THE RPG GROWS UP
BioWare hasn’t had the entire decade to itself of course. The 2000s saw Bethesda go from strength to strength with its open-world Elder Scrolls games, selling millions upon millions of copies of Morrowind, Skyrim and Oblivion to players looking for more of a freeform experience. It would also add a string to its bow by picking up the Fallout licence—along with a tangled knot of assorted legal issues—and restart the series with Fallout 3 in 2008. Much like BioWare, having a leg in both science fiction and fantasy hasn’t hurt, even if the best of the new Fallout games remains New Vegas, written under contract by Obsidian Entertainment.
Many other companies started the new decade by going out of business. Origin’s final chapter of the Ultima series, Ascension, took over from Descent To Undermountain as the new Duke Nukem Forever of the RPG genre, only worse, because millions of players actually cared about Origin. Ascension crawled out of development hell in a barely functional and not remotely enjoyable state, ending the once proud Ultima series with a flatulent note of despair. Other companies, like Interplay, which should have been in a position to enjoy the genre’s resurgence, were too far into the red. On the plus side, many of the individual people involved were able to escape and form new companies. The Fallout team, for instance, recoalesced as Troika Games, while other Black Isle employees formed Obsidian Entertainment and survived by focusing on contract work rather than creating their own self-owned properties.
This was a tricky time for RPGs. Baldur’s Gate had become a huge success by going back to the genre’s roots, but at the same time, players were expecting the next big thing. On PC, that was Deus Ex, which combined RPG and FPS in ways that should need no explanation here. Even then, it was easy to slip up, as was seen with Deus Ex’s own sequel, Invisible War.
Best summed up as ‘ Deus Ex with vampire s,’ it bombe d at re lease
A big problem was that, while consoles offered a whole new audience, the gulf between Xbox and PC in terms of power was ridiculous, forcing any game that went for both to play to the lowest common denominator. In the case of Invisible War, that meant going from levels that modelled the whole of Liberty Island in New York, to levels that are literally ten seconds between load screens. The controller was also no match for a PC’s keyboard and mouse, making it impossible to carry many of its best experiences across.
The consequence was that developing for both was a gamble, but so was focusing on the PC and ignoring the wider market. Troika quickly became the most high-profile casualty of this. Its first game tried to fuse what players loved about Fallout with fantasy, in a brand new Victorian style world where magic and technology coexisted. Unfortunately they called it Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura, a title so relentlessly geeky that players reported their virginity growing back just from hearing it. It was a popular game with those who played it, though not a megahit by 2000s standards. Next, the company tried going back further to the genre’s roots with a conversion and upgrade of the classic D&D module The Temple of Elemental Evil. Unfortunately, its adherence to the mechanics wasn’t enough to compensate for the lack of things like a plot, or how old-fashioned it felt. (For starters, the game’s village is called ‘Hommlet’. Not Gary Gygax’s most inventive moment.)
Finally, the company released one of the 2000s’ most beloved and poorest selling games, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines— the second attempt to bring the World of Darkness universe to the PC. Best summed up as ‘Deus Ex, with vampires,’ it bombed at release, and Troika didn’t survive it. Players kept it alive through word of mouth and fan patches, and it’s still being updated and praised today as one of the few adults-only RPGs that earned its place through dark atmosphere and intelligence. It wasn’t that it didn’t have sexy vampires, but that they were designed and written to be more than that—pieces in a game that, among other things, punished trying to do the right thing by inadvertently condemning an innocent college girl to be your mindless thrall, dealing with the broken personalities of an abusive family, exploring a crazed mental asylum, and, in its most famous level, exploring a haunted house that’s strangely effective at bringing scares—despite you being a powerful vampire.