So according to you, the fact that a bulk of CRPG discussion is centered around games from the 90's (and early 2000's, to be more precise) is 'proof' that there's something wrong with the genre itself? But not the fact that, with the exception of BioWare and Bethesda, every CRPG developer closed their doors in the late 90's or early 2000's? You're acting like we've been drowning in hundreds of CRPGs since the 90's, when you could basically count the number of CRPGs released in the decade prior to the Kickstarter renaissance on one hand.
Well, one could be hopeful and believe that the lack of quality RPGs after the 90s is merely due to some combination of developer sloth, bad luck and RPGs only barely being financially viable, so there weren't enough of them made to beat the odds. With the way the "Kickstarter renaissance" turned out, though, I think that may be wishful thinking. The thing is, one could very well think (and I think many people on the Codex did) that it should not be exceedingly difficult to improve on 90s CRPGs, because we know
perfectly well that those games are deeply flawed and full of broken or halfbaked game mechanics. But, as it turns out, it is in fact very difficult to do so: the recent Kickstarter RPGs
do in fact have a lot of polish and refinement in at least some aspects, and I think it would be unfair to say that they don't improve on 90s RPGs in that regard. However, that hasn't actually made for better games. Moreover, when they have their own flawed mechanics (as they, plainly, do), players do not treat such flaws with the compassion afforded to 90s classics. I don't know if having a lot more RPGs would really help, when it seems to be difficult to make even a passable CRPG, let alone a good one.
As for FTL, I think it's an interesting game to discuss from an RPG perspective because it possesses a coherence and interplay of systems that almost all CRPGs lack. It is thanks to this that FTL can have a strategically meaningful time limit, whereas CRPGs have essentially given up on time limits altogether; the random events, simplistic as they are, contribute well to the game as a whole, whereas in the context of most CRPGs they would be pointless or intrusive. And there is nothing there that
couldn't be done in a more "CRPG-ish" form, since FTL's basic mechanics are so similar. It's true that in FTL, the emphasis is on building the ship rather than the crew, but mechanically, that's an insignificant distinction, because the ship building accomplishes the same things that character building does in a CRPG: the player gains resources from battles which can be used to improve the ship's combat and non-combat capabilities (including dialogue choices), there's resource management and attrition, shops to buy and sell equipment, and substantial variety in different builds that the player could go for, subject to change depending on random equipment drops, which haven't been balanced to irrelevance because the player can't necessarily just find the best equipment, and must sometimes make do with whatever weird stuff he finds.
Mostly, though, all of the above works together like a clockwork in a way that could only be attained through refinement. And refinement isn't even that hard, ultimately: FTL was made by two guys, you know? It's just CRPGs that are terribly difficult to improve through iteration, because the conventionally desirable RPG elements add up to such a grab-bag of disparate, isolated mechanics that it's not even obvious what one should be aiming at.
