Ok, I am going to buck the trend and actually stay optimistic. Some years ago, in the middle of the decline, I thought that things would become better in the future based on looking at other entertainment media. Whether you look at literature, movies or television, the same general model repeats itself: a mainstream market that produces terrible dumbed down shit and dominates in terms of numbers and profits, and then healthy niche markets, some of which are aimed at more sophisticated tastes. I still don't see any reason why video games will not turn out that same way. The problem was that in early 2000s, everything changed up, huge new target audiences appeared (console gamers, casuals) and all the companies felt compelled to chase after them, often to their own detriment. But now, things have settled down somewhat, and you have your mainstream (the EAs, Ubisofts, Activisions, etc) producing yearly shit for the masses, and that market is very saturated and competitive. On the other hand, the niche markets such hardcore RPGs are underserved. At some point this might lead certain companies (small and medium sized especially) to target it and choose to become a large fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in the sea.
Some other things that will help that trend along (servicing niche markets) are things like Kickstarter, Steam Greenlight/Early Acess, and cheaper, more wide available and more powerful third party tools. The last one is particularly important, in my opinion, as most of the cost of making these games comes from having to do unnecessary work (build your own engine, produce your own art assets, etc). Sure, every once in a while someone will do really nice things with engine, but for most companies its a huge resource sink without providing any tangible benefits. If they could use an out of the box engine with tons of customizable functionality, this would be huge in terms of driving down costs and making RPG development feasible for smaller companies and even individuals. And then you get to even more advanced stuff down the road, like perhaps procedural voice generation for dialogue, procedural art, and so on.
So because of these things, I do think we may have gotten over the worst of the decline, and will see more interesting games in the future, whether from smaller development teams like Obsidian or Warhorse, or even individual developers. But on the other hand, to me the future of cRPGs does not lie in the past either. Games like Divinity: Original Sin, Wasteland 2, PoE, Torment capitalized on people's longing for old school gameplay, but in the future, I expect the RPGs to be more innovative and try to break new ground. I don't want another Fallout 1 or Planescape: Torment or Gothic 2, I want games that are as much a step forward from those as those were from the games before them. And I think we will see cRPGs (and games in general) capitalizing more on the full potential of the medium, going more procedural to present complex simulations where C&C doesn't mean choosing among 3 developer created choices, but twiddling with any of the myriad of aspects of the simulation and having it organically affect the rest of the game. Or developing completely new in-game systems to replace age-old conventions. There are a lot of things developers can do, a lot of innovations they can make as long as passionate people can get their hands on tools cheap enough to allow them to implement their vision.
