GameBanshee Feature: PCRPG Editorial by Damien Foletto

Damien “Puuk” Foletto, the former Black Isle Studios designer who recently joined Silver Style Entertainment, has written up an editorial for GameBanshee entitled “PCRPG’s: Man the Lifeboats!“. In it, Damien provides examples of games that have redefined the genre, as well as reasons why the PC platform has plenty of life left. Here’s a snippet to get you started:

The voices of doom for the PCRPG have sung before in the past. Back before 1996, one would have to search far and wide to find a PCRPG that was new. The days of Ultima and the Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box games were gone. Nintendo and Sony Playstation were going strong, and PC games mainly consisted of flight sims and action games. Then something happened. Diablo, from Blizzard Entertainment, was released and sold not only to PCRPG gamers, but also action gamers and anyone who enjoyed an easy to play and fun dungeon romp. True, Diablo was not a hard-core PCRPG, but that did not matter. What mattered was that the masses enjoyed Diablo and its high sales reopened the PCRPG market. PCRPG’s were not dead and the PC once again proved to be a viable and profitable gaming platform.

Quietly, yet hot on the heals of a reborn PCRPG market came another game that would prove that PCRPG’s could not only be fun, but also open-ended, thought provoking, and provide a pretty accurate model for displaying consequences for one’s actions. Fallout took gamers out of the dungeons of old and slapped them into a subtly campy, 1950’s interpretation of a post-apocalyptic future where the player was tasked with a basic endeavor survival. But it was not only his survival he had to worry about, but the survival of his fellow vault dwellers. Moral choices were strewn throughout the wasteland and the player could tackle quests in pretty much any way they saw fit. Fallout was a true role-playing game and fans of the genre could not have been more pleased.