With Bioware, when Baldur's Gate 1 released. Literally everything you complain about modern RPGs can be linked to Bioware: Real Time combat, romances, simplified character creation, cliché classic heroic fantasy story.
True, but this is also related to the distribution problem for computer games, which affected far more than just CRPGs. As the gaming industry expanded, stores failed to keep pace in terms of increasing the size of their retail space and therefore the number of different games available. This gradually drove relatively niche genres or subgenres into virtual extinction, as they disappeared from physical game stores and could survive only via direct orders (placed by mail or phone, later increasingly on-line, but always necessitating a physical delivery), which further harmed sales. For CRPGs, this meant, for example, that RTS games with RPG elements could amass considerable sales by exploiting the popularity of existing RTS gameplay, or that Bethesda could pioneer 3D Open World CRPGs and achieve considerable sales, while Wizardry-likes, Dungeon Master-likes, Tactical RPGs, and Ultima-likes had more or less disappeared by the mid-00s. Digital distribution of computer games began as a niche method, but the development of Steam into a proper platform resulted in a surge of players switching from physical to digital distribution, which limited the number of available games only by the platform's selectivity. By 2012, it was possible for near-defunct CRPG subgenres to make a comeback, since they didn't need to obtain any physical store space, just gain clearance from Steam to appear on the virtual store. The 'wasteland' era of CRPGs from 2004-2011 was replaced by an era of semi-hemi-demi-renaissance that would never have been possible if physical sales had remained dominant (as much as I otherwise regret the demise of physical, boxed computer games).
