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.
Last edited by Saito Hikari; 18/11/22 08:03 AM.
