Sorry, wait, is DOSII not widely considered to be one of the games most responsible for the modern crpg resurgence?
Like, don't get me wrong, I have loads of criticisms about how Larian is handling BG3, but I think it's undeniable that they are one of the, if not the, most popular crpg devs right now.
At this point, I have to ask if this cRPG resurgence actually did happen, or if it was really just a handful of games in the genre getting noticeable budgets.
Larian is the most popular cRPG dev right now because they’re really the only one left other than Owlcat. All the other big players left the genre. Not much of a resurgence there, is it?
Going from nothing to something is still a resurgence to me. I can't really think of any popular CRPG the period before DoS2... Grimrock maybe?
DoS 2 ?
Depends what you mean "popular" but Kotor 2 was mostly the last of the old golden age of CRPGs. Then we had Dragon Age Origins a few years later and a few years later again : Wasteland 2 / Pillars of Eternity / DoS.
Pillars of Eternity was the most awaited cRPG as proven by the kickstarter campaign. They had 4 times the money Larian had for DoS1. But the critics were not "so good" in the end, which doesn't stopped Obsidian to also released Tyranny and POE2 (which also managed to raise much more money than DoS 1 and 2 combined). Of course they did not sold as much copies as DoS but does that mean that those games were not "popular" ?
In the period before DoS2 another game was released : Pathfinder Kingmaker.
I guess we can consider it as popular too considering that the kickstarter campaign for WoTR gave Owlcat a lot more money than the one for Kingmaker. Exactly like the one for DoS2 compared to DoS 1... numbers are mostly the same.
Owlcat is going very well too even if their audience is not as wide as Larian's one (which is easily understandable).
Just as POE, their games have contributed to the initial ressurgence of CRPG more than DoS1 to me. The strenght of Larian is that they renewed the formula a lot more, which open "their genre" to a wider audience.
