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Decline PC Gamer Presents: The Ultimate RPG Handbook

felipepepe

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What to say to a "PC GAMER" that calls 2003 & onwards the "Rise & Rise of RPG" because "muh BioWare & Bethesda"? FFS, even Kotaku agrees that there's a rebirth in the past years, and you can't have a rebirth unless it was dead.

Also, Deus Ex is from 2001 and Morrowind from 2002. At least be consistent with your time divisions.
 

Valky

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What to say to a "PC GAMER" that calls 2003 & onwards the "Rise & Rise of RPG" because "muh BioWare & Bethesda"?
call-him-a-faggot.png
 

Boleskine

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http://www.pcgamer.com/the-complete-history-of-rpgs/

The history of RPGs

By Richard Cobbett 3 hours ago

Our comprehensive guide to PC RPGs spanning four decades—from Dungeon to The Witcher 3.

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Computers and RPGs have always gone hand-in-hand. Even when the best adventurers could hope for visually was a few letters and numbers on a screen, what better way could there be to handle stats, die-rolls and complex calculations? Soon enough, though, computer RPGs were capable of doing much more.

The original PC RPGs—such as MUDs, or multi-user dungeons—appeared in the mid-’70s. These weren’t for home computers, but mainframes, typically found in universities. They tended to be based on either Dungeons & Dragons, which itself launched in 1974, or be variously disguised takes on Tolkien. These included Dungeon, DND, Orthanc and Oubliette. A few, such as Oubliette, had simple graphics, though most started out as just text or used ASCII’s standard set of text-mode graphics.

Despite the primitive technology, these games often offered surprising depth. Don Daglow’s Dungeon for instance, a 1975 D&D pastiche, offered control of an entire multiplayer party, mapping, NPCs with AI, line-of-sight-based combat, and both melee and ranged attacks. Moria, from the same year, served up wireframe graphics for its characters, and even featured rudimentary 3D views of its corridors. Small ones, with no detail, but let’s not forget that even Space Invaders wasn’t out yet!

THE QUEST BEGINS: 1975—1990
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Bringing it home
For those outside universities, the genre really began around 1980. There had been games for home systems before that, including Temple of Apshai for the TRS-80 and Beneath Apple Manor for the Apple II, but few of them made real waves. 1980 saw the launch of Rogue, the first true dungeon crawl game, whose combination of randomly generated content and permadeath set the tone for today’s ‘roguelikes’. It would be a few more years before it and its clones would be available on home computers—the PC version landed in 1984—but the basics were here.

The most successful dungeon crawler of all time is, of course, Blizzard’s Diablo. But Rogue’s longest-lived descendent is arguably a much more interesting game—1987’s Nethack. Technically, it was based on a Rogue clone called, yes, Hack, but let’s not quibble. Nethack takes the basic dungeon crawling concept and adds several decades worth of development. Ever wondered if throwing a custard pie in a basilisk’s face will stop its petrifying stare? Nethack not only answers that question (it will), but also implements blindness if you get hit by a pie yourself, causes you to break your code if a vegan character eats one (seriously), and ensures the attack doesn’t count if you’re on a pacifist run (it does no damage, no matter your combat bonus). This level of detail lead to the saying “The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything”. Many versions are now available, from the original ASCII-based game to graphical overhauls like Vulture’s Eye. All are free, as a condition of the distribution licence.

As home computers became more popular over the ’80s, they began to take over—and many of the big names are still with us. Wizardry, for instance, launched in 1981, and the series ran until 2001. It used simple graphics and played out mostly using menus, in a way that most Western RPGs would soon try to move away from. However, its popularity in Japan led to it largely defining what that market thought an RPG was. Later games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest still follow its lead today, albeit with those systems endlessly refined and prettified. The Bard’s Tale followed in its footsteps in 1985, with three games, and returned last year courtesy of a $1.4 million Kickstarter.

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Into the dungeon
Almost all RPGs of this era were fantasy based, though there were a few exceptions like Origin’s car-based Autoduel (1985, based on Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars) and Starflight (1986), which swapped the traditional party for the crew of a spaceship on a quest to explore the universe and find out why the stars of the galaxy are flaring and destroying everything around. (It would later inspire the wonderful Star Control 2, as well as be one of the lynchpins for BioWare’s Mass Effect series.)

This shouldn’t, however, be much of a surprise. Fantasy worlds were easy to both produce and to understand—the difference between a shortsword and a broadsword being easy to parse. They also didn’t require much in the way of story, which was good, because they rarely offered much more than go forth and slay the Bad Dude/retrieve the Golden Whatever/rescue the Generic Princess. That wasn’t their fault, and it wasn’t simply that nobody wanted to tell stories. It was that doing so was difficult.

Most games of this era didn’t have the disk space for text. A 51⁄4 inch floppy disk held around 720KB of data. Its more compact successor, the 3 1⁄2 inch floppy, held about 1.2MB. The more floppy disks a game needed, the more expensive it was to produce. This is why, for example, the first Eye of the Beholder doesn’t have an ending sequence. One was planned, but it would have required an extra disk. The publisher said no. Instead, your reward for getting to the end was a quick burst of text going, more or less, ‘well done you won’ (the Amiga version retained the cinematic, so you can find it on YouTube now if you still feel ripped off ).

Some games found ways around this problem. Wasteland, for instance, released in 1987, came with a printed book that resembled a Choose Your Own Adventure. The idea was that when you reached a critical part, the game told you which paragraph to read. This saved space on the disks for more maps, graphics and other good stuff that RPGs really needed.

Most games got around it by shrugging and not worrying about it at all. Dungeon crawling was what people expected from these games, and dungeon crawling is what they got. 1987’s Dungeon Master, for instance, which offered a huge 3D viewing window on the dungeon (redrawn in chunks, step by step, not a fluid 3D engine), real-time combat, rune-based magic, and seemingly endless maps to explore. To put expectations into context, this was a time when anything 3D was impressive, and a game could make waves by letting you go outside—even when ‘outside’ meant painting the ceiling blue, replacing the dungeon walls with trees, and claiming it was a particularly dense forest.

The trick was still working by 1993’s Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep and Westwood’s Lands of Lore, despite games like The Bard’s Tale long having experimented with ‘dungeons’ that were, say, the streets of a monster infested town, and even the UK TV show Knightmare, which went a couple of seasons inside computer-painted dungeons before ‘upgrading’ to location footage. The general rule was that dungeons could be first person, but overworlds were top down. We craved the day when that would change; when a company like Origin would announce Ultima Overworld to go along with its beloved, dungeon-exploring Underworld brand.

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Dungeons and Dragons
Strangely, despite Dungeon & Dragons’ influence on the genre, the source made few waves at the time. This isn’t because there weren’t official games. Just about anyone who was anyone bid for the licence when owner TSR finally made it available in the mid-’80s, which was ultimately won by a company called Strategic Simulations Inc. This makes some sense. D&D started more as a wargame than a story-rich property, and wargames were what SSI did. Its most prominent attempt at an RPG was called Wizard’s Crown, which focused heavily on combat and character development mechanics. It had also dipped into the genre for the Phantasie series, and with Questron, a game so close to Ultima in design that Ultima’s creator, Richard Garriott, filed a suit against it.

SSI’s later AD&D-based RPGs became known as ‘Gold Box’ games, based on, quite simply, the design of their boxes. Examples include Pool of Radiance and Death Knights of Krynn. They were popular, but rolled out on a production line, featuring top-down worlds, menu-based combat and very similar graphics—despite whether the world was fantasy or, as with Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed, 25th century sci-fi. Still, the series was better received than many of the spin-offs that SSI published, like the side-scrolling Heroes of the Lance and its instant deathtraps. Until Baldur’s Gate came along, the Gold Box series was the defining D&D experience, despite a great many games coming out using its settings over the next ten years.

Of the others, one of the most interesting, though often forgotten, is Westwood Studios’ DragonStrike—a 3D dragon- hunting game that combined fantasy and early graphics technology to let you ride your own beast and take on others in action combat. It was billed as a Dragon Combat Simulator, and there’s no good reason why that didn’t become a genre.

Overall, while these games were popular at the time, they didn’t contribute a vast amount to the growing RPG genre. The source material was much better picked through for ideas, rather than full conversions. Gold Box games were popular, but quickly outstayed their welcome and are now best remembered as a thing of their time, while most others around them are best forgotten.

Ironically, many of the fondest remembered are the ones not from familiar parts of the D&D world (which in games, has tended to be Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk), like the Eastern themed Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse. The big exception is the aforementioned Eye of the Beholder, which cemented future Command & Conquer creator Westwood as a studio to watch.

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The Ultima effect
Easily the most important series of the era was Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott’s Ultima. The first, not including Garriott’s unrelated Akalabeth, came out in 1981, though it was re-coded and re-released five years later. It was an impressive game for the time, offering a top-down mode for exploring the world, a first-person wireframe dungeon crawling mode, and, for no particularly good reason except that he had space left on the disk, an outer space section where you shoot down TIE Fighters to be declared a ‘Space Ace’, and unlock a time machine that allows you to go back and kill the invulnerable villain Mondain before he has a chance to become so. This mixing of genres and throwing in random ‘cool’ stuff for the heck of it wasn’t unique to Ultima—Wizardry quickly developed a taste for merging fantasy and sci-fi—but this was still pretty surprising at the time.

Still, Ultima was simply another popular RPG until Ultima IV. Tabletop RPGs were taking a lot of flak from the moral minority at this point, up to and including being accused of promoting Satanism (magic, demons, all that good stuff ). PC RPGs were no different. Fed up with this, or so the story goes, Garriott decided to make Ultima IV about something unquestionably positive—the quest to become a better person. While there are monsters and dungeons, there’s no big cackling villain. Instead, winning means coming to embody the Eight Virtues of Truth, Honesty, Compassion, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Humility and Valor, to become the Avatar of Virtue; a symbol to look up to. This meant, for instance, not murdering peaceful creatures for their XP, or paying for goods with stolen gold.

This put Ultima on a fascinating path. Each new game not only offered a new engine, often stretching the limits of current PC power, but set about trying to tell a story that mattered. Having explored the Virtues in Ultima IV, Ultima V flips them. You return to Ultima’s world, Britannia, to find it under the control of a tyrant called Blackthorn, who is using the Virtues as weapons of moral absolutism. If you do not compassionately give half your income to charity, then you lose all of it. If you do not correctly support virtue, then you’re a heretic. It’s the Avatar’s job to depose him and the three Shadowlords who have perverted his thinking.

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Ultima VI is arguably the cleverest of the set. This time you’re recalled to find Britannia under siege by an army of demonic looking ‘gargoyles’ who are trying to destroy the Shrines of Virtue. Everyone, including ‘wise’ Lord British (cue hollow laughter from every Ultima player) wants you to sally forth and beat up these monsters. In practice, though, the whole story is an allegory for racism and the importance of communication—the gargoyles revealed to not be an evil species, but one with their own moral codes and sense of honour. Most importantly, they have a valid grudge against both Britannia and the Avatar—the quest in Ultima IV having destroyed their homeworld. The next two games would pick up on the ease with which religion can be subverted, and explore the idea of the ends justifying the means—the Avatar stuck on a world that he ultimately has to sacrifice in order to return home and deal with a bigger threat.

Ultima raised the bar of the types of stories RPGs could tell, and proved they could be about something. It didn’t hurt that, along with this, the series contributed heavily to the growing genre—advancing what was possible with every new game. Ultima VII in particular stood as proof that an RPG could look gorgeous without sacrificing detail, (as long as you could actually run it.) It brought dialogue trees and day/night NPC schedules to the series, and its simulation elements have yet to truly be bettered. Players could shear sheep, spin the wool into yarn and then weave it into cloth. Or combine flour and water to make dough, then cook it to make bread. The series proper sadly ended in shame in 1999, with Ultima IX: Ascension, but Garriott is currently working on what he hopes to be a return to the series’ high points—Shroud of the Avatar, coming out soon.

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Bonus XP
By necessity, I’m skipping over many games here—some famous, some not. By the end of the ’80s, though, we were firmly in an age of innovation, with many obscure games that deserve a quick call-out. Drakkhen, for instance, released in 1989, offered one of the first fully explorable, real-time 3D worlds. It was a simple one, full of deathtraps, random encounters and poorly translated dialogue that made it tough to tell what was actually going on. But it still did it.

Then there was Sierra’s Hero’s Quest, also in 1989, which merged adventure gaming with RPGs to great effect. Unfortunately a licensing issue meant a swift rename to its better known title, Quest for Glory. They’re more on the adventure side, and so I won’t be covering them in any detail, but they have enough RPG in their DNA to still be worth a mention. There was also Worlds of Ultima, which took the Ultima VI engine and used it to create two spin-off games. The first, The Savage Empire, took place in a Doc Savage-style jungle world filled with tribes drawn from various historical periods. The second, Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams, was set on Victorian version of Mars. World of Ultima was going to finish with an Arthurian tale for good measure, had Origin not decided to focus on its core series instead of dabbling in spin-offs.

In short, after the first ten years or so on home PCs, RPGs still had to get over the hump of being complicated, often very hard, and geeky, even by gaming standards, but they’d established themselves as a genre to be reckoned with. All they needed was the technology to turn their worlds from things to imagine into places we could genuinely explore. It was about to arrive. Or so we thought.

Continue to page 2 of our complete history of RPGs where we explore the genre between 1991—1997.

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There’s a reason the ’90s are considered a golden age. Everything seemed possible. Every new game had the potential to be its own thing. Is Ultima Underworld, released in 1992, an evolution of dungeon crawlers like Dungeon Master? Yes, but to call it so is to do it a huge disservice.

Underworld wasn’t about fighting through a dungeon, but experiencing it. You play as Ultima’s Avatar, falsely accused of a crime and thrown into the Stygian Abyss with nothing but the clothes on your back. What you find is a living community with its own characters and histories. Learning to survive is learning to be part of it, trading for supplies and making allies. Creator Blue Sky Studios, later Looking Glass Systems, called it a dungeon simulator, pioneering a new way of exploring RPG spaces that would be refined in its sequel, its spiritual successor System Shock, and virtually ever other RPG.

This was the era where ideas and technology could go hand in hand, or so it felt at the time. In practice, there were obvious limitations—things like AI, the use of sprites, and low-resolutions. The price for Ultima Underworld’s real-time graphics and 3D engine was a viewport that barely took up more than a quarter of the screen. Its sequel boosted that to a third. But that was fine. This was a jaw-dropping achievement. To put it in context, Underworld came out before Wolfenstein 3D—both appearing mid-to-early 1992.

TO INFINITY & BEYOND: 1991—1997
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Bigger, not always better
Despite the potential, PC RPGs went into something of a slump in the early ’90s. A few major franchises were immune to this, particularly Ultima, and developers who were willing to take the plunge and risk everything could still be rewarded for it. Innovation, however, was becoming more and more expensive by the minute. RPGs typically lagged behind other genres in terms of immediate look and feel due to their complexity, and the difficulty of having a great looking game also provide tens of hours worth of entertainment (in many ways this was the flip-side of adventures, which shrank due to the graphics making it too expensive to have much game—particularly with the dawn of FMV). It’s not too surprising that many RPG studios desperately stuck with what had worked, much like many adventure game devs tried to hang on when their own genre began to feel the pinch. LucasArts and Sierra at least tried to evolve, and survived for the decade. Most others fell away, outside of the core German market that generously kept the genre alive no matter how bad many of the games got. (They got very, very bad.)

In RPGs, the key market was the hardcore fan, and they weren’t easy to please. The simplest approach for most companies was to do more or less what they’d been doing and hope to either sell enough copies to allow them to do another, or trim down in the hope of attracting a different audience. Origin’s ShadowCaster for instance, released in 1993, removing almost all the expected RPG elements that existing players would be used to, aiming to sell the experience on its shapeshifting gimmick—the main character being able to turn into creatures like a four-armed cat warrior or a not particularly awe-inspiring dragon. SSI got into this with Al-Qadim, a far more Legend of Zelda-style RPG than its usual fare. The genre was, after all, doing well on other platforms, with the SNES getting both Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, along with two different versions of Shadowrun, compared to the PC’s none.

These stripped down PC RPGs didn’t really work. New players weren’t brought on board, and ‘real’ RPG fans wanted something with more oomph. The market also provided a steady stream of solid but ultimately forgettable D&D games, including a couple of Ravenloft titles—Ravenloft being AD&D’s primary horror setting, full of vampires and other nasties that went bump in the night; the almost unspellable Menzoberranzan, set in the spidery parts of Forgotten Realms; and the post-apocalyptic Dark Sun, which stumbled out of the gate by not being quite finished at release.

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Hunting for treasure
This isn’t to say that there weren’t popular RPGs, or RPGs worth remembering. Sierra’s Betrayal at Krondor was a fun attempt at a heavily narrative driven one. Jagged Alliance 2 combined strategy and RPGs like no other game before or since. Most big names, though, did eventually become watchwords for failure. Even Ultima blotted its copybook with the eighth game, Pagan, by switching to a terrible engine and a tiny world full of frustration. Interplay’s Stonekeep largely nailed the coffin shut on dungeon crawlers, due mostly to taking five years to make and only having a generic-but-pretty game to show for it. By far the biggest failure of the era was Descent To Undermountain, a game that spent years in development, and used an already outdated engine—designed for 3D shooter series Descent—to make an RPG. This went about as well as could be expected. In the end, Interplay just shipped what it had and washed its hands of it. (A couple of years later, its far better game Fallout 2 openly mocked it. One of the lines that could randomly pop out of a Magic 8-Ball, along with the likes of ‘Reply hazy, try again’, was ‘Yes, we KNOW Descent To Undermountain was crap.’)

Despite this, the ’90s produced some amazing RPGs. 1994’s System Shock was Looking Glass attempting to go beyond Underworld by thinking differently. The designers had been unhappy that, for all Underworld’s detail, much of it was artificial—like how conversations pulled you out of the game into a whole other interface. The solution? Kill everyone. That allowed the player to explore the devastated Citadel Station without ever being forced between interfaces, with character interaction replaced by one-way communications between them and SHODAN, the evil AI controlling the station. It was done so well that the absence of people wasn’t felt at all. The only catch was that telling the backstory by means of audio-logs—then a genius idea—is now overdone to the point of South Park: The Stick Of Truth not so much mocking as murdering the entire concept.

Even things that didn’t work out are worth remembering. Just about everyone knows System Shock, but few remember Psygnosis’ Sentient from 1997—a similar idea, only on a living space station full of characters who go about their lives both automatically and based on a complex conversation system that allows you to give orders. It’s janky, it doesn’t always work, and even when it does, it’s not that much fun. But it’s a great demonstration of ’90s ambition in action. So too was Robinson’s Requiem and Deus, from 1994 and 1996. Both are survival games, with the first about surviving on a hostile planet and the second about being a very easily wounded bounty-hunter. Both are notable for their complex medical systems. Get an infected leg? You’d better hope you have the tools you need to sort it, or you’ll swiftly collapse. You might find yourself amputating your own limbs, or having an eye pecked out—spending the rest of the game staring at the side of your nose.

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Victory in the arena
Amusingly, the biggest RPG success story of the ’90s was never meant to be one. Bethesda, then a largely unknown company despite a couple of Terminator and Wayne Gretzy games, was making a relatively simple gladiatorial combat game called Arena in which you’d take a team of fighters around the fantasy world of Tamriel in the hope of making some cash. During development, the ultimate feature creep set in. First a few RPG elements were added to the mix. Then dungeons. Then quests. And then the whole arena combat thing was ditched in favour of it just being a regular, single-character RPG. The title stuck around solely because the marketing materials had already been printed, with the team handwaving it as Tamriel being so dangerous that the whole place was nicknamed ‘the Arena’. To make it sound more of an RPG, they then stuck on the name ‘The Elder Scrolls’.

The Elder Scrolls raised many bars. Visually, it looked fantastic for the time. The map is about six million square kilometres in size, though almost all of it created using procedural generation (of its several hundred dungeons, only around 15 are actually connected to the plot.) It has day and night cycles. It’s got weather systems. Unfortunately, Arena also has more bugs than a lifelong entomologist, and a starting difficulty best described as ‘psychotic’ (Elder Scrolls III designer Ken Rolston admitted to having started it over 20 times and only getting out of the tutorial dungeon once).

And for all of that, it bombed. Bad marketing led to just 3,000 copies sold out of the gate, which co-designer Ted Peterson later commented was less than the sales of his Terminator: 2029 expansion. And Terminator: 2029 was, putting it kindly, garbage. Word of mouth saved the day, and two years later Bethesda released Daggerfall. This one was only the size of Great Britain and no less buggy. While players looking for a deep story were disappointed, nothing had offered anything close to its level of freeform adventuring—with guilds to join, several religions, the ability to create your own magic spells, and become a vampire or werewolf. Plus, it had box art that gave some idea of what the game was about, rather than being fronted by a sword-wielding lady in a poorly fitting bikini.

Later games would radically shrink the size of the worlds to allow for hand- crafted design, at the expense of the freedom and range of options, but we all know how that story ends. Instead of killing Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls series now sells millions of copies, and is one of the most popular RPG franchises ever.

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War. War changes dramatically
Some games land softly. Others land with the force of a nuclear bomb. In the desolate year of 1997, Fallout was definitely one of those. It was the spiritual sequel to Wasteland, though the two were actually quite different takes on the post-apocalyptic world. Wasteland was more comedic and surreal, with Monty Python style killer badgers, as well as more futuristic and developed—the world had ended, but civilisation had largely rebuilt. There was greenery. There was water processing. Your role was that of a Desert Ranger, assigned to keep the radioactive landscape safe from do-badders, and foil evil plots as time permitted. Fallout, meanwhile, used the 1950s as a jumping off point for a far more desolate, less reconstructed world of psychopaths, mutants, drug-dealers and all the other scum that you can imagine rising to the top. Your goal was simple—retrieve a water chip so that your protected Vault could continue hiding from the outside world. For you, hiding was not an option.

Fallout was the most adult, most brutal RPG around at the time, not because other RPGs hadn’t had bad people in them, but because this time it was entirely up to you if you joined them. It’s dark. It’s cynical. It’s also one of the most beautifully designed RPGs around. Create a low-intelligence character, for instance, and all your dialogue is replaced with little more than incoherent grunts. Follow the path it lays out for you and you get a great tour around the world, but it’s so open that if you know what you’re doing, it’s possible to run to the end and just finish it in about ten minutes.

Its Perk and Traits system allowed incredible character creation abilities, with skills ranging from Mysterious Stranger, which would sometimes spawn an ally in combat, to Bloody Mess, guaranteeing that every kill-shot ends as messily as possible. It was funny. It was challenging. It was huge and complex, despite the relatively small map. It was everything that players had been crying out for, with the exception, perhaps, of looking a bit prettier. And, like most of the best RPGs of the decade, it almost got killed. Interplay wanted real-time combat instead of turn-based, and favoured multiplayer action over single-player—a focus based on the runaway success of Blizzard’s Diablo.

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The shadow of Fallout still lingers over the more recent games, which are part of the same universe, but very different in style. Fallout 4 in particular is essentially a shooter strapped to a building game, where conversations inevitably end in bloodshed. This is a far cry from Fallout, a game where you can defeat the final boss by convincing him that his plans for a mutated wasteland simply aren’t going to work. The sequel, Fallout 2, also features one of the most beloved locations in any RPG—the city of New Reno, where RPG design superstar and living Kickstarter stretch goal Chris Avellone first came to people’s attention. New Reno is a gloriously seedy place full of feuding mobsters and opportunities for violence, as well as the memorable chance to have your hero become a porn star (complete with a porn star name, such as ‘Arnold Swollenmember’).

The main problem with Fallout 2, as well as being rushed out and suffering from the buggy RPG problem that afflicted many a ’90s game, ended up being a lesson to everyone. Fallout occasionally enjoyed a naughty pop-culture reference or two, which players appreciated. However, hearing that, and with every designer having their own section, Fallout 2 often feels like nothing but shout-outs to everything from Tom Cruise and Scientology to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It broke much of the sense of place, and proved that yes, you can indeed have too much of a good thing. It’s not that later games would stop making pop culture references—WoW loves its little nods. After Fallout 2, though, most designers just needed to be told ‘remember Fallout 2?’ to know when to tone it down a bit.

As the decade ended, it became clear that they would have the chance. Despite a few franchises riding high throughout, there hadn’t been much to laugh about during the majority of the ’90s. That energy had to be spent on simply staying alive, and keeping the genre going. With Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, though, it finally had the shot in the arm it needed. And in 1998, the tables would turn.

Page 3 of our complete history of RPGs visits the genre between 1998—2002.

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Baldur’s Gate beckoned players in with beautiful graphics, a heavy focus on story, and some of the genre’s most beloved characters. It looked fantastic, thanks to the Infinity Engine’s method of displaying worlds. Huge rendered maps with overlaid sprites allowed for exquisite detail without the predictability of tiles. It wasn’t just D&D reborn, but a new start for the genre. RPGs were finally cool again.

Replayed now, it’s the complexity that jumps out. Baldur’s Gate was based on AD&D Second Edition, and it doesn’t hide the fact. It wants you to know its dice rolls. It wants you to know terms like THAC0 (“To Hit Armour Class Zero,” aka, the likeliness of a hit landing). It often pushes you to areas you’re not ready for. Roll a mage and wander to the first real fight in the game—an ambush at the Friendly Arms Inn—and watch as a single hit lands like an anvil to the face.

It was still an RPG of its time, rooted, for all its attempts to welcome new players, in the designs of the past. It was BioWare’s first RPG, and the company hadn’t even formed with a plan to make them. The founders had intended to start a medical software company, before deciding games would be more fun. Previous releases were mech game Shattered Steel and comedy shooter MDK 2. Even Interplay, the publisher, had only moderate hopes for Baldur’s Gate. Two million copies later, BioWare was the new cool kid in town.

THE AGE OF INFINITY: 1998—2002
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Experiencing Infinity
Unusually, while Baldur’s Gate struck a chord with players and became a huge hit, it was its engine, Infinity, that players came to love. When Obsidian ran its Kickstarter for Pillars of Eternity, it wasn’t the prospect of a game like Baldur’s Gate that excited people, but an updated Infinity Engine.

Exactly why Infinity became so famous is a bit of a mystery. There were only five games that used it—Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale 2 and Planescape: Torment. The likely answer is that, because both BioWare and Interplay development group Black Isle Studios were using the engine for different projects (BioWare on Baldur’s Gate, Black Isle on the others), it was easier to identify the games by what unified them—the things that ensured everyone knew exactly what subset of RPGs was being discussed. Sprites over renders, pausable real-time combat, and so on.

Baldur’s Gate was the traditional RPG of the set, with the sequel going even further to try to give the experience of playing the pen-and-paper game in all its glory. Both games responded to your character, alignment determining who would stick to your party and who would walk off in a morally upright huff. Both also offered lots of exploring, whole areas dedicated to optional side-quests. Baldur’s Gate 2 cranked it higher still, with vast amounts of dialogue, inter-party chat, a second act that was like seven full AD&D modules glued together, optional romances, and more. The plot was better, and hugely helped by bringing in voice talent such as David Warner as the villain, Irenicus. The writing was funnier and sharper. Instead of a million NPCs willing to join the party, most of them forgettable, it trimmed the cast down to just the team’s favourites.

At the same time, Baldur’s Gate 2 didn’t sit on its laurels. It took some dramatic risks, including setting much of the action in a city where casting magic is against the law. This might not sound like much, but compare it to later games like, hypothetically, BioWare’s own Dragon Age 2. Few mainstream RPGs have the guts enforce a rule that makes one of the most popular classes that hard to play: casting a spell in public summoning a Cowled Wizard to demand an apology or justice. Baldur’s Gate 2 did, forcing mages to keep the magic to a minimum until they can either afford a licence, or become bad-ass enough to smack down the Cowled Wizards and convince them that you’re out of their league. It’s a shame too, because reaching that point of untouchability really is a wonderful feeling, versus simply being told not to use magic and having every guard you pass turn a blind eye to your firestorms in the name of game balance.

Away from Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and its sequel offered a different spin on adventure. While they still had a story, quests and so on, their focus was tactical combat. You had a whole team from the very start, and had to use them wisely. Between you and the final boss was a gauntlet of fights. The focus was on managing your team’s firepower and tactics, rather than worrying about who liked who (or even who might be up for a tersely written sex scene.) They’re easily the most Marmite of the Infinity Engine games, but developed a huge following of their own.

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The nature of a man
Finally, there was Planescape: Torment. No introduction should be necessary. Despite what is often claimed, it wasn’t a flop. It wasn’t a hit either, though, which, along with the desire of the current owners of AD&D to move away from the Planescape setting as a whole, was enough to guarantee we’d never see a sequel. At least, not an official one. Thanks to Kickstarter some of the original team is working on a spiritual follow-up called Torment: Tides of Numenera that’s due out in 2017.

Torment is the story of The Nameless One, an amnesiac immortal who has lived innumerable lives—some good, some bad, and one judged so terrible that even eternity is insufficient time to atone for his crimes. Along with a team of equally broken damned souls, including sarcastic skull Morte, a suit of armour animated by the spirit of justice, a chaste succubus who runs a brothel devoted to intellectual lust, and a man who is literally a doorway to a plane of fire, he has to find out the secret of his immortality before an unseen enemy finally destroys all the clues leading to the truth.

Torment is easily one of the best written games ever made, and a personal favourite. It’s dark, it’s funny, it’s philosophical, and every line is as smooth as a master barber’s razor. Not only is The Nameless One’s story far more fascinating than any plot with the word ‘amnesia’ in it has any right to be, but the world of Planescape is unlike anything games had ever tried. It’s a place where belief has power, with a central city, Sigil, full of doors to every conceivable world. If you’re lucky, you find the one you want. If you’re unlucky, you can simply cross a threshold and end up in Hell. Or worse.

One section in particular stands out as an absolute masterpiece of RPG design. The Nameless One begins the game as a fighter, but as he’s been the pinnacle of literally every class in existence at some point over his tortured life, it’s not hard to swap to another class if you can find a trainer to jog his memories. For mage, that’s the village witch, Mebbeth. Before Mebbeth will teach him anything, she has a few odd-jobs down at the village. One is to fetch a herb which nobody has seen before, forcing him to will the seed into growth. Another is to get some rags, starched so often as to be useless. A third trip, at this point ignoring his and the player’s irritation, requires him to go get some ink. All fairly standard fetch-quest stuff, with a little Planescape weirdness seemingly thrown in for flavour.

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In this case, though, it’s not. As the quest ends, Mebbeth essentially sits back and asks “So, what have you learned so far?” And if The Nameless One is smart enough, he realises—that in those quests he’s been shown how belief works in the Planes and how to shape it to his will, the futility of ritual without reason, and finally that no matter how much a person knows, there is always something to learn. Magic has never been taught with such a practical focus; your first step not being to decide what kind of magic missile you want, but how to better see the universe.

The whole game is written with this level of love and detail. The Nameless One can be a force of great good to the Planes, or true evil. You can heal your friends’ broken souls, or sell them into slavery. You can use and abuse your immortality as you see fit, to get through a lethal tomb, or to manipulate a preacher into killing himself by offering to go first, respawning, and declaring “Your turn.” The journey goes from the filthy streets of Sigil down to the abyssal planes, where the only half-friendly life is a pillar of the skulls of wise men whose advice sent others to their doom. Throughout it all, it’s not a big villain that truly defines the story, but a simple question: “What can change the nature of a man?” It’s a question Torment poses, but you have to answer.

The main complaints about Planescape: Torment at the time look amusingly trivial in retrospect. The combat isn’t great, and there’s never any tension because you can almost always respawn, wade back into battle, and win through sheer force of attrition. There aren’t many companions compared to other Infinity Engine games—just seven, with two of those being secrets. It’s not a difficult game either, happily exchanging raw challenge for rewarding exploration and telling its story. If that sounds familiar, it should. It would become the model for most of the next generation of games, even after the Infinity Engine became just a fondly remembered bit of gaming history.

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Echoes of infinity
While there were only five games based on Infinity, its legacy lasted a little longer. BioWare’s next engine, Aurora, was largely about bringing the experience into 3D. Its big debut was in Neverwinter Nights, which combined a pretty dreadful campaign with tools that players could use to create their own single- or multiplayer 3D adventures from scratch. These systems were fairly complex, but the audience soon rose to the challenge with everything from the comedic Sex And The Single Adventuress and the detective-focused Maugeter, to persistent online servers for full MMOs.

Already though, BioWare was tiring of the limitations of the top-down, old-school RPG, and looking for the next step. Aurora really only saw use in Neverwinter Nights, its sequel (made by Obsidian), and, out of seemingly nowhere, (though a heavily reworked version of the engine), the first of the Witcher games. Black Isle, meanwhile, didn’t survive the Infinity era. Its final published—though not developed—game was a mix of magic and the Crusades called Lionheart, which started reasonably well but quickly puttered out into a disappointing mess. After that, it was intended to go on to a new game, Torn, as well as sequels to both Fallout and Baldur’s Gate—Van Buren and The Black Hound respectively.

The Black Hound was going to be the start of a whole new series rather than a continuation of the previous games’ story, with the tagline “You cannot kill guilt”. It would have seen a new hero bound to its essence and growing stronger through dark actions, using a new engine called Jefferson. Why not Infinity? Because as popular as it is with fans, everyone who’s used it agrees that, under the hood, it’s a mess. Much like BioWare’s Aurora, Jefferson was going to be the same basic idea, but in 3D.

Financial problems at Interplay led to the entire team being unceremoniously booted to the kerb. Interplay would later try one of the more desperate crowdfunding campaigns, asking fans to contribute to the rebirth of Black Isle to create an online Fallout game—something allowed even after selling the main licence to Bethesda. Its only goal, however, was to fund a tech demo to try to attract investors, and none of the actual Black Isle staff from the company’s glory days were involved. As expected (and deserved), it failed miserably and with much mockery.

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Beyond infinite
Despite its importance to RPG history, Infinity’s reign as both an engine and a style of game didn’t last very long. Fast forward to now, however, and it lives on. As noted, Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity tries to replicate it using modern technology. Former BioWare member Trent Oster, however, is still using the creaky old thing directly, originally in the form of Enhanced Editions of Baldur’s Gate 1, 2 and Icewind Dale, and then in the form of a brand new adventure called Siege of Dragonspear, which takes place between the two Baldur’s Gate games. Dragonspear had a mixed response, for both good reasons and a few honestly very silly ones, but was a decent enough interquel on its own merits. It remains to be seen if the company will ever embark on the full Baldur’s Gate 3 project that it’s long talked of doing. If it does though, it’ll be an original story rather than The Black Hound.

As for the rest of the industry, with the exception of a few indies, time has very much moved on. Since Baldur’s Gate, RPGs have gone from a struggling genre to the home of some of the best AAA releases in the world, and a genre that it’s cool to play... even if the transition to the mainstream has robbed it of much of what made it popular in the first place.

Our complete history of RPGs concludes overleaf by exploring the genre from 2003 onward.

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Something I’ve yet to mention is the role of console RPGs. The reason is, as far as the PC was concerned, they weren’t as popular or influential. JRPGs such as Final Fantasy 7 changed the game for consoles. But its PC version, released in 1998, was one of the worst produced ports most players had seen. Final Fantasy 8 didn’t do much better.

One of the few games that really embraced the console style was Tom Hall’s Anachronox, made by Ion Storm, which mixed Japanese RPG design with cool, imaginative science fiction to fine, if somewhat janky, effect. It was about the last real game to try to do so.

This all changed with the Xbox, the first truly successful Western console. Being a Microsoft product, it had a relationship with the PC, and afforded a chance for Western RPG developers to break away. The PC was struggling mightily at the time, to the point that many predicted it would burn out as a system.

Many developers spat out cut-down, simplified, and ultimately much hated versions of their games for this new market. Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004, and no relation to Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel—a more successful attempt to focus on Fallout’s strategic combat back in 2001) threw out all of the intelligence in favour of storming around with guns. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance was another action heavy game, sharing little with its source.

THE RISE & RISE OF RPGs: 2003—PRESENT
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Knights of the new order
Enter BioWare once again, with Knights of the Old Republic. Unlike Baldur’s Gate, this was a full 3D experience, capable of conveying the awe-inspiring flashes and clashes of lightsaber combat, while still being a ‘proper’ RPG. In fact, it was a bit too much of one, still using and pushing its D&D systems, THAC0s and dice rolls into the foreground, even while pretending to have moved on from such things. It didn’t matter. This was the Star Wars epic the world had been waiting for, the perfect antidote to the disappointing movies, and an amazing sci-fi adventure unlike anything we’d ever seen before.

If there was any doubt that BioWare was now king of the genre, KotOR obliterated it. Its best characters became as loved as any in the franchise, particularly snarky assassin droid HK-47, while the spaceship Ebon Hawk quickly reached Millennium Falcon levels of popularity. The story acted as a Greatest Hits of Star Wars, delivering trips to Tattooine and the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk, fights with evil Sith Lords and bounty hunters, the chance to be as good or evil as you pleased, and planets being blown up in failed attempts to destroy your team. It even had a twist almost worthy of “Luke, I am your father,” based on the reveal of who your amnesiac main character actually was.

BioWare used this success as a springboard. Aside from an early stumble with its first attempt to create its own world, 2005’s Chinese-themed Jade Empire—a solid game, but one that didn’t catch the market as well—it created two of the biggest RPG series around. Mass Effect paired RPG-style action with third-person shooting, while Dragon Age began as an attempt to go back to BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate roots, but soon, after the more traditional first game Origins, became another action-RPG hybrid. With the two of them, the company had a firm grip on both sci-fi and fantasy, and the cash to make them as polished as any other game.

BioWare also repeatedly fought for the industry over the right to include controversial content, including sex scenes in the first Mass Effect. These days it seems strange that there could be such a major, mainstream media controversy over such tame cinematics, but it needs to be put into context. It wasn’t long after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had whipped up a storm over the ‘Hot Coffee’ scandal (where players found evidence of clothed sex scenes that had been cut from the game but left on the disc). Many a pundit or worse—for instance, angry anti-gaming activist lawyer Jack Thompson—were still sniffing around, eager for blood. Fox News, for one, castigated Mass Effect’s sex scenes—which consisted of nothing more graphic than a glimpse of an alien’s blue bottom—describing them as “Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas”.

Needless to say, the expert brought onto the panel hadn’t actually seen these game scenes and was going purely on what she’d been told before coming onto the show, ultimately describing it as “a bit of a joke”. Still, the pressure on BioWare was real, and in weathering that storm, the rest of the industry was able to push the boundaries—even if the Mass Effect crew did spend the rest of the series taking showers in their bras and pants. More recently, BioWare has committed to broadening the diversity of its casts, implementing bisexual characters in the first two Dragon Age games, and one of gaming’s few transsexual characters in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

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The RPG grows up
BioWare hasn’t had the entire decade to itself of course. The 2000s saw Bethesda go from strength to strength with its open-world Elder Scrolls games, selling millions upon millions of copies of Morrowind, Skyrim and Oblivion to players looking for more of a freeform experience. It would also add a string to its bow by picking up the Fallout licence—along with a tangled knot of assorted legal issues—and restart the series with Fallout 3 in 2008. Much like BioWare, having a leg in both science fiction and fantasy hasn’t hurt, even if the best of the new Fallout games remains New Vegas, developed under contract by Obsidian Entertainment.

Many other companies started the new decade by going out of business. Origin’s final chapter of the Ultima series, Ascension, took over from Descent To Undermountain as the new Duke Nukem Forever of the RPG genre, only worse, because millions of players actually cared about Origin. Ascension crawled out of development hell in a barely functional and not remotely enjoyable state, ending the once proud Ultima series with a flatulent note of despair. Other companies, like Interplay, which should have been in a position to enjoy the genre’s resurgence, were too far into the red. On the plus side, many of the individual people involved were able to escape and form new companies. The Fallout team, for instance, recoalesced as Troika Games, while other Black Isle employees formed Obsidian Entertainment and survived by focusing on contract work rather than creating self-owned properties.

This was a tricky time for RPGs. Baldur’s Gate had become a huge success by going back to the genre’s roots, but at the same time, players were expecting the next big thing. On PC, that was Deus Ex, which combined RPG and FPS in ways that should need no explanation here. Even then, it was easy to slip up, as was seen with Deus Ex’s own sequel, Invisible War. A big problem was that, while consoles offered a whole new audience, the gulf between Xbox and PC in terms of power was ridiculous, forcing any game that went for both to play to the lowest common denominator. In the case of Invisible War, that meant going from levels that modelled the whole of Liberty Island in New York, to levels that are literally ten seconds between load screens. The controller was also no match for a PC’s keyboard and mouse, making it impossible to carry many of its best experiences across.

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The consequence was that developing for both was a gamble, but so was focusing on the PC and ignoring the wider market. Troika quickly became the most high-profile casualty of this. Its first game tried to fuse what players loved about Fallout with fantasy, in a new Victorian-style world where magic and technology coexisted. Unfortunately they called it Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura, a title so relentlessly geeky that players reported their virginity growing back just from hearing it. It was a popular game with those who played it, though not a megahit by 2000s standards. Next, the company tried going back further to the genre’s roots with a conversion and upgrade of the classic AD&D module The Temple of Elemental Evil. Unfortunately, its adherence to the mechanics wasn’t enough to compensate for the lack of things like a plot, or how old-fashioned it felt. (For starters, the game’s village is called Hommlet. Not Gary Gygax’s most inventive moment.)

Finally, the company released one of the 2000s’ most beloved and poorest selling games, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines—the second attempt to bring the World of Darkness universe to the PC. Best summed up as “Deus Ex, but with vampires”, it bombed at release, and Troika didn’t survive it. Players kept it alive through word of mouth and fan patches, and it’s still being updated and praised today as one of the few adults-only RPGs that earned its place through dark atmosphere and intelligence. It wasn’t that it avoided the sexy vampire trope, but that its vampires were designed and written to be more than just that—pieces in a game that, among other things, punished you for trying to do the right thing by inadvertently condemning an innocent college girl to be your mindless thrall, dealing with the broken personalities of an abusive family, exploring a crazed mental asylum, and, in its most famous level, exploring a haunted house that’s strangely effective at creating scares—despite the fact that you are a powerful vampire yourself.

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Wake the white wolf
If one company really came into its own through all these challenges, it’s CD Projekt Red, with the Witcher series. The Witcher is a hugely successful series of books in its native Poland—and around Europe as a whole—but was little known when an obscure development company bought a licence to BioWare’s Aurora engine and tried to bring the stories to the world.

Skipping ahead, The Witcher 3 is an amazing experience. It’s a glorious-looking world. The writing is touching, detailed, nuanced, with varied characters. It’s one of the best games ever made, never mind one of the best RPGs—cementing creators CD Projekt Red as being on the absolute top-tier of modern development, even above BioWare in most estimations. However, at least part of what makes it so impressive is having seen the stumbles and triumphs on the way to making it happen.

The first Witcher game, for instance, was so poorly translated as to be nonsensical, requiring a whole Enhanced Edition to come vaguely up to standard. It also featured some deeply unpopular game mechanics, such as representing hero Geralt’s many trysts as collectible cards—as if the ladies in his life were nothing but Pokémon to be captured and catalogued. Or, less socially relevant but just as annoying, having to collect increasingly expensive books in order to take on quests that Geralt should have been more than capable of doing on his own with just his sword.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, meanwhile, was proof that, more than any other company in recent memory, CD Projekt had read every single complaint about the first game and fixed it, and had the ambition to take the series further than anyone could have expected. Of its three acts, there are two variants of Act 2 that take Geralt to opposite sides of the game’s central war. It still had sex scenes, but here they’re choreographed affairs designed to say something about the characters involved—parts of the story that contribute to, rather than distract from, the experience.

Looking back, the first two games are less The Witcher 3’s predecessors as its betas—the games CD Projekt had to make first to be able to create the Witcher experience it had dreamed of so long ago. At the moment, it looks like there won’t be another simply because the company has done what it set out to do all those years ago. Now it’s working on Cyberpunk 2077—an RPG that’s been in development for years now, and is likely still a couple more away.

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Diamonds in the rough
The Witcher’s path to greatness isn’t unique to CD Projekt. As we approach ‘now’, it’s worth highlighting a few of the other games that have slowly but surely become legendary over the last decade. Larian’s Divinity series, for instance. It began in 2002 with Divine Divinity (the publisher’s choice of name, the developer is quick to explain). It was popular, but still best described as a company attempting to make Ultima 7 without first having made Ultimas 1-6. The series was constantly besieged by two factors. Financial issues on the outside led to the third game, Divinity 2, being a “release it now or lose the company” affair. (To its credit, Larian later tried to fix up the mess created by such a rushed release.)

But also, Larian had a tendency to let the cool, big ideas overshadow the foundations needed for a good RPG. Let’s make the player character psychic! Let’s have the player turn into a dragon! In the case of the strategy-focused Divinity: Dragon Commander, let’s have the player be a dragon wearing a jetpack! You know? That kind of thing. With the Kickstarted Divinity: Original Sin, however, the company finally found its footing, and created one of the best new RPGs in years. It was an instant classic, which earned everyone involved the credit they deserved, and led to the even more ambitious but equally grounded sequel, Divinity: Original Sin 2, currently in Early Access over on Steam.

Many others have also found new life thanks to Kickstarter, both games that have found their due and those that deserved better. The Bard’s Tale. Wasteland. The Infinity Engine, through Pillars of Eternity. Planescape: Torment, through Torment: Tides of Numenera. Shadowrun. Shenmue. Underworld. System Shock. Pathologic. Outcast. The list goes on, and is mostly filled with titles that did something so amazing that nothing else has come close in five, ten, sometimes even twenty years. It’s not just the hunger for something familiar that’s driven it, though. This isn’t simply a plea to nostalgia. It’s a combining of genuine classics with top quality developers—teams that do enough justice to the original idea that they stand up against any game you could possibly want.

Their original stories may now be over, and the quests long since complete. But these are legends that live on. May they do so forever.
 

hellbent

Augur
Joined
Aug 17, 2008
Messages
322
THE RISE & RISE OF RPGs: 2003—PRESENT

Hmmm, that's quite a span, and no mention of "Decline" in the title. Yet they discussed the death of Interplay / Troika, then skip ahead to Witcher 3, with the usual congratulatory praise for Bethesda and BioWare games released in that span.
 

Paul_cz

Arcane
Joined
Jan 26, 2014
Messages
1,996
Eh, I've read worse overviews of a genre. But Gothic not even getting a mention is reaaally lame on their part.
 

McPlusle

Savant
Joined
May 11, 2017
Messages
319
Reminder that at one point PC Gamer called fucking Dark Souls the greatest RPG of all time.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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Messages
5,623
2003-Present = Bethesda, BioWare and CD Projekt RED.

Reminds me of the football "fans" who only know of Real Madrid and Barcelona.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
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Messages
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:love:
Although this screenshot is from Chaos Strikes Back, and the article mentions both Dungeon Master and Dungeon Master II but not Chaos Strikes Back. :rpgcodex:
 

pippin

Guest
CDPR only rose to prominence with The Witcher 3, though. 2 was big, but not *that* big. 1 is practically forgotten by everyone and people often talk about it as Bethesda FO fans talk about FO.
 
Joined
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Messages
180
Location
CT USA
I wasn't thrilled with the bookazine but its not awful. Just.. not good. Kind of like Alien Covenant really. Not recommended but not weaponized ass either.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
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Messages
27,087
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Read Cobbett's article until he got to the floppy disks.

How can PC Gamer keep making such simple and stupid mistakes?

And why did the article up 'till that point sound like he was just paraphrasing felipepepe in his CRPG book?

The accusation that PC Gamer is ripping off others in gaming media only grows stronger.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
Patron
Joined
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Messages
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Terra da Garoa
Richard Cobbett knows his RPGs, I blame it on the editors. More specifically, on Phil Savage. He writes A LOT of really dumb shit, like "Fallout 4 is Bethesda's best story", "Baldur's Gate is a chore to play" and "Monkey Island 2 is too hard".

He's the editor of the RPG magazine. He's likely the guy who went "Hey Cobbett, cut some of those shitty old RPGs, we need to fit in my 4-page article on why Deus Ex: IW is actually good."

Guy is so egocentric there's TWO pictures of him - full body - in the magazine. You buy a magazine on RPG history and see more of his fat ass than about Wizardry, Might & Magic, Gothic, etc...
 
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Sceptic

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 2, 2010
Messages
10,871
Divinity: Original Sin
Scorpia did one in 1991, quite funny to read:
Is like 16 pages long, worth a read.
She did an update in 1993 I think, in that special issue that dedicated a good chunk to CRPGs (including a glowing review for BaK). I think it's the issue with Shadowcaster on the cover because that was previewed too (CGW always had the cover based on one of the "sneak previews"). I still have the issue somewhere, it's one of those that I reread the most over the years, Scorpia's "magic scrolls of CRPGs" (I think it was called that) was a great reference for remembering where a particular game was reviewed.

I might post both versions of the survey when I get home tonight.
 

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