The Year Role-Playing Games Broke
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Before 1995, role-playing games, flight sims, and adventure games were the norm for PC gaming, but they were supplanted by first-person shooters and real-time strategy games as the default games you see on the shelf.And this, my friends, is just another reminder that supporting Wasteland 2 and the old school mentality behind it is a good idea.
For example, SSI, the company that owned the license for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video games, released around 30 AD&D games between 1988 and 1994. Thirteen of those were part of the "Gold Box" series of games that had almost identical engines and narrative style. We sometimes complain about Call Of Duty putting out similar games every year, but the Gold Box games came even faster. But SSI lost that license, with the last major release in 1995, and a consistent amount of good-to-great (though rarely earth-shattering) AD&D games disappeared from the market. So too did non-licensed games that are barely remembered today -- Albion, The Magic Candle series, Phantasie?
At the time, this seemed to indicate the near-death of the genre. 1995 and 1996 were certainly dark periods, with only Daggerfall and Diablo -- barely counting with a December 31st release -- making 1996 look better. The numbers never came back, but the Hall Of Fame-level games did: Fallout in 1997, Baldur's Gate, Fallout II, and Might & Magic VI in '98, and so on. (One of the few things that interests me about Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning is that it seems like an indication that the RPG is popular enough again to start seeing generic games in that genre, instead of shooters or action games.)
But the games were different. The model had almost completely changed. In many RPGs prior to 1995, the model was simple: You created a party of four to six characters by building each one from scratch, and they hacked and slashed their way through the bad guys until the game was finished. After 1995, only a handful of games -- usually sequels, like Might & Magic and Wizardry, plus the Icewind Dale throwbacks -- continued that model.
