanic's I've seen work well in other games and reuse them, without having to worry about whether they fit the setting.

 

It's complicated. These days you're likely to find more people that want weird and wacky settings. The catch is that the more out there you make the setting, the more people will become curious about how it works, and there are a ton of problems involving how to pace and regulate the amount of info you can dump.