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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?

I honestly think that is how CRPGs are always going to be in terms of popularity. How popular they are is going to go in waves and I think Obsidian left the space after Deadfire because:

1. They botched the launch. I didn't play at launch but I heard it was bad. Really bad. I have played the game since they fixed it up and I honestly think it is great.
2. Player burnout.

cRPGs are probably my favorite type of game, especially when they blend in at least reasonable levels of tactical combat. But they are a grind. A huge, huge grind. So when a great one comes out and gets ridiculously good reviews it grabs the attention of gamers who have never played a game in the genre before. They will usually play the 100+ hours or more it takes to truly beat a cRPG and then they want more - because cRPGs are awesome. But eventually burnout sets in because for a lot of gamers that is a big deal.

This is also not just the turn based/RTWP genre either. The Witcher 3 was a great, great game... but a super small percentage of people beat it due to how long it was. I think it is why you saw CDPR switch gears to a shorter main story for Cyberpunk 2077. I think it is why you'll see games like Starfield, God of War: Ragnarok, etc. start to settle in at that 20-35 (35 at the very high end) hour mark for the main story of their games. Because that is the sweet spot for most people.

cRPGs like... never hit that sweet spot. They are always massive, always take a ton of time and the barrier to entry into the genre is usually way higher than other games. I hadn't played a cRPG in years when Divinity: Original Sin 2 came out. I picked it up and was a bit overwhelmed at first. I was like... WTF is going on with all of these systems? Then I figure it out and fell in love with the game.

That is to say... it is tough to give the cRPG genre the AAA treatment over and over. There is an extremely loyal fanbase in the genre that seems like it will always make your game do okay, but it is extremely difficult to make the games a blockbuster hit. I think devs can cash in big on a handful of them, but after that player burnout sets in, a major release in the genre flops and the devs go elsewhere for a while.

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.

As an older professional with very little time to play video games, I almost exclusively play cRPGs. I passionately love the old IE games and the NwN, PoE, and Pathfinder series of games. I follow, and have for decades, cRPG news and cRPG devs closely. But up until D:OS2 I never ever saw Larian as a dev that I needed to pay any attention to, including even relative to small indie devs. Even in a top-20 cRPG devs list, Larian would not have been there. Once D:OS2 to came along, then of course I learned about Larian for the first time. But the game itself was meh to me, and my knowledge of Larian was entirely based on reading gaming news and not from playing their games myself. I tried D:OS1 and found it to be an utterly poor game (it's the nicest I can be in describing the game). And so for me, the ONLY reason I am on this forum is because Larian's current project is named "Baldur's Gate III." Anything else and Larian would not even be on my mind as a cRPG developer.

So no, Larian is NOT the be-all-end-all of cRPG devs, and to make such a claim only serves to shred the credibility of the person making such a silly and lame claim.

Edit: I might also add that as a hardcore cRPG fan going on 25 years, I despise Skyrim. And yet I'd much rather play a Skyrim-like RPG than D:OS2 any day.

Would love to get a top-20 cRPG devs list tbh, looking for new cool games to spend my time with.

1. The game underperformed and figuring why isn't an easy thing
2. After working on two cRPGs + DLCs back to back, team burnout happened. With Deadfire struggling to make it's money back, there was little reason to push for a sequel and not do something fresh.

2c from me:
Yes, the launch had issues (mainly mid-late game balance, and dodgy reactivity/reputation gain), and the game was and still is flawed - still any problems Deadfire has or had would be discovered by people who played the game only. I still believe that Deadfire sales are result of PoE1 - if vast amount of player base wanted more more of PoE after PoE1, they would have come for more.

Edit:
Rearching through Josh's Tumblr I found this little post. Turns out Deadfire made some profit in the long run, though it took its sweet time.

This seems more like your personal preferences of Larian's games, which is different than the impact Larian had on the crpg genre.

I agree that saying "Larian is the be-all-end-all of cRPG devs" is an opinion, and thus changes with each person. However, DOSII inarguably sold incredibly well, bringing Larian's name onto the map for many people. It seems to have done well enough for WotC to grant Larian the D&D/BG license after rejecting Larian multiple times. You've been on these forums - there are plenty of people who are playing BG3 solely because of their love for DOSII.

Do you think there is another dev/game that can be said to be significantly more influential on the newfound popularity of the crpg genre since 2010? PoE...died, and other very popular crpgs (Disco Elysium, Wasteland 3 [is it a crpg? or just a squad-based tactical combat game like XCOM?], Solasta, Owlcat's Pathfinders) were released after DOSII.

I suppose you could also categorize crpg fans into "classical crpg fans," who possibly enjoyed & think more highly of PoE & P:Km/WotR than DOSII, and "new crpg fans." As DOSII seems to have done a lot more to bring new players into the cRPG genre than any other recent game(?), I'm giving it more points for expanding/revitalizing the cRPG genre. It's more popular in general, even if other games might be more popular within the "classical rpg fanbase."

Edit: You mentioned "relatively small indie [crpg] devs" that you thought more highly of than DOSII. Any recs of such games that are small enough I might not have heard of?

Yes, absolutely. It is merely my opinion, just like everything else being said in this thread is also some individual's personal opinion, except that some are trying to say their personal opinion is somehow representative of attitudes generally. So I'm thinking, if that's how some people are going to frame things, well, I can do the same, right?

As to D:OS2's popularity, I will say here what I've said before and which I will always say about that issue, which is that the reason D:OS2 was "popular or sold a lot was because it appealed to a LOT of non-cRPG fans. So it had cross appeal between both cRPG fans (who are a very tiny niche group) and gamers who are most certainly NOT cRPG fans and who actually don't like cRPGs. For me, that is exactly what is wrong with D:OS2 (and also with BG3), in that it merges a lot of things into the game I don't at all consider to be a part of what makes a cRPG a cRPG, while also diluting a lot of things that are core to a game being a cRPG. But Larian has done a great job of being able to walk that line of moving their games away from being true cRPGs so as to appeal to all those other gamers even while still holding onto many cRPG fans (but not including me, obviously). And that makes complete sense from a business standpoint, as a business always wants to expand its customer base. It is exactly the same thing Bioware did by moving away from true cRPGs to making games like Dragon Age, which also had cross-appeal between cRPG fans and non-cRPG fans.

The D:OS games and BG3 have a lot more in common with Bioware's DA games than many in this forum will be willing to admit to, but that's the truth of it. Being isometric isn't what magically makes your game a cRPG. Both D:OS2 and BG3 are NON-cRPGs that are trying to pretend to be cRPGs, and that's what ultimately really irks me. I assign a lot of value to honesty, even when that honest reality doesn't line up with my own preferences.

Huh. How do you define a cRPG? What makes BG1&2, P:Km, and PoE cRPGs but not DAO or DOSII? Can you give some example of core things that cRPGs have, or what things DOSII/etc add that make them not cRPGs?

Also, then what genre would you classify DOSII and BG3 as? They're clearly not ARPGs...do you think they need an entirely new name to describe [whatever core aspects you attribute to them]? Maybe something like Tactical and/or Adventure RPGs...

To your second question first, yes maybe tactical RPGs. But I would just settle for calling them RPGs with no qualifier, which is what I do even with the so-called ARPGs. I just only differentiate between cRPGs and then RPGs generally, with cRPG being a sub-genre of RPG (the only one).

As for my list of core qualities of a cRPG: deep and rich main story questline as well as secondary quests; a lore-heavy and dynamic world/setting; nonlinear world exploration; branching, and possibly mutually-exclusive dialogue; deep characters and strong character development (for the PC as well as any companions and even key NPCs); wide range of character creation and customization options, especially for the PC; meaningful leveling up options; meaningful choices with reasonable and relevant consequences including mutually-exclusive options and outcomes; at least some gameplay subsystems such as stronghold-building or crafting and the like. There may be a few other criteria that I'm not thinking of right now off the top of my head. So this list is not entirely exhaustive.

DA:O was a strange game in terms of my ability to quite classify it, because it was Bioware's transition game from making cRPGs to making non-cRPG RPGs.

I would also add that it is not just Bioware and Larian that have moved on from making true cRPGs. Both Obsidian and inXile also now appear to have done so with their future games (Avowed, and inXile's unannounced AAA RPG). True cRPGs are now being made only by a handful of small indie studios (although Obsidian's Pentiment may still be a true cRPG; I haven't investigated it much). This is why you will see in my posts in other threads in this forum that I have consistently argued that neither D:OS2 nor BG3 should be compared with games like PoE, Pathfinder, or Solasta, but rather with games like what Bioware and CDPR have been making recently. That's the correct and proper comparison, in my opinion.

Regardless, Larian would have been foolish to NOT cater to their biggest audience with BG3. Honestly, after playing DOS2 - haven't finished it yet - I think they have actually done a rather good job at trying to maintain a delicate balance between non-RPGers and hard core RPGers. Sure, many of us hard core RPGers are not happy, but then again there are those non-RPGers who do gripe about the RPG elements, dice rolls, etc.

But, overall, the audience is happy, and that's amazing. Most RPGers and nons are expressing that they really love the game, and that's a feat in and of itself.

Well... I THINK that's the case anyway. Seems like it.

It is not. Think Disco Elysium minus RPG elements. There are some background choices that play into you available conversation choices, but they are too few and to limiting for me to consider them character creator. There are some Disco inspired checks, but they are choice, not character-build driven. Good game, loving it so far.

Speaking as someone who discovered the cRPG genre through DOS2 and actually went back and played almost every cRPG associated with this so called renaissance afterwards, crediting DOS2 with said renaissance and re-emergence of the genre is incredibly revisionist at best. It basically released halfway into it, and it didn’t really revitalize the genre at all - it feels way more like it was so successful that other developers pivoted out of the genre when they failed to match up. Especially when considering many cRPGs were RTwP before DOS2 came along.

Now there are absolutely no RTwP on the horizon that I’m aware of. Even Owlcat had pivoted to full turn based, and Disco detoured into its own sub-genre of cRPG (and may not get a sequel).

You cannot argue in good faith that Larian is responsible for the revival of the cRPG genre when it’d be far more accurate to say they and Owlcat basically hijacked the genre for themselves.

It is my opinion that DOS2 is the peak of the CRPG resurgence and (obviously) the most popular of them (although Baldur's Gate 3 may take that crown) - but there is no way that it started it.

I will say that having loved the old school CRPGs (Fallout and Fallout 2 are probably in my top 10 games ever, plus I enjoyed the BG games and such as well) I thought they were dead and gone. DOS2 revived my interest in them and Wasteland 3 drove that interest even higher, to the point where I went back and played most of the newer ones. The only ones I can't get into are the Owlcat ones as they strike me as buggy messes.

Also, as a note on this... now that Bethesda, Obsidian and inXile are all owned by Microsoft I hold out hope that one day we will get an old school, turn based Fallout game. If it was done right I think it would probably be my most anticipated game ever made.

I would really want something like that to happen. A Fallout game, while Bethesda is busy with Starfield and Elder Scrolls6 would be a nice thing, and doing a full on New Vegas style without Bethesda Fallout game to based it on would be a big ask. I wonder if a more nieche side project like that would be easier to grinlit. And it wouldn't mess with Bethesda vision for Fallout, as at this point it would feel more like oldschool-spinoff-throwback thingy then Fallout5.

I had no idea DOS 2 was that huge a hit, I played it, and I liked it fine, but I'm surprised. What was going on when it released? Was there something in the zeitgeist that gave it a leg up?

I always tacked the beginning of the RPG renaissance with the new Bioware era, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Then with Kickstarter a wave of smaller 'indie' games that mostly did 0 to 1 interesting things with the genre, before being quickly forgotten, this is where you'd also find all the 'old school' games, giving us a familiar divide between the franchise projects and the more niche games. That era ended when Mass Effect and Dragon Age crapped out and some Kickstarter projects flopped (relative to their funding I guess), and it seems to be back to business as usual again.

I've liked Bethesda's Fallout games, but they really don't have anything close to the character and voice of the original two. Giving Bethesda the benefit of the doubt, that's probably because a fully modelled 3D world doesn't leave as much to the imagination, than some tiny sprite and prose did. Microsoft seems to be willing to put money behind smaller projects, and I don't think cRPGs are considered the risky investment they once were. Those companies are still famous for their past work more than most things, who can say.

Me too.

How's this?:
Tyranny
2016

Pillars of Eternity
2015

Disco Elysium
2019

Divinity: Original Sin II
2017

Pathfinder: Kingmaker
2018

Wasteland 3
2020

The Age of Decadence
2015

Shadowrun: Hong Kong
2015

Torment: Tides of Numenera
2017

Planescape: Torment
1999

Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
2000

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
2001

Dragon Age: Origins
2009

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
2003

Neverwinter Nights
2002

Wasteland 2
2014

Fallout
1997

Baldur's Gate
1998

Baldur's Gate 3
2020

Fallout 2
1998

Atom RPG
2017

Underrail
2015

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
2003

Neverwinter
2013

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
2018

Divinity: Original Sin
2014

Tower of Time
2018

Path of Exile
2013

Encased
2019

God of War
2018

Masquerada: Songs and Shadows
2016

Punch Club
2016

Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
2014

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition
2013

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
2015

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance
2001

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
2004

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
2016

Deus Ex
2000

Neverwinter Nights 2
2006

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
2002

System Shock 2
1999

Ultima VII: The Black Gate
1992

Mass Effect Legendary Edition
2021

Diablo II
2000

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
2004

Wizardry 8
2001

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
2006

Gothic 3
2006

The Bard's Tale
1985

Pool of Radiance
1988

So we've got Obsidian, ZA/UM, Black Isle, Larian, Bioware, Owlcat, inExile.

Obsidian, Black Isle, Bioware, and inExile, are all part of the same tradition. Troika too, to some extent. Their works are pretty well known and are for the most part well loved by me.

I falter where I firmly trod. ZA/UM. Disco 2, is still happening but It'll be interesting to see HDB breaking up Unions, quoting Alan Greenspan, and putting Atlas Shrugged into his mind palace; excuse me while weep bitter tears.

Iron Tower studio's Age of Decadence was great, can't wait for Colony Ship.

We have a few Russians with one-offs. Atom RPG I never finished, but it came across as Fallout light, or Fallout: Roadside Picnic. I'd put Encased as a more polished Atom RPG, with a much more interesting character creator. Underrail I think reminded me most of the Avernum games by Spiderweb Studios, maybe with a little dwarf fortress, I didn't play much of it. It also makes me think of Undertale for no reason, so I'll give it +1 lvl.
The Russians teams are all newer, so their games being all one-offs I guess is to be expected, but I'm not seeing anything on the horizon either. Based on the Russian modding scene I find it odd how lackluster the games coming out of there are, maybe there are some untranslated gems.

Deus Ex, another franchise snapped up and rebooted in the renaissance, I don't know how much about Ion Storm, but lead dev Warren Spector also worked for Looking Glass Studio, which did the Ultima games. In hindsight this makes sense for Deus Ex, the divide between Ultima type rpgs and Baldur's Gate-type rpgs. I've always bounced off the Ultima games, despite Morrowind being one of my favorite games, and Deus Ex for that matter.

Warren Spector, seems to be working on an immersive sim; "in conjunction with OtherSide Entertainment", might be worth keeping track of that now.

I have played Punch Club. I've read and watched a lot of boxing manga/anime. I don't think anyone else could appreciate Punch Club. A better version of Punch Club, might be Chroma Squad by Behold Studios. Behold also did the Knights of Pen and Paper game, which is...not an idle-clicker I'm pretty sure.

Harebrained Schemes did Shadowrun, I Kickstarted Shadowrun, of the three Hong Kong would be my pick too. The most recent news on their webpage is from 2020. The most recent news article I could find about Jordan Weisman was him working on a "blockchain based card game". Yikes.

I liked the first God of War game, but even by my lax definition of what an RPG is, I'm not sure it should be here.

Hmmmm. Can I broadly summarize your definition of a cRPG as a tactical rpg with significant amount of deep PC+NPC (companion) character development, significant character creation & customization options, and nonlinear world (but not "open world") exploration?
- DOSII, imo, has a deep and rich (enough) main story questline and secondary quests, lore-heavy world, character creation options, and crafting. But it didn't really have non-linear world exploration, significant game choice-consequences, or strong (non-Origin) PC character development.
- DAO, however, seems to fit most if not all of your criteria. "Deep and rich story," the extent of branching, "strong character development," "meaningful leveling up options," are of course all varied in what one considers sufficient. I suppose DAO doesn't really have crafting/stronghold..?
- The Witcher has most of your criteria but not NPC companions or character creation options, and is open world - which is nonlinear, but isn't split into sub-areas of BG1&2, PoE, etc. And obviously combat is more action = skill based, rather than stat/ability based.

I disagree that CDPR games should be directly comparable to DOSII/BG3. I'd put the Witcher 3 and CP2077 much closer to Skyrim than to DOSII/BG3, and DOSII/BG3 much closer to PoE & Pathfinder than recent CRPR/Bioware games.


I mean, I'll point directly to your quote: "...who discovered the cRPG genre through DOS2 and actually went back and played almost every cRPG associated with this so called renaissance afterwards" Doesn't that speak to the influence of DOSII right there?

Your point that DOSII might have actually co-opted the genre, essentially changing the definition of a cRPG by encouraging future developers to make less "classical BG1&2-like cRPGs" and focus more on "DOSII-like games" is interesting.....if we accept that DOSII isn't a cRPG. Kanisatha kind of addressed this, but there's arguably a broad overlap between their definition of a crpg and DOSII. Maybe DOSII is only 70% cRPG, but that's more than 50%...so it' still mostly a cRPG.?

I strongly disagree with your implication that cRPGs need to be RTwP. You might prefer those games, and BG1&2, Planescape, PoE, etc might be RTwP, but that is not a defining characteristic of the genre (imo, or apparently according to kanisatha).

...also, are you saying that Owlcat's games aren't cRPGs??? What. If P:Km and WotR aren't cRPGs, then nothing is.

No, you misunderstand. My argument is that while DOS2 may have been the most popular cRPG of the era, it had nothing to do with starting any reniassance. To credit it with popularizing cRPGs is revisionist history when its success did not translate to anything similar happening to other cRPGs released around it. While I did go around trying many of the cRPGs that released during that era, I saw many more DOS2 fans basically treat the rest of the genre with particular disdain for either being RTwP or having nowhere near the production values that DOS2 and now BG3 have (and also watched fans of other cRPGs return that sentiment, as we've all probably already seen elsewhere).

Consider the future - there are really only two high profile cRPGs on the horizon: BG3 and Rogue Trader, both fully turn-based. As such, DOS2's true long term impact on the genre was that it basically caused a huge push towards turn-based to such a level that RTwP games have gone near extinct as far as future projects go, hence my statement that it'd be way more accurate to say that Larian hijacked the genre. Your original post is correct in that DOS2 is indeed the most influential cRPG released this past decade, but basically dominating the cRPG market isn't the same thing as making the genre more popular, as the term renaissance would imply.

And I do prefer turn-based over RTwP, hence why I never bothered wading into the whole 'BG3 should have been RTwP' debacle. But I am speaking of things as they happened, and I am not so much of a blind Larian fanboy as to revise DOS2's role in the genre to be anything more than this.