BIGGER, NOT ALWAYS BETER
Despite the potential, PC RPGs went into something of a slump in the early ’90s. A few major franchises were immune to this, particularly Ultima, and developers who were willing to take the plunge and risk everything could still be rewarded for it. Innovation, however, was becoming more and more expensive by the minute. RPGs typically lagged behind other genres in terms of immediate look and feel due to their complexity, and the difficulty of having a greatlooking game also provide tens of hours worth of entertainment. (In many ways this was the flip-side of adventure games, which shrank due to the graphics making it too expensive to have much game.) It’s not too surprising that many RPG studios desperately stuck with what had worked, much like many adventure game devs tried to hang on when their own genre began to feel the pinch. LucasArts and Sierra at least tried to evolve, and survived for the decade. Most others fell away, outside of the core German market that generously kept the genre alive no matter how bad many of the games got. (They got very bad.)
For RPGs, the key market was composed of hardcore fans, and they weren’t easy to please. The simplest approach for most companies was to do more or less what they’d been doing and hope to either sell enough copies to allow them to make another, or trim down in the hope of attracting a different audience. Origin’s ShadowCaster, released in 1993, removed almost all the expected RPG elements that existing players would be used to, aiming to sell the experience on its shapeshifting gimmick—the main character being able to turn into creatures like a four-armed cat warrior or a not particularly awe-inspiring dragon. SSI got into this with Al-Qadim, a far more Legend of Zelda- style RPG than its usual fare.
These stripped-down PC RPGs didn’t really work. New players weren’t brought on board, and ‘real’ RPG fans wanted something with more oomph. The market also provided a steady stream of solid but forgettable AD&D games, including a couple of Ravenloft titles, full of vampires and other nasties.