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