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A term not used very often anymore and for a good reason too! RPGs have become a mainstream genre and the Computer Role-Playing Game isn’t big enough to account for all the new genres that exist now.
Let’s break down the concept and focus on their core mechanics!
A vast majority of titles during the rise of CRPGs were released before the 2000s. That meant they had to account for the serious limitations of the hardware. They were a next step after the text-based RPGs, slowly improving on the graphical aspect of the games.
CRPGs still had to rely a lot on the interesting worlds, dialogue, gameplay and overall story to make up for the lack of impressive graphical representation within the game itself.
It’s not an exaggeration to call CRPGs an attempt to bring TTRPGs into a video game world. As that was probably the original intent of many developers at the time.
All hail the nerd culture of the early video games!
Similar to the TTRPGs, CRPGs allow players to create a unique experience for the players to explore and participate in.
The choices in character creation would have a large impact as to how your character would be able to interact with the world they’ll be thrown into!
Certain choices would be extremely important, to the point that you could miss out on a lot of content if you’d create an extremely low intelligence character for example. Limiting the conversation to grunts and being unable to participate in the majority of quests.
While not quite on the same level as you’d enjoy in the TTRPG, since there isn’t an almighty and always correct (debatable) DM, it was still a great experience for those players who didn’t have an access to a group of friends, a basement and a lot of free time to organise a session.
Each CRPG relied on their own individual systems. While some leaned into D&D, the others tried implementing their own way to deal with levelling up and progression to allow players to become more adept in handling any new challenges introduced by the developers.
Some games focused on more party based systems, where your main character was one of many members of a larger group, while others introduced companions but focused on your character being able to perform well on their own.
Both offered a different type of experience and allowed alternative playstyles, introducing more potential ideas for the future generations of RPG developers.
As mentioned before, the story and narrative HAD to do quite a bit of heavy lifting. Gameplay, of course, had to be enjoyable as well but without an immersive story, interesting quests, fun dialogue and recognisable references the CRPGs wouldn’t become as nostalgic and memorable for the fans as they are today.
Not to say that new players couldn’t pick up any CRPG title today and still enjoy it but there would definitely be a certain… “adjustment period” for them to get into it.
As one would expect from an RPG, CRPGs allowed players to choose different ways of how their playthrough would develop. You could be a character who does good wherever you go, saving the world one person at a time. You could do the opposite and reduce towns and communities into barren wastelands. Or you could mix these things up and face the consequences down the road.
Different CRPGs had different approaches to the concept and some were of course better than others. Each individual playthrough could offer a new and interesting story for you to discover though.
Since CRPGs were a response to the growing popularity of TTRPGs a lot of the mechanics like dice rolls and stats affecting combat were carried over to it.
This is especially true when it comes to turn-based combat. It makes sense since tactical turn-based combat works really well for mechanic rich games. You can take your time to choose your actions and quite often it relies both on your characters abilities and a little bit of dice roll, adding that little random factor into the equation.
But let's not forget the RTWP (real time with pause) that sped up encounters while still offering the tactical approach to each engagement. Both offer an interesting take on how combat can be handled in CRPG.
The term CRPG doesn’t get used much anymore. Today there are a lot of subgenres that attempt to classify video game titles.
CRPG used to be a very broad term that was mostly used to separate the TTRPGs from video game RPGs. Although there were some throwback indie and crowdfunded titles that the fans of the genre classified as CRPGs.
Even the recently released game like Baldur’s Gate 3 could easily claim to be one. Still, you’re more likely to see more specific genre classifications today, due to the immense amount of games being released in comparison to the early ages of video RPG. Which is a great legacy for the CRPGs to leave behind.
After the CRPG era came new types of RPGs that are still cherished to this day, with new interesting ideas and implementations for each new title. The more skill based action RPG genre and a natural continuation in the form of tactical RPGs are good examples of branching in the RPG genre.
Action RPGs definition was evolving quite a bit before the 2000s, the Japanese market had quite a few titles that used to be called action RPG but have now become action-adventure instead. In the west though, the success of Diablo, shifted the genre towards that type of game as to what ARPG actually is.
Today though, Diablo would be closer to hack and slash or dungeon crawler. Still, the success of CRPGs was definitely what drove the creation of Diablo and further expanded what RPG genre could offer to players.
Tactical RPGs are all about planning out your next move with your carefully built up group of heroes/companions.
CRPGs with party mechanics could pretty much all be considered tactical RPGs. Very few of them had real-time combat or didn’t offer some sort of pause/turn based system.
CRPGs and TTRPGs had a large impact not only on the western markets but on the JRPGs as well.
There are quite a few titles that played with the concepts introduced in both and did great job at creating their own take on it.
CRPGs are what the RPG genre used to be called back in the day to give a meaningful separation from the TTRPGs and video game RPGs.
Yes and one of the great ones on top of that. Virtually each game in the trilogy can be proudly called a CRPG. With Baldur’s Gate 3 being a very modern and improved take on the oldschool CRPG.
Definitely, along with Fallout 1 it’s one of the most recognisable CRPGs in the genre. Recommended for anyone who enjoys RPGs.
