The Hero with a Thousand Faces is certainly an important, even fundamental feature players expect to experience in games.
It is one of the fundamental archetypal expressions of meaningful existence - evolutionary and biologically strongly imprinted into males of the species, although its not limited only to males. There is nothing "romantic" about it.
As every Bucko should know these days.
But its possible to introduce such feature badly, superficially and lousily, as we can witness in a lot of games. That causes rejection, not exactly against the core idea although it may look like that expressed by less inteligent, but against it being done badly, superficially and lousily.
Not in the least because cRPG games are creations in which all the important parts depend on and are influenced by other critically important parts.
So getting one feature right isnt enough. The novelty is extremely important feature in human psychology in general. We all get fed up with repetition of anything and emotionally positively react to any kind of novelty.
This is also a biological and evolutionary feature physically chiseled into us.
But because cRPG games are complex creations with several critically important and interconnecting features - the novelty of settings and stories cannot be the whole answer.
Especially if that novelty works against the fundamental idea of archetypal human meaningful behavior and tries to undermine it or make it irrelevant. And especially if the novelty is lacking in improvements of quality.
Novelty without quality is a vacuous superficial thing that only serves to trick people in short term.
Compare how you would feel and what you would prefer if you would chose between something that has superficial novelty, and something that is a novelty but also contains quality and various improvements.
Whatever that thing was.
Thats why its critically important to innovate (but innovate with the aim of improvements of quality) in all of these features, especially the gameplay mechanics.
The games i consider such innovators and examples of proper evolution of the genre were Fallouts, Planescape Torment and MotB.
Because in those cases the gameplay mechanics affected the story and the narrative (quests and their C&C) that the player creates by playing, while the choices in the story and the quests narrative affected the gameplay mechanics. Thus the full integration of of these critical features were achieved - in ways that were innovative and improvements in general.
None of those games did it perfectly, but they did it good enough to clearly point out thats the correct path to take and improve on.
In more recent times only games like AoD and DoS provided some kind of true innovation, (I haven't played Underrail or few others that could be noted here) although in case of DoS it was limited to mechanics - which caused a lot of criticism for its story, setting and the playing narrative, which were of the superficial and lousily implemented "heroic" variety. DoS2 then went the opposite way, trying to improve the story and narrative but devolved the mechanics, or kept them the same in some cases.
AoD went down the path of reducing the "Hero" archetype in its story, setting and the lore - but not in the gameplay itself, because me or my character are still the protagonist and effective instigator of changes in the world.
And, wouldn't you know it, it got a lot of criticisms because of sense of reduced agency of the player. Conflated and probably enhanced by pushing hard skill checks too far.
I believe the right path to take is the one between these two extremes of presenting the hero archetype lousily and superficially (including any superficial "irony" or sarcasm) and trying to exterminate it.
I know how to do it too, but im gonna keep that for myself. I don't think my way would be the only way either.
Even in action RPGs which lower limits of character abilities in favor of player skills the best ones are those where the player cannot directly override the character he is playing with.
Which is why Witcher 3 is considered a good game. The player cannot override Geralt character and just go Axi raping around. While Geralt presents a quality type of archetypal hero - by not being a superficial lousy kind.
You can go killing every NPC in the world, but thats an irrelevant, nonsensical and superficial gamey option which immediately destroys the whole story and the entire game.
Keeping the character strongly defined, but not distorted into superficial nonsensical and one dimensional hero, is what also allows the morality themes to be complex rather then liquefied into meaningless ambiguity.
In turn, such approach to morality issues and themes allows the character to remain strongly defined. The Wild Hunt excels at providing several narrative opportunities where you can experience exactly what a Witcher is supposed to be and how one as Geralt is supposed to behave. It doesn't keep that level of quality across all quests and sub quests, of course, but there are several high points one can point at and say: this, this is the spice.
Developers misunderstand this as turning the player on some kind of demigod chosen one on a Tolkien copy setting,
Superficial, lousy and distorted copy.
To conclude, - the fundamental feature of cRPG games are the limits on the gameplay options imposed through various character abilities that the player must shape and evolve to succeed, but cannot directly override.
This fundamental core feature enables emergence of all other features of cRPGs - including the story, the narratives, and C&C. This creates the specific RPG type of gameplay where the player controls the strategic and meta options - while he cannot directly override limits imposed through character abilities on the immediate in-game options.
If the best stories told are character based, and they are - so they must be in cRPGs because that transcends the change of medium from solid linear story imprinted on the paper to a virtual, changeable and interactive medium of video games. The difference is that in cRPGs the character is defined and constructed through various abilities he has, attributes, skills, traits, perks and so on - but the basic concept of constructing an experience based on a specific character remains the same.
), and likely plenty of others I'm probably forgetting right now.
