Around the turn of the millennium, there were two RPG revolutions.
You had the BIS/Troika revolution, stressing all the stuff you mention above, but especially one more thing: fucking role playing mechanics. Your build mattered to MUCH more than combat—it affected everything from dialogue to environmental interactions. You had a lot of C&C both in terms of narrative AND gameplay. This was my RPG revolution and I would gladly die on the barricades for it.
But before the vanguard of the role playing revolution could catch its breath, the counterrevolution struck its first blow. The release of Baldur’s Gate was the 18th Brumaire of BioWare. And BioWare wanted to revolutionize the genre in a different direction. Rather than giving you deep role playing mechanics, they paired RTwP D&D combat with a heavy focus on storytelling. Increasingly over the years, their emphasis shifted toward character interactions, especially with companions. But the only real mechanic here was a “loves me/loves me not” meter that gauged your dialogue choices—choices that were almost never dependent on your character build. Over time, BioWare moved further and further in this direction. To the extent you had choice and consequence it was purely based on a binary morality system.
You end up with KOTOR and Jade Empire and finally Mass Effect. Good looking console games driven by increasingly cinematic storytelling and some narrative C&C that mostly related to your companions. By ME2 your super simplistic build gives you a choice of a few special powers in combat. I don’t mean to shit on Old BioWare too much: BG series was good with plenty of old school sensibility (but little of the Troika/BIS Renaissance). KOTOR was worth playing for storyfags. DA:O was a throwback and had a lot going for it—they even made a real effort to built in some Troika style reactivity with different builds have quite different narrative and gameplay consequences. The best neo BioWare game by far, but still inferior to its influences. Still, the mass audience loved DA:O for the companion interactions, especially romances, so they doubled down on that stuff again going forward.
The BIS/Troika roleplaying revolution went in a different direction, emphasizing both stat and narrative related reactivity. No matter your build in a BioWare game, you will fight your way through everything. But in, say, VtMB: Bloodlines, different builds from different clans give you a vastly different experience, both in terms of story and gameplay. There is nothing like a Nosferatu or a Malkavian playthrough in a BioWare game.
Don’t even get me started on Arcanum. For all of its flaws, no one even tries to match Arcanum’s levels of choice, insane build variety or reactivity.
And that’s the problem. The BioWare counterrevolution won commercially, so Troika went under and even Obsidian, the heirs of Black Isle, began to embrace more of BioWare’s design philosophy.
As for Bethesda,
Sacred82 is right that they haven’t even attempted to make an RPG since Morrowind. Not that latter TES or BGS Fallouts are decent action games, but looking back they were the first ones to realize that an open world with shitty action gameplay and RPG style character progression would sell like crazy. Still, Skyrim or Fallout 4 have more in common with Red Dead Redemption 2 or the newer Far Cry games than CRPGs.
tl;dr the old school “figure it out yourself” attitude predates the late ‘90s CRPG revolution and the best we can hope for here are games that let you disable quest makers because casuals love that shit too much to part with it. But the Troika/BIS specific stuff has been making a comeback, even if few of the Kickstarter throwbacks have managed to execute it well. This is why I will remain hyped for The Outer Worlds, FPS-RPG though it may be. TOW will allow you to role play rather than just LARPing and that’s huge.
If we’re going to have so many action games with RPG elements, they might as well integrate the best of those elements, not just boring character progression systems and lots of dialogue.
