Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General I always knew they listened to us really :)

For a while, I was wondering how I would define what a cRPG is for myself. Admittedly, the criteria I settled on was rather loose in the end, revolving around the concept that nowadays the C stands for Choice-based RPG, rather than the traditional Computer RPG. So for me, a cRPG has to have a major emphasis on choices affecting the flow of the narrative and how you interact with the world, whether it be the story and/or the overall character development of your companions and maybe even adversaries. Many achieve this based on providing different choices that are tailored to the various attributes of the character(s) you've built, usually those that let you create a character, though this part isn't a requirement as long as there are enough choices to make that impact the overall flow of the game (such as in Disco Elysium).

As such, games like BG3 and Dragon Age Origins are clearly cRPGs. I consider games like Tower of Time and Solasta to be cRPGs too, but barely - what keeps them in the genre is that the choices you make and the way you build your characters can still significantly alter the way you experience those games, even if the overall narrative is still linear (excluding the more open-ended Lost Valley campaign for Solasta). At the same time, I consider the combat style to be irrelevant when it comes to defining what a cRPG is.

As an aside, many JRPGs let you create a character, but I don't consider those to be cRPGs because the writing and gameplay flow of most games in that genre tends to be extremely rigid and linear. I think the closest I've ever seen a JRPG blur the lines between the two genres is Tactics Ogre. (I am REALLY enjoying the remake that was released last week by the way. It's my first time playing the game, it has clearly aged like fine wine, and I've quickly come to understand why people in Japan considered it to be their version of Planescape Torment back in the day. Matsuno and the FFXIV crew that followed in his footsteps are really the only top-tier writers that exist on the JRPG side. And the team behind the Yakuza games too I guess, though the Yakuza games are more like really good soap operas rather than RPGs.)