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Incline Top RPG's 2006 - Present: The Decline to the Current Resurgence

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After reading Infinitron's recent RPG Codex Retrospective Review: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), I could not help but wonder what were the best RPG's released since TES IV: Oblivion in 2006, which officially kickstarted what is known on the Codex as "The Decline."

Over the past 10 years, many aspects of the CRPG industry have changed, mainly the revival of oldschool gameplay mechanics, including choice & consequence and plain good storytelling. It's interesting to note to that, instead of revamping the play style of old games like BGII, PST, or FO2, everything that these games had to offer was copied in its exact form with the only real change being updated graphics.

What I would like to see is a "Best RPG List of the Past 10 Years." We already have the all-time greatest RPG's in the thread, RPG Codex Top 70 PC RPGs (Now with User Reviews!), but the inclusion of newer games (2006+) is sparse if not entirely absent.

Who's with me?
 

felipepepe

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Oblivion didn't kickstart the decline, it was just the biggest icon of it. The decline came from multiple factors: rising cost of development (due to 3D), Microsoft pushing devs towards consoles & multiplatform releases, big PC-oriented companies closing down or bought (Black Isle, Troika, Origin, Sierra, Looking Glass) and a few other stuff.

Since then, the best ones we got were probably Fallout: New Vegas, NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, Mount & Blade, Dark Souls, Knights of the Chalice and The Twitcher series... there are others, like Grimrock, DX:HR, Heroine's Quest and the likes, but they are nowhere near the "classic" level.
 

StrongBelwas

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You're being pretty conservative with 2006 starting the Decline, but okay, lets play along...

Age of Decadence and Underrail are pretty obvious suggestions for such a list.
revamping the play style of old games like BGII, PST, or FO2, everything that these games had to offer was copied in its exact form with the only real change being updated graphics.
If that was accurate, we would not have 1000 pages of Pillars of Eternity talk of some form or another.
 
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Zed Duke of Banville

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The Golden Age of CRPGs lasted from 1987 to 1994. After a lengthy period of decline for over a decade, old-school mechanics began making a reappearance.

I consider the Souls series to be only borderline RPGs, but counting them for this purpose the best recent CRPGs have been
2009 - Demon's Souls
2010 - Fallout: New Vegas
2011 - Dark Souls
2012 - Legend of Grimrock
2013 - Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
2014 - Legend of Grimrock II
2015 - Age of Decadence

The Witcher was promising, but the follow-up was more a Bioware Simulator than an RPG (haven't played the third one yet, which I hear is better). The period 2003-2008 in general is so dreadful that I left these entries blank on my personal list of best RPGs by year going back to 1980.
 

octavius

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The decline started with the X-Box in November 2002.
Almost overnight we went from The Golden Age of PC Gaming (1998-2002) to The Great Decline (2003-2012/13).

I guess Legend of Grimrock (haven't played it yet), although somewhat of a "living fossil" in a genre that was thought an evolutionary dead end (RT Blobbers), was the harbinger of Incline, showing that Old School CRPGs could sell well.
 

Mustawd

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In all seriousness, the real decline is when the old codex guard* dies off and we're left with people talking about how Morrowind is "old school". All the while we'll all be turning in our graves.


*I mean in age not join date. What's the internet? Get off muh lawn you damn kids!
 

pippin

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I guess Legend of Grimrock (haven't played it yet), although somewhat of a "living fossil" in a genre that was thought an evolutionary dead end (RT Blobbers), was the harbinger of Incline, showing that Old School CRPGs could sell well.

Sadly, from what I understand, Grimrock managed to hype so many people because it has decent graphics. Even if you're just in a dungeon, the graphics themselves are quite good for a game made by essentially 4 people. Nobody played it because it was a blobber.

Also, what really killed crpgs was the mmo market, not consolization.
 

octavius

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Also, what really killed crpgs was the mmo market, not consolization.

That may be so, but the X-Box (and the PS 3) ruined single player PC gaming.
Just compare Thief 1-2 with Thief 3, and Deus Ex 1 with 2, to see what consolization does.
 

Kem0sabe

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The decline started with the X-Box in November 2002.
Almost overnight we went from The Golden Age of PC Gaming (1998-2002) to The Great Decline (2003-2012/13).

I guess Legend of Grimrock (haven't played it yet), although somewhat of a "living fossil" in a genre that was thought an evolutionary dead end (RT Blobbers), was the harbinger of Incline, showing that Old School CRPGs could sell well.
Agreed, decline practically coincided with xbox, and the magnus opus of console western rpgs... Kotor.
 

NeoKino

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
The decline began with Planescape: Torment the start of a trend where storyfaggotry supersedes good gameplay, solid mechanics, or interesting lore in RPGS. But arguably you can blame Ultima for the decline too, for each approaching installment gameplay is gutted to make way for "Majestic' Storytelling, games like Arcanum, Kotor and the like are just the fruits of Torment's critically acclaim reception. Now you have hacks such as MCA held to the highest pedestal of the genre, and a continuing trend of dumb downed game mechanics., Poor combat, and disgusting info dumps.
 
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Actually both Gothic 2: Night of the Raven and Arx Fatalis were released around 2002-2003 which are a couple of my favorite games.
 
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The Golden Age of CRPGs lasted from 1987 to 1994. After a lengthy period of decline for over a decade, old-school mechanics began making a reappearance.

I consider the Souls series to be only borderline RPGs, but counting them for this purpose the best recent CRPGs have been
2009 - Demon's Souls
2010 - Fallout: New Vegas
2011 - Dark Souls
2012 - Legend of Grimrock
2013 - Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
2014 - Legend of Grimrock II
2015 - Age of Decadence

The Witcher was promising, but the follow-up was more a Bioware Simulator than an RPG (haven't played the third one yet, which I hear is better). The period 2003-2008 in general is so dreadful that I left these entries blank on my personal list of best RPGs by year going back to 1980.

Was Legend of Grimrock II an improvement over the first?

The first one is pretty childish IMO.
 

Jaesun

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The original Dungeon Master is STILL vastly superior. And no where near as good as Chaos Strikes Back. Just FYI. :M
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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The PC games I've enjoyed to some extent that were made since 2006 are:

King's Bounty series, 2008 onwards (though only played the first 2)
Dragon Age: Origins + Expansion, 2009/2010
Drakensang: The River of Time, 2010/2011

I'm stopping my list at 2014, there's been so many games in the last couple of years that the list would lose it's focus if people start listing all and sundry from the last couple of years. I've played other cRPGs that were made 2006-2013, but none that I care to share. I'm still hoping to play Knights of the Challice at some point, maybe later this year, but the above three games have been the only islands I've not entirely been disappointing in stopping by during the Moby Dick like console era.
 

Zanzoken

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Morrowind and Dragon Age Origins are two pretty good RPGs from the decline era. Both have significant flaws but are still enjoyable in many aspects.
 
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Lilura

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Morrowind and Dragon Age Origins are two pretty good RPGs from the decline era. Both have significant flaws but are still enjoyable in many aspects.

That would be Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights, both released within a month of each other in 2002. Dragon Age: Origins was released 7 years later.

And thanks to its Aurora toolset and the quality and quantity of user-made modules, NWN is major incline, even to this day (see sig). Morrowind and Origins modding communities are a complete joke in comparison.

And the best part is? The vast majority of Aurora talent is in their mid-30s. This is a dedicated, selfless crew that you don't see in other RPG communities, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon, because they have invested a decade of work already, so why walk away now. They have plenty of gaming and building life still in them (not to mention the recent influx of new blood), which probably means in another decade the NWN platform will still be kicking, long after the current gen wannabes have been forgotten.
 
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Zed Duke of Banville

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Telengard the game is from 1982, and I assume Telengard the user would disagree with me over the issue of incline from the early to late 1980s. We also have a fundamental disagreement over the nature of CRPGs versus table-top RPGs, as he thinks the former should simulate the latter as faithfully as possible, while I think CRPGs need to reflect the difference between the medium of humans around a table and the medium of a computer with one human player.

Also, what really killed crpgs was the mmo market, not consolization.
MMOs do seem to be an oft-overlooked part of the decline, though only a part.

Was Legend of Grimrock II an improvement over the first?

The first one is pretty childish IMO.
Have you ever played Dungeon Master? The first Legend of Grimrock plays like an homage to the progenitor of its subgenre with the game's chief weakness being that it's too similar to Dungeon Master, so if you disliked Legend of Grimrock then I wouldn't think you'd like any real-time blobbers. The second Legend of Grimrock did have better character options, more varied environments, and a less linear structure than the first; but the game feels less cohesive and some of the puzzles are a little abstruse.
 
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Mustawd

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Telengard the game is from 1982, and I assume Telengard the user would disagree with me over the issue of incline from the early to late 1980s.

Yes, it was a joke. Telengard kind of goes on those types of old school rants no one else has context for. But I tend to enjoy them to be honest.
 

Telengard

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For the Golden Age/Silver Age terminology, see JC Matt Barton. The Golden Age is the games of classic design elements, and the companies who backed it began abandoning rpgs or outright failing in the early 90s, culminating in the destruction of SSI. RPG sales versus costs went into the pits as the 90s tech race took off, and games that required a lot of human resources to support long development times and lots of text, they just didn't make the cut. There was a period then, however brief, where no one wanted to make rpgs anymore, and the rpg industry died off.

A few years later, though, came the redesign. The rpg was action-ized with IE and Diablo, and the 'not your daddy's rpg' tagline. This brought about a brief resurgence of the rpg, this period dubbed the Silver Age. However, in this Silver Age, anyone who tried deeper mechanics was stuck with the same old sales rut that had ended SSI and the other Golden Age companies. It was only the action-ized games that continued to find success and stay in business. The Silver Age was short and already ending when Bioware shed itself of the shackles of d&d for mainstream success.

But the key for the Codex is, the Codex was founded in '02 in the wake of people who had been already fed up for years about the direction the rpg industry was going. While the Xbox (which was a failure, by the way) would be emblematic to a later group of people for the direction of the entire games industry, the Golden Age had already come and gone before the Xbox was even a gleam in Bill Gates's eye, and the Silver Age was already fading out while Microsoft was still playing footsie with Sega. The Xbox may indeed have sucked up a lot of action game lines (though that was more the 360), but on a site devoted to rpgs, the loss of a bunch of action game lines should not be considered the source of decline. The source of decline should, you know, involve the end of rpg development.
 

laclongquan

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The golden age start at 1999 and last a few years with such titles like Fallout series, BG series, IWD series, PST, end at 2004 with VRMB, KOTOR2, and Arcanum.That is the peak.

If you want to say the Fall and Rise, should have started with 2005.
 

MrMarbles

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Thing is, old rpg's have replay value, so the stock of available rpg's to sink your time in has kept growing. That, plus a trickle of new titles, was enough to get through to AoD, Underrail and hopefully ITS/Styg/maybe T:ToN/other follow-ups.

2007 - Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer
2009 - Dragon Age: Origins
2010 - Fallout: New Vegas
2011 - Dark Souls
2013 - Dragon's Dogma/ Dark Arisen
2015 - Return of the messiah

All of these come in addition to the oldies = hundreds of additional hours to spend. D:OS is close but doesn't rise to classic status. Also, it's interesting that the kickstarter "revolution" completely failed to deliver, but people have made that point before.
 

Dorateen

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2008: Storm of Zehir
2009: Knights of the Chalice
2010: Swords & Sorcery: Underworld
2011: Demise: Ascension
2014: Might & Magic X: Legacy
2015: Elminage Gothic
 

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