All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-12-09: Fond CRPG Reminiscence Edition

I've been revisiting a number of slightly more antiquated genres this year, between the 00s-oriented The Top Shelf, that block of 90s games back in May, and the occasional Indie throwback (one of which I'm playing presently for the next Go! Go! GOTY! entry), but those occupying the most attention right now are the many incarnations of CRPGs throughout the years.

Without diving into a history lesson, because there are tons of places online to learn more about this particular genre (I would recommend The CRPG Addict), CRPGs began with the earliest attempts to translate the D&D table-top to a video game format. Originally, these were big name games like Wizardry and Might & Magic, which adopted a first-person perspective as you went through tunnels and chambers full of monsters and treasure. Even before that, though, you had precursors such as Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai and Rogue - top-down games with primitive visuals which would continue to live on, in a sense, with the ASCII-based "true" roguelikes. After all those came Ultima and the Gold Box series (e.g. Pools of Radiance or Gateway to the Savage Frontier), which alternated the top-down and first-person perspectives at varying points, and advances in the same format with the likes of Dungeon Master (which added real-time enemy movement and combat) and Ultima Underworld (which introduced panoramic movement in first-person dungeon crawlers, something that would be established further with the first The Elder Scrolls game, Arena). After that are Diablo and the Infinity Engine games, which traded the top-down perspective for a more angled fixed isometric perspective which became the de facto "look" for CRPGs for a little while in the late 90s. Neverwinter Nights broke out of the fixed camera perspective to present a third-person CRPG in a fully 3D world that you could view at any angle, and since then all CRPGs have either been first-person affairs (like the more recent Bethesda RPGs) or third-person RPGs like Dragon Age or Mass Effect that tend to follow the player character around from just above and behind their shoulders.

Yet, we have people who grew up with any number of the above visual styles and perspectives, and those people became Indie developers eager to revisit those eras for new stories they could tell. What began as a linear progressive chain of visual styles predicated on the technology of the time has now become this anachronistic salmagundi of CRPG aesthetics taken from its many historical periods with the occasional idea or feature borrowed from their JRPG cousins, who have also undergone just as many mutations and styles over the decades since the first Dragon Quest in 1986. Take Anachronox, Child of Light or Costume Quest: games made in the western hemisphere with a very western aesthetic, but built with turn-based mechanics more commonly employed in JRPGs.

While it might be a bit late this year to start on a new CRPG, next year I hope to play the following games from this genre, each of which are representing different eras of CRPG history whether they actually hail from that time period or not:

• Divinity: Original Sin II: Considered by many to be a viable candidate for 2017's GOTY, Original Sin II continues where its 2014 predecessor left off - at least stylistically, since I don't know anything about the narrative - with an adjustable angled top-down perspective and deeply strategic turn-based combat that combines something like Neverwinter Nights with the Gold Box series.
• Tyranny: I'm showing up late to this Obsidian Entertainment jamboree, which deliberately evokes the earlier work of its founders with the Infinity Engine for Black Isle Studios and BioWare, previous to founding Obsidian and creating Fallout: New Vegas, KOTOR 2 or Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansions. Seeing that next year will usher in the sequel to Obsidian's 2015 hit Pillars of Eternity, I'm hoping to squeeze in a playthrough of this slightly more low-key affair set in a world where evil has already conquered all.
• Wasteland 2: A game I've been meaning to get around to for several years now, Wasteland 2 is nominally a sequel to Wasteland - a 1988 post-apocalyptic RPG inspired by but not wholly based on table-top rulesets that would go on to inspire the Fallout series - but it's really more of a reboot that attempts to modernize several aspects without losing the original's spark. That approach has been InXile's province over the past few years with the likes of Torment: Tides of Numenera (a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment) and their 2004 action-RPG adaptation of The Bard's Tale. Speaking of which...
• The Bard's Tale IV: I Kickstarted this game largely because it gave away Wasteland 2 as a freebie incentive, and from all accounts should be launching sometime next year. Likewise, it appears to take the basic tenets of the venerable The Bard's Tale series - the last true core entry of which was also released in 1988 - and revitalize them with modern design conveniences and visuals. I'm looking forward to it, if only because it'll be one of the 2018 games I won't need to spend any money on. Any more money, I probably should say.
• May Maturity 2018: While I'm still very early in the planning stages for next May's feature (I'll probably start figuring something out on April 30th, knowing my organizational aptitude), there's a number of CRPGs from the 1990s I intend to include, including Might & Magic: World of Xeen (which combines IV and V in the series) and Ultima Underworld 2, to follow this year's playthrough of the first. I'm also hoping to fit in Anvil of Dawn, one of the Lands of Lore games, and Septerra Core, though I'm far from finalizing anything. A distinct mix of visual styles, settings and formats here for sure.
• The Maybe Pile (i.e. games I've yet to purchase and am on the fence about): Vaporum, a steampunk-festooned first-person dungeon crawler throwback in the Grimrock mold and not a Pokemon; ELEX, the janky but loveable new sci-fi open-world CRPG from the developers of the janky but loveable Risen and Gothic games; Kingsway, which borrows a concept from old Mac RPGs like Quarterstaff or Shadow Keep by incorporating desktop windows into the game; Shadowrun: Hong Kong, the last of the Harebrained Shadowrun episodes that I somehow missed; Pillars of Eternity II, if I fold and buy it new which I well might since the original was my 2015 Game of the Year; Underworld Ascendant, a throwback crawler inspired by the Ultima Underworld series due for a 2018 release; Vampyr, the action-RPG from DONTNOD that seems to be biting the steez (and neck) of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

While I don't imagine I'll get to all of these before the year is through (I once again have an immense backlog thanks to a birthday, Christmas and the holiday sales), I hope to indulge that nerdy little kid inside of me who spent whole summers sat five inches away from the screen of the family computer getting spooked by Dungeon Master's mummies or accidentally short-circuiting my robot team in Captive. That kid really liked Secret of Mana too, though, and that's apparently something else to consider in 2018...

Back to the present - that cold, dark, miserable present - we have a few rays of sunlight peeking through with this week's blogging:

• The Top Shelf had something of a CRPG week itself with the two EverQuest "Champions" action-RPG spinoffs from Snowblind Studios, built with their own proprietary engine first devised for Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (which was also the engine used for that The Bard's Tale 2004 reboot I talked about earlier, coming back full circle). While these loot RPGs have some unavoidable deficiencies, having been streamlined for a console audience rather than the number-fanatical PC crowd, attention was paid to the core tenets of the sub-genre: plenty of character customization and combat skills to choose from, some challenging battles that relied on tried-and-true tactics like kiting as well as per-character stratagems (my barbarian had some pretty killer buffs, if I remembered to activate them in time), and a deep variance with its dungeon settings and mission design. It was tough to choose between them, largely because the sequel made some bizarre risks that were hard to distinguish as either pros or cons, but I liked how this piece turned out. Just two more contests left...
• Go! Go! GOTY! meanwhile dominated this week's blogging, moving through the majority of my shortlist in this scant seven-day period. Since we already spoke about the first game on the chopping block, Loot Rascals, here's a brief summary of the rest: Game #2 was Doki Doki Literature Club, the freeware visual novel game that lulls you into a false world of cutesy highschool romance before pulling out the rug from underneath you; Game #3 was Cryptark, a devilishly difficult roguelike shoot 'em up with gritty visuals that I bounced off of almost immediately; Game #4 was The Sexy Brutale, an ingeniously clever murder mystery adventure game with time-reversal mechanics; and Game #5 was the deceptively tough balancing action game TumbleSeed, which felt like the out-of-control problem child of Super Monkey Ball and a roguelite. The appraisal for Game #6 should appear either later today or tomorrow, depending on how much more of it I can stomach (it's good, but kinda repetitive?) and then there's just the matter of Prey: the last 2017 game I want to complete before I start working on my GOTY material.

No supplemental section for this week, since I spent all my free gaming time on that gaggle of GOTY aspirants above and have written plenty on each already. Stay tuned next week for the final remnants of Go! Go! GOTY! and the penultimate The Top Shelf: Battle Royale (it's a big one), and as always thanks for stopping by for this edition of Saturday Summaries. Peace.