The year role-playing games broke
Filed under: Features, PC, Sony PlayStation 3, Retro, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360, Online, RPGs, MMOThis is a weekly column focusing on “Western” role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The most important year in western role-playing history was also its worst. The late 1980s and early 1990s were an obvious Golden Age, as RPGs were the drivers of innovations in graphics, interface, complexity, and narrative in Wizardry, Ultima, and the Gold Box series. That came to a screeching halt in 1995, when the once wildly popular genre suddenly became devoid of games.
The genre was rebuilt after 1995, but it looked very different. The companies and franchises which had dominated withered away, replaced by the ones we know now: Fallout, BioWare, and Blizzard. All these started shortly after 1995, and the only residual series from before, The Elder Scrolls, squeaks in with its first installment in 1994. So what changed, and why did it change?
The chief contributing factor was the rise of the compact disc for storage. Games comprised of a dozen ungainly 1.5 megabyte floppies were growing more and more common, so the CD, with 500 megabytes, was a godsend (or so it seemed). All the other technological advances: better sound and music, voice-over, 3-D polygonal graphics, full-motion video, etc, could be used with CDs. This made games bigger — but it also made budgets bigger, teams bigger, and development times much longer. Role-playing games and their developers struggled to adapt.Continue reading The year role-playing games brokeThe year role-playing games broke originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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