I think one reason they make new engines and art, is because like I said on the first page, the industry and player base are chock full of graphics whores. Graphics whoring is how they one up each other. The other reason is they want to hang on to their artists and cracker jack programmers. So instead of you paying them to make the best game evar, they are thinking about building their companies and creating make busy work for their employees. Fargo said he wanted to rebuild another Interplay. I also read interviews here where he said he was returning to Kickstarter, so he could keep people who would otherwise have nothing to do employed.
It's true that most gamers are graphics whores. But from time to time, there are games that hit it big without really having much production values to speak of. From things as primitive visually as minecraft or stardew valley, to something more modern tech but still low in prod value like the original Dark Souls (heck, even the graphic whore'd up DS3 shows a ton of cost cutting everywhere if you look hard enough. Zoom into any environment you can't walk to and all you see is very low poly low res texture stuff), it's possible to make games that sell a decent amount without going balls deep into muhgfx.
The real reason why the RPG genre is half dead is because most people just plain don't like RPGs. By don't like RPGs I mean the traditional type we talk about on the codex, not action rpgs, not dumbed down TES or Fagout shooter. The audience for the genre is fucking tiny. No indie RPG would ever sell as many copies as games like Terraria, Minecraft or Stardew Valley did. The genre, for all purposes and intent, has reached its maximum potential audience and the result is that very, very few developers even want to enter its niche.
The thing is, gameplay wise most of the lauded RPGs on the codex are at best mediocre, at worst they just fucking suck. RPG devs, outside of a few rare attempts, rarely managed to make a convincingly good gameplay loop, something that goes beyond pure sheer boring repetition of the same routine of commands to give to your party. Cue the focus of this thread on DoS which while not particularly amazing at least attempted something sort-of different but without straying too far from the classics. There's a reason why BG2 sold better than PST and it's not because muhgfx. PST was a nice interactive book if you cared about its setting (I did and was very into it when it released) but the
game part of it was absolute garbage. If you were to remake something like PST today and want to make enough money out of it to release more games you need to make a visual novel, not a RPG.
So all that was left was to capture the graphic/cinematic interactive movie audience and sandbox larpers for larger studios because they were just incapable of producing something that people want to play and they need other hooks to get people to come.
In the top
10 part of the top 70 RPG of the codex, the only games that even approach a decent gameplay loop is BG2. Maybe Wizardry 8 if it wasn't so fucking slowass. Is it even a wonder the genre slowly declined until almost nothing resembling the original games were left?
Fallout games had a great world, great settings, characters, choices.. but the game part of it was basically get a decent weapon and aim for the eyes, rince and repeat till end, occasionally eat a stim. It really doesn't hold up.
You want a cRPG revival ? Start by thinking on how to make those games actually good outside of the parts that could be extracted into a Visual Novel format (and yes, there are a few VN out there with C&C, it's not exclusive to cRPG)
If your cRPG could be extracted into a VN without any actual loss then you've made something that spent more dollars than it should have in production.
The same thing put down the MMORPG craze. The only thing that really sustained MMOs is the community side of it, the "fills a need for social interaction for people who have none" thing. Not even graphics could save MMORPGs, new MMOs struggle to keep an audience.
