Decline Why did the crpg decline happen?

[Butter]

I don't want to blame everything on the fall of Constantinople, but it sure didn't help.

 

[Swen]

Luckily we have Larian that ushered in a new cprg renaissance.

 

[Thalstarion]

It's not just CRPG's, the entire world has been in a downward spiral for the last couple decades...and I mean everything. Games, music, movies, the economy, world affairs, etc.

You're not wrong.

Certain genres of games also encourage critical, strategic thinking. Something which those pulling the strings in the real world desperately want to put a stop to.

There's a growing, alarming number of people who can't even cook a simple meal for themselves using the most basic of ingredients. It's inevitable, then, that they'd struggle to handle any game that doesn't constantly hold their hand or reward them with instant gratification.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

The consoletard infestation.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Console and console "RPGs"

Can't blame it on consoles bitch because we were still getting stuff like Demon's Souls, Dragon's Dogma, and Bloodborne long after your RPGs became fag decline.

 

[gooseman]

Creativity was strangled in favor of profits, which equal to lower quality, trend chasing, boardroom designed games and mass appeal. This was always the case to a degree, but getting worse every year. Larian is succeeding thanks to their perfect mediocrity, they somehow appeal to everyone, without alienating as many people as others (evidenced by critical acclaim and somehow making it to top 2 of codex goty). It helps that the competition is braindead and completely out of touch.
Consoles are only a small part of the drive for profit.

Console gaming caught up with PC gaming in terms of allowing relatively complex actions

Consoles had better hardware than PCs until around mid 90s, afterwards they had some good games and that's about it. In terms of controls, gamepads are very limited. Racing, platformers and flight sims are pretty much the only games I can think of where you'd prefer those over keyboard and mouse (mostly due to the granularity and precision of analog sticks).

 

[NecroLord]

The advent of consoles as a means of bringing videogames to the plebeian masses did a number on videogaming itself.

 

[Zarniwoop]

The focus on money and profits and not just focusing on good RPG mechanics for a game.

Pretty sure they were always focused on money and profits. It just used to be that you made those profits by making good games. Now it's made by having a button and something awesome happens.

 

[Inec0rn]

Consoles, historically, have been more powerful than PCs, until around PS2 generation, which was the last console generation worthy of existing.

just no.

although there were some actual good game releases back then before the AAA studios all started making dumb dumb open-world realtime durr.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Consoles, historically, have been more powerful than PCs, until around PS2 generation, which was the last console generation worthy of existing.

Reminds me of Sony's marketing materials that claimed the PS3 was like 300 times more poweful than the PS2, which was already like 5 times faster than a Pentium 4.

And yes, consolefags were stupid enough to believe it.

 

[Necrensha]

Some of you are also forgetting that one point many people believed that the best game would be the one that sells the most.
Over time people started to notice just how wrong they were, and thus marketing slowly become as big as the budget of the game itself or even bigger.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Diablo, Final Fantasy VII, Baldur's Gate and Oblivion ruined everything.

Also the industrial revolution.

 

[Inec0rn]

PS1 launched around the same time the consumer 3dFX card's was selling like hotcakes on PC.

Quake 2 PC shits on anything the PS1 was doing in 1997, and they later ported a version that probably runs at 20fps for the PS1.

 

[gooseman]

Yeah, I misremembered something.

 

[NecroLord]

Quake 2 PC shits on anything the PS1 was doing in 1997

Yeah, no kidding.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Diablo, Final Fantasy VII, Baldur's Gate and Oblivion ruined everything.

Also the industrial revolution.

Wtf did Diablo 1 ruin? I could see an argument for D2 maybe but D1 is harmless.

 

[Falksi]

RPGs started getting simplified in general the second Joe Casual started jumping on board the hobby mid-90's, we're just feeling the momentum take full effect in recent years.

The main thing to blame for that is Chrono Trigger. It was literally a beacon to retards to become RPG fans.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Diablo, Final Fantasy VII, Baldur's Gate and Oblivion ruined everything.

Also the industrial revolution.

Wtf did Diablo 1 ruin? I could see an argument for D2 maybe but D1 is harmless.

Plenty of RPGs had to turn into isometric real-time games with tons of loot so they could compete with Diablo and its clones. Not even D&D games were safe, just look at Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights.

 

[Hell Swarm]

I'm pretty PC master race myself. That being said do people not remember the NES/SMS being way better than most 80s computers? Or the snes/genesis being better than most late 80s early 90s pcs?
Compare an NES to a C64, or zx spectrum. There's no competition.

This is a really important factor in gaming history PCfags refuse to admit. The PS1 made a complete chump out of the PC home market. Having a CD drive was a big deal and a 3d graphics card was almost the same cost as a console in a machine most people did not update frequently. It's easy to look at the rich kid's parents buying him high end PC parts and say look how powerful the PC was, but the reality was that most houses did not own a computer and those that did had no reason to be buying gaming parts. If you look at the PC as your gaming toy today, it's totally different to how we lived back then.

While DOS struggled to do scrolling at all the consoles of the era were doing multiple layers of scrolling. You weren't being forced to pick between sound effects and music. Your controls weren't a 1 button joystick or a full keyboard and nothing in between. You can't see these things today because you emulate everything and use your (probably) xbox 360 controller for any machine you're copying. But controllers were expensive and joysticks weren't seen as essential at all. Gamepads on PC were quite rare and most people thought you had a stick or nothing.

mouse-based interfaces gave PC games a lot more options than you could get with a controller.

Controllers can also control a pointer. It's lame but so was a lot of early gaming.

It's also no surprise Bethesda was as successful as it was during the Dark Ages, as their "hiking sim" approach overcame the effort-attention and complicated systems-gameplay barriers.

CRPGs have always been some form of hiking sim. The majority of their play time is dull walking around with dungeons spliced between them. CRPGs lost popularity because those experiences can be handed better in other genres. Why wander round bumblefuck in a CRPG when you can race around it in GTA?

Because the zeitgeist of the '00s was that classic RPGs (insert here also any of your preferred game genre from the '90s) don't sell. History scholars still debates on why this irrational belief came to life in these years.

They didn't sell. There are thousands of CRPGs running around, all with brilliant 80's box art.. and only a very small amount of people bought them. Saying CRPGs sells is like saying Onlyfans is a career path. There's maybe 1% of them successful at that point and the rest died hard. It was ironically the PS1 that brought RPGs of all kinds mainstream when they became the vehicle for FMV spectral.

1- CRPGs were never all that popular regardless of how many there were

Correct. But it's any RPGs. Remember Square didn't even release major series like final fantasy and dragon quest in Europe.

Halo was also dumbed down for the XBox.

No it wasn't. Bungie discovered what was the most fun and built around it. Bungie have done loads of documentaries on making Halo and none say they cut stuff down for Xbox in Halo 1. Halo 2 was held back by it though.

Console and console "RPGs"

Can't blame it on consoles bitch because we were still getting stuff like Demon's Souls, Dragon's Dogma, and Bloodborne long after your RPGs became fag decline.

They're not RPGs in any real sense. They're action game with light RPG mechanics at best. Locking equipment and damage behind levels is standard game mechanics at best.

Falksi Can't quote you but stop being a dumb fuck. Chrono trigger wasn't on any one's radar any more than Earthbound was. Both were niche within a niche. You're taking youtubers retconning history and blaming irrelevant games for impacting an industry that never paid attention to them. RPGs and JRPGs especially take off with FF7 and the PS1. Everything before that make it a niche product that they keep trying and failing to pick up steam with. Big system sellers were never RPGs until the PS1 made them semi-movies.

 

[Dark Souls II]

Jews, niggers, lack of eugenics & racial hygiene. Imagine the RPGs we'd have if Hitler won World War II.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Diablo, Final Fantasy VII, Baldur's Gate and Oblivion ruined everything.

Also the industrial revolution.

Wtf did Diablo 1 ruin? I could see an argument for D2 maybe but D1 is harmless.

Plenty of RPGs had to turn into isometric real-time games with tons of loot so they could compete with Diablo and its clones. Not even D&D games were safe, just look at Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights.

That's a stretch. I'm a firm believer that decline always originates from homosexuality so we must look at the earliest RPGs that were developed by homosexuals and contain homosexual content aka grooming. It seems that RPGs became increasingly more gay after Fallout 1. We can start there.

Diablo 1 ftr had zero homosexual subtext.

 

[jackofshadows]

Woman, niggers.

 

[Gandalf]

• Bad business handling, bad sales.
• Dumbing down things to appeal to broader audience.
• New generation taking up the mantle.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Diablo, Final Fantasy VII, Baldur's Gate and Oblivion ruined everything.

Also the industrial revolution.

Wtf did Diablo 1 ruin? I could see an argument for D2 maybe but D1 is harmless.

Plenty of RPGs had to turn into isometric real-time games with tons of loot so they could compete with Diablo and its clones. Not even D&D games were safe, just look at Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights.

That's a stretch. I'm a firm believer that decline always originates from homosexuality so we must look at the earliest RPGs that were developed by homosexuals and contain homosexual content aka grooming. It seems that RPGs became increasingly more gay after Fallout 1. We can start there.

Diablo 1 ftr had zero homosexual subtext.

You can have gay sex in Ultima VII though. Makes you think.

 

[almondblight]

No it wasn't. Bungie discovered what was the most fun and built around it. Bungie have done loads of documentaries on making Halo and none say they cut stuff down for Xbox in Halo 1.

Yeah, that's complete nonsense. I don't know what Bungie said in their documentaries, but they were lying since the Microsoft purchase. They tried to claim that being an XBox exclusive had nothing to do with the Microsoft purchase and it was just because they thought the console was so cool.

Anyone who was following the game before and after the acquisition knows that Halo was originally supposed to be an open 3rd person shooter, and it changed to a much more traditional FPS with much smaller levels after the acquisition (massively changed Cortana at some point from a rogue AI into something completely generic).