There were never really a massive number of really good CRPG's, it always seemed like a genre that needed improved technology to be what it should be. Hah, and look at where we are, we got less, not more. I remember thinking yeah, wouldn't it be great if you could actually blow up walls for alternate routes, even demolish buildings on top of people? Or how about building your own evil wizard's tower and doing the routine, gather power, minions, do some cliche villain stuff? Wouldn't it be cool to have massively complex puzzles about space and time where you do weird stuff with physics? I suppose a lot of what I want to see could have been done even then, so by my logic we should now see pretty awesome things.
But hell, the vast gulf between what could be done and what they actually go with has just increased with the massively improved technology. Just look at the popular franchises of the era :
We have Mass Effect, a heavily story-based popamole shooter game where all you do is play minigames and shoot people. You don't even get to actually fly a spaceship, just some stupid deathtrap car. What the hell? Where's all the cool sci-fi stuff? Why can't you do anything in this game? It would matter dick all if it would be set in the WW2 for all you get to do. It would probably be better that way, at least you'd get nazis instead of ancient evil robots. Seriously, they get to make a new setting and story and that's what they're going with. Ancient evil. No interesting reason why the robots do what they do, instead they go with stupid. And this is the developer who everybody praises for their writing! Why? This is so boring!
I won't go to any length about DA, I wasn't interested at all with what they were going for, just boring standard fantasy with ancient evil, singleplayer wow mechanics and the chosen one. What can you say about Bioware except that they are a fucking boring b-developer house? How the hell can anyone have so little imagination, or maybe balls?
So we have Oblivion, a hiking simulator which is probably the most boring game idea ever conceived. Enough has been said about that one as well, a game where the cool stuff you can do amounts to pushing corpses in weird positions. Since Fallout 3 is the same game but with guns it's not necessary to talk about it.
Oh then there's Obsidian. So you get to make a spy rpg. Cool, sounds a lot like driving fast cars with missile launchers behind the driving lights, using weird gadgets in creative ways, going about investigating, finding clues, paths, that sort of thing. Yeah right, sounds like popamole and minigames. Fuck you Obsidian, it is no wonder you're known as Bioware the lesser.
Then there's Twitcher series which is solely about QTE combat and running, also fun spacebar mashing minigames in the second installment. Why do I get a feeling that CRPG's of the era are in fact the dumbest, least varied and most primitive games of all?
And the future looks no better. Absolutely no improvement in anything except graphics, and even that is debatable.
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