My guess would be the inherent expectations of what comes with the first person view as time went on and first person shooters started having stuff like mouse looking, aiming, and just more free control over your moment in general...so, not consoles. More that they were falling behind what first person shooters on PC were doing and starting to feel like old hat; like Might and Magic IV does not seem like a game coming two years after Duke Nukem 3D.
In crpgs, it seems like the top down or at one of the varying 3rd perspective angles for a third person party-based gameplay opened up the potential for more complex gameplay than what was possible in something like M&M's, Wizardry, or Goldbox games. For D&D games, this meant the possibility for closer emulation of combat which was one of the goals of crpg development. Unfortunately, that stopped just after ToEE and KotC and there wasn't an attempt to really emulate a tabletop ruleset until the Shadowrun games, Kingmaker (though you needed mods to get the game to be an appropriate emulation of the tabletop ruleset; the turnbased mod before the less functional turnbased mode was released and the closer to tabletop mod or some other later mods), Solasta, and KotC2.
Yeah, part of it is Blobbers did fall out of vogue for RPGS with isometric or isometric like views. But I think that's more to do with Blobbers being too stuck in the past and not really innovating at all when it came to presentation and how the games felt, and didn't really have anything to do with more complex gameplay or whatever.
I know this is RPG Codex and all but how the fuck does one land on fucking consoles as the reason why they went away? JRPGs were probably hanging on to Blobbers and first person blobber elements long after the major PC Blobber RPGs were. If anything those Western blobber developers should've been able to make some moolah while they were still around in the PSX and PS2 era with Blobbers on consoles.
They probably didn't have the time to dedicate to console programming since they were already struggling with financial problems then. 3DO notably went bankrupt in the development of M&M9 and SSI was disbanded soon after being acquired by Ubisoft. It also doesn't seem like consoles were a good thing to get into at the time because most consoles were either Obscure, region specific things, or in the case of the US; their companies went bankrupt and it wasn't guaranteed that they'd be able to get customers for their games. The consoles that did survive seemed to be Japanese consoles with the like Nintendo with Final Fantasy or SEGA with Dragon Slayer coming out on their consoles almost the same time as their consoles were being released. By time most western developers where at that point, either consoles were dead in their country and DOS was the medium of choice or the only consoles were Japanese ones starting to get into their markets which likely would have been fairly difficult to get licensing for just due to language and international business constraints alone. It also makes sense since the biggest companies that seemed to survive at least up to 2003-2004 were Black Isle, Bioware, and Blizzard making games all on PC and not making any console releases until later. There wasn't a big western console that could stay in the market until the Xbox (2001).
I'm not really sure what you mean when you say consoles were obscure at the time. I'm not saying they should've started on consoles pre the NES or something. But in the PSX era, it is odd you saw less of these western RPGs (the first three Might & Magic games got console releases, Westwood made Warriors of the Eternal Sun for the Genesis, and there are Wizardry games on the SNES) making their way onto consoles after something like FF7 comes out and sold over a million in America in a week...those are numbers a CRPG in the '90s would be lucky to make in a year. I'm not saying they could've sold FF7 numbers or anything, but I know if I was a western developer making RPGs in the late '90s I sure as shit would've been paying attention to the PSX as a viable platform for RPGs when I started seeing those FF7 numbers. Instead it seems they abandoned what could've been a huge source of revenue right when that market actual started paying off for the type of thing they were trying to sell.
Like I'm looking at a press release for the Might and Magic series as a whole right now (so stuff like Heroes too) from March of '99, since this has kind of made me wonder exactly how well Might and Magic sold, and the whole of Might and Magic up to that point sold something over 4 million world wide. At that moment that'd be 2 Heroes games, 7 Might and Magic games, and the World of Xeen release. Looking at another press release from '99 that says the Heroes series has sold 1.5 million; that doesn't work into the 4 million exactly though since the Heroes specific one is post Heroes 3 coming out in '99, and the overall series numbers one is right before in come out in '99; but it gives you somewhat of a picture of who well just the 7 Might and Magic games sold. If they'd of made a cool looking Might and Magic blobber (or Heroes game ) of some kind on the PSX in like '99, I'm guessing it would've sold better than any Might and Magic game they released on PC.
- Blizzard started as a console developer, and Warcaft 2, Diablo, and StarCraft all have console releases. It's actually kind of a surprise they dipped out of consoles like they did during the original Xbox and PS2 era. They did however announce that StarCraft Ghost game that never came out for consoles in 2002.
- BioWare made MDK2 on the Dreamcast. MDK2 would've come out the same year KotOR was announced.
- The Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was published under Interplay's Black Isle Studios label in 2002, and the studio would later make Dark Alliance 2. Black Isle however is part of Interplay and Interplay did release console games, in fact their most well known games were probably console games like ClayFighter and MDK. The weird thing about Interplay is when they came back to consoles when they were dying and started releasing stuff with the Baldur's Gate and Fallout name on it they weren't even kind of in line with the PC games. Like I'd imagine if they'd of released a proper Fallout on the PSX, PS2, or XBOX sometime between '98 and 2004 that probably would've done better than Fallout, Fallout 2, Tactics, and that shitty looking console Brotherhood of Steel game that just made you wonder what exactly the fuck Interplay was thinking.
