Re: sales and AAA CRPGs
The fact of the matter is that AAA CRPGs do need to die. In their present form, they're an abomination of action/shooter gameplay and an ever decreasing list of 'roleplaying features,' masquerading as overly bloated GOTYs. Games eg GTA, Far Cry, AssCreed, for all their faults, know what they want to be, and are designed from the ground up to support that goal. AAA CRPGs frequently do not. From Amalur to DA to FO3 to the FF series, they all stumble about trying to address the same age-old problem: 'how the fuck do you make a AAA CRPG?!?' Only Skyrim manages to grasp it and only because Bethesda has been remaking, effectively, the same game for decades.
In my mind, AAA CRPGs have been dying for a long time. The process began with the decline of tactical strategy games, which is what classic CRPGs, at their core, were. With the all but extinction of tactical strategy games - just the count the amount of TBS and RTS games in the AAA market today... - CRPGs were next on the list. CRPG developers scrambled to keep their sub-genre alive, and they split over those who ran to make MMOs and those who ran to make action games. The former effectively staved off decline by riding on the social gaming train, and took advantage of the fact that network infrastructure scaling favored tactical strategy mechanics over action mechanics in MMOs. The latter figured that, because classic CRPGs were just tactical strategy games with 'roleplaying features,' next gen CRPGs are just action games/shooters with 'roleplaying features.'
The issue is, they overcalculated the degree to which those 'roleplaying features' were what made CRPGs, CRPGs. The tactical strategy aspect was just as important; indeed of greater importance. When people remember fondly back to the days of classic RPGs, the 'classic features' they remember are mechanics eg levels, classes, dice rolls, skill checks, perks, detailed itemization, party combat, layers of status effects, etc. that went hand-in-hand with a tactical strategy base, but which fit poorly with the philosophy behind action games. You don't want levels, dice rolls, detailed itemization, and skill checks in action games, because you want to maximize the player's own twitch control. You don't want party combat, because you don't have the ability to control an entire party in twitch mode. You don't want layers of status effects, because you want the combat to be visceral instead of cerebral.
The further down this action road CRPG companies go, the less CRPG their games become. The 'classic CRPG features' in Bioware games already feel forced, such that with ME 2 and ME 3 they did away with a great deal of it altogether. But because these companies continue to cling to their CRPG moniker, they feel the need to hamfist CRPG mechanics into games where they ultimately do not belong. They do this because they know that without these features, the only difference between their games and action games is the amount of interactive dialogue and C&C, which action game developers are themselves attaching to their games.
The end of the road is, I think, already obvious - games eg Alpha Protocol are a glimpse of what the future holds for AAA CRPGs, and AP isn't a CRPG at all, but an action game with interactive dialogue and C&C. Only then are we finally going to hear the industry declare that CRPGs are dead. Only then does the rebirth begin.
