@Seiryu Suta
In the late 90s and early 2000s the gaming community was just starting to explode. Most games didn’t have the hundreds of millions of dollars in their budget like today. It was a smaller base of developers with smaller budgets.
So back then, you didn’t need a million is sales to make it big. Now you do because the costs of producing a game has gone up exponentially.
BG1, BG2 and NWN1 were all big successes for the era. You have to put in context of the time. NWN2 was a modest success because the gameplay and story just wasn’t as good as NWN1. BioWare was the big fish at that time so gamers were a bit disappointed when they didn’t make NWN2.
Gamers also tend to have brand loyalty. Look at all the Larian fans here. So obviously when BioWare came out with Dragon Age, it became a massive hit because it had all the hallmarks of a good BioWare game, namely a good story with interesting characters.
Oblivion wasn’t obscure. At that point Elder Scrolls was a major franchise in computer RPGs. Morrowind was a success that continued on to Oblivion. And to their credit, Bethesda to me started the “living world” trend we see today in open RPGs. They set the trend (along with Rockstar and GTA). And by 2011, gaming was mainstream so now games garnered millions of followers.
You have to look at the history of gaming to put it all under perspective.
So why no D&D games for like a decade? Answer 4th edition. 4E was specifically designed with computer gaming in mind. Problem was, it sucked as PnP so it had no audience. The irony is, it’s because it had a system similar to cooldowns.
Yes you have to take times into account but DA was 2009, NWN2 was 2007. Also I'm trying to compare apples to apples, but lets look at something like Diablo 2 at 30m sold, this is more action cRPG. The point here is Oblivion was 1% of the population, if we add European Canadian, and US population, because they would be the primary group playing at the time. about 1B people. That is still obscure. You can find 1 in 100 people to talk to about it. With Diablo I could find 1 out of 33.
Also 4th Ed was a jumbled mess of Action points and battle powers which acted like a mana pool for some classes, and changing the timeframe of usage limits. Lets not get that confused with cooldowns. Also Cooldowns are not a good option for PnP, that's way too much to keep track of. The abilities were still limited use, but instead of so many per day, some were able to be used infinitely, some were 1-X/encounter, and some were 1-X/day. Then they divided things into types of actions, etc. Yes 4E was absolute garbage, but if it hadn't been for that attempt we might not have gotten 5E, which I'm actually impressed with.
I am aware it was their attempt to make an all encompassing rule set. That is the root of the problem. You cant just expect a ruleset to work on 2 different mediums. If you do want something that works on both mediums, then you are sacrificing on both sides of the equation. Now instead of making a square peg for one medium, and a round one for the other, keep in mind the peg is still made out of iron, so same material just a slightly different shape, I now need to make a triangle shaped peg, that will fit in both the square hole and the round one. Its just a bad approach. I'm left wanting on both sides of the equation, there are gaps between the sides of the peg and the holes.
