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The PC RPG is an increasingly rare specimen, a bitter turnaround from its heydey in the 80's and early 90's. While they disappeared entirely, what we see today is almost the polar opposite of the genre's fledgling years on the PC; some would argue, and I would not dispute, that the wheat and the chaff have been discarded just the same. The PC RPG market has effectively been kneecapped, with key development houses disappearing almost overnight. To put it in simpler terms, it's a bad time to like RPGs off the console, and a lot of us are simply standing there, wondering what the hell just happened.
A little over a decade ago, it was impossible to throw a rock without hitting a PC RPG. You had your long-running series - the Wizardries, the Might and Magics, the Ultimas; by 1990 each of those three had more than or around five games apiece, and they would continue for some time. You had your very old school stuff - the Bard's Tale and Wasteland to name two, both of which have persisted to this day, in one form or another.
Obviously, these games are of debatable quality even amongst their fans; it is less debatable that the longer-running series have gotten worse with each passing installment, more or less after 1998. This, in itself, wasn't such a bad thing, because the late 90's and early 2k's saw some truly fantastic titles outside the old guard.
BioWare broke onto the RPG scene in a big way with Baldur's Gate, and whatever complaints about the Infinity engine one might have, BG is undeniably an RPG experience with few peers. Sequels and other games in the Forgotten Realms universe were soon to follow, backed by the now-legendary Black Isle Studios - games like Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, all eagerly consumed by PC RPGers. Interplay had a few tricks of its own up its sleeve, with the hit RPG Fallout; a spiritual descendent of the old Wasteland, and a much-needed breath of fresh air for the genre. Fallout 2 upped the ante in every way - including, sadly, game-crippling bugs that could only be rectified by patches.
Stepping out of traditional role-playing games, we had blurrings of the line between action and RPG - Irrational and Looking Glass' System Shock games, the Diablo series, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Deus Ex - just to name a few. Quirky developer Troika suffered from a lack of technical prowess, but nonetheless made games that are quite literally without peer; it's easy to say that Arcanum or Vampire: Bloodlines were highly flawed games, because they are, but buried within are some of the best dialogue, plot and voice acting the industry has to offer.
And where are they now? Interplay is effectively gone, Black Isle is dissolved, Troika has vanished. Ion Storm, if it even exists anymore, is a hollow shell of its former self, thoroughly decapitated so Eidos can pump out the next Tomb Raider game or god only knows what else. Newcomer Obsidian, comprised of a huge chunk of Black Isle, bore the burden of Star Wars: KotOR II, which didn't quite receive the warm welcome its predecessor did. Holdouts BioWare and Bethesda show signs of life, but the former seems doomed to cranking out Neverwinter Nights expansions, and the latter... well, perhaps it depends on how they do with the next Elder Scrolls game.
And what are we left with? Fallout 3, never to be, continued instead in a sub-par console action game? Deus Ex: Invisible War, not just inferior to Deus Ex but rife with gameplay decisions that are objectively bad, and a PC version that is little other than a bad port? Games like Anachronox never getting the attention and finishing touches they so desperately needed? Beloved series like System Shock being effectively sat on by an increasingly corpulent developer that couldn't care less?
Maybe the multitude of MMOG franchises were meant to slake our thirst for a quality RPG. Anarchy Online, City of Heroes, Matrix Online, Ultima Online, Final Fantasy XI Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Lineage I and II, Everquest I and II, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft... not to slight these games, hell, I still play FFXI, but these games are complements, not supplements.
Where is the game where I don't just level up, but decide how my character grows? Where is the 'be your own six-million-dollar badass Yojimbo-type' game? Where is the game with writing that wouldn't be out of place in a bestselling novel, as opposed to relying on a translator that understands just how different two languages can be? Where is the game where I can hunt for hours on the internet for user-created mods and tweaks, or even come up with a few of my own, and load them to effectively create an entirely new game?
I don't have answers for these questions. Maybe they're still out there, I don't know. All I know is they've gotten surprisingly hard to find in a matter of years, and I have all the reason in the world to suspect that's not going to change anytime soon. Meanwhile, with every passing computer, every Windows version or DirectX update, it takes more work to get each game running properly; extra programs and compatibility modes, fan patches because the real ones aren't always enough, tweaks and mods from sites that went under years ago.
To clarify: this isn't meant as a slight against console RPGs, or other games in general, or anything in particular save for the lack of computer RPGs. They simply add something to the genre as a whole that other systems don't, can't - mutability, flexibility, depth... these are qualities not easily duplicated, especially when built for a less versatile platform.
I love me some RPGs, however I can get them. But as I've said before, I would trade many of the RPGs of this generation for an honest-to-goodness, non-suck sequel to Deus Ex, and I don't feel too presumptuous in saying that this is true for many a PC gamer. It's been a long, hard fall for us.
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