The CRPG Family Tree

manalive

I’ve been wanting to get more into CRPGs lately, and while looking for which one I wanted to start with, I noticed that there were certain names you’d see over and over again across different companies and franchises. So I decided to map the flow of sequels, developers, and companies over time:

I also put together an alternate view that groups the games by developer. For me, it highlights just how unusual this genre is, with developers bouncing between franchises, and franchises jumping between development houses:

A few notes:

I started by including games that come highly recommended as the best CRPGs of all time. I left out a few big franchises like Divinity, Shadowrun, and Pathfinder, as even though they come highly recommended, they don’t share any personnel “DNA” with the other games
I generally avoided including sequels if they were the exact same company and creators as the previous game, or if they started branching away from being considered a traditional CRPG (apologies Fallout 3)
While dozens or hundreds of people worked on some of these games, to avoid making the chart look like spaghetti I did my best to identify a single “creator” for each game (generally the lead designer/director). This was easier for some games than others (especially older games where titles hadn’t really been formalized) and for some games I included a second person if they seemed equally involved.

Would love to get your feedback, as well as any recommendations for which one to start with!

antillese

This is cool!

I respectfully suggest swapping the order of Torment (December 1999) and Icewind Dale (June 2000) in your first tree if it’s chronological. It seems accurate in the second one.

Seeing the SSI Gold Box games in here may highlight some very cool relationships in your chart too as they are very AD&D2 influenced in their design. They will have through lines into almost any of the Infinity Engine games. This may be out of scope for what you want to accomplish though.

manalive

antillese Is it wrong? I have Planescape above Icewind Dale in both I believe. But that’s interesting about the Gold Box stuff, I’d actually never heard of it. I did think it was kind of odd that there’s a 10 year gap between Wasteland and Fallout, and it’s cool to see what else came out in that time (I also fell down a rabbit hole and rediscovered some weird old DOS games I played as a kid).

yeso Interesting, for Vampire + Alpha it looks like you’re referring to Brian Mitsoda? I’d actually not seen him come up in my research, but I guess whether or not he gets credited for Alpha Protocol is a point of controversy. Interesting! And yes I did work on the color thing, I should revisit that and I’ll definitely prioritize Dreamcast first!

deepspacefine I used GraphViz to make the graph. I was a bit hesitant because it’s code/command line based, and I assumed there’d be a simple visual editor to make something like this. But actually it’s super simple, you literally just define nodes like IceDale [label="Icewind Dale"]; and connect them like IceDale -> IceDale2. It does all the formatting for you which is awesome, though it takes some work to get things to appear where you want (for example, I would prefer if Troika appeared over Obsidian since it appeared first, but for some reason the algorithm decided it should go at the bottom. And I think Planescape is generally what I’ve heard is the best to start with? I’m a little scared it will feel dated at this point, which is actually what inspired me to make this graph. I was wondering what the modern successor was to Planescape, assuming it was Torment: Tides of Numenara, but then discovered that was a completely different team, and actually the most recent game lead by Chris Avellone was Alpha Protocol (though it also seems like he’s had his hands in basically every one of these games).

Tradegood Oh that’s rad! That would definitely bring them in the fold I think, it’s a sequel even if none of the original team is involved.

rejj That’s actually really interesting. I thought the level of inter-company movement seemed unusually high within the CRPG genre, but I wonder if the same is true for immersive sims?

yeso

you could do a creator line from Vampire to Alpha Protocol

As for recommendations:

KOTOR and KOTOR II, ToEE, Vampire are all good imo. I like the shorter, more focused games personally. Not a big elf guy

sdate

v cool ! would be fun to see if there could be more of these, somewhere. origin systems has lines you can draw from ultima to the immersive sim stuff (deus ex AND bioshock (AND madden 93 for genesis)), a bunch of space trader games (star citizen included) and more than a few mmos, all of which have similar ideas about simulation and stuff happening. they never really passed around licenses though…

re ‘where to start’: note how many of the newer games on here are openly trying to recapture the feeling of the older games. that’s not a dig, a few of those are my favorite games period, but if your goal is “getting into this particular type of crpg,” maybe you should start with some of the older stuff? idk. have you played dungeons & dragons? most of the d&d rpgs were made with people who were into it in mind. baldur’s gate tends to go down fine, but icewind dale is v much about ad&d combat, and temple of elemental evil is straight up adapting a real module. (still haven’t played toee so idk how much it expects of you). the fallout games don’t have this problem, though. original system, original setting, still a great example of “that kind of game.” AND you don’t have to learn how to think orcs are cool. i spent a few nights last fall in my backyard playing fallout 2 and smoking painful weed and it was a very good time. probably made the whole, uh, “tribal” element easier to stomach though. like, maybe look at the intro on youtube first. don’t blame you if that’s a dealbreaker.

yeso you could do a creator line from Vampire to Alpha Protocol

ehhhh, maybe stretching it. most of what mitsoda did didn’t survive development iirc? sans the dialogue system, but my brain goes “you might as well put gary gygax on here then!” at that and i’m having trouble stopping it.

but now that i’m thinking about it, i prob wouldn’t even put bloodlines or alpha protocol on here, personally. or mass effect, or fnv, etc. AP has all the splinter cell stuff happening, new vegas is made out of bethesda imsim tech (they COUNT i WILL fight about this), bloodlines becomes a half-life mod every couple hours, mass effect has third person cover shooting, etc. if you take those out you get a big list of a pretty specific type of game. they’re not not Computer Role-Playing Games, ofc. but they go on a different shelf in my head.

man, now i wanna reinstall bloodlines.
and the shadowruns.
but also bloodlines.

yeso

also aren’t you the console true color person? Can you do Dreamcast some day, please?

deepspacefine

This is so cool. What application did you use to make this? I have tons of stupid use cases for a good flow charting app.

Also – pentiment is such a weird beautiful game. Tim Rogers used to (?)joke(?) that most video games are worse than books so people should just go read. Pentiment was the rare game that made me go “huh maybe this deserves to go on the shelf with my favorite books.” It really makes me wonder if the obsidian team didn’t want to make narratively ambitious games after New Vegas, or if they just didn’t know how (maybe besides tyranny?).

It’s a darn shame the game only exists because of microsoft’s expanding, purchased monopoly, but its existence (and brandon talking about stadia revenue sharing) have me trying to keep an open mind about the “pivot to streaming.”

As for the rest of the chart: for my money planescape torment is obviously head and shoulders above anything else on this chart (but I’m more about story and characters first, balanced mechanics second). It might be a tough entry point with combat that’s as obtuse as baldur’s gate but without the reward of being actually good (as baldur’s gate appologists swear that game’s combat is…).

Tradegood

This is cool. Divinity’s developers are working on the new Baldur’s Gate, so I’m sure there will be some DNA splicing in the future, though I have no idea if anyone from Bioware was brought back for it.

rejj

Without giving thought to how it would mess up the diagrams, I feel like Origin, Looking Glass, and SSI should be represented.

There’s likely a whole fresh diagram one could make tracking the output of Warren Spector and those he worked with / mentored.

deepspacefine

manalive Avellone was a writer on Torment: Tides of Numenara, even if he didn’t seem to be the lead. It’s kinda the successor to Planescape: Torment. But we all know the real (&only) successor is Disco Elysium… (But that’s a whole other team with its own can of worms rn)

tomjonjon

sdate Painful weed?

Syzygy

the fallout games don’t have this problem, though. original system [ . . . ]

Ultimately yes, though as an aside Fallout was initially pitched as a GURPS game and 1+2 still resemble GURPS systems if you’re familiar with it: a lot of the math is similar, just changing terms like Dis/advantages to Traits/Perks to meet copyright distinctiveness.

SU2MM

There is another thread in which some recommendations for CRPGs are given which might also serve as inspiration for figuring out which ones to get into? https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1382-wrpg-canon

Planescape Torment is my favorite of these as well (for some more detailed thoughts see https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1382-wrpg-canon/35), but I gave up on Tides of Numenara after maybe 3-5 hours. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for it when I tried to play it, but it definitely felt less interesting to me.

yeso

spiderweb software branch just a straight line

Syzygy

You know what they say: it’s 2023, play Avernum already

deepspacefine

Syzygy I’ve never heard of this. Which does one start with, and where does one play it?

yeso

deepspacefine the geneforge games are interesting mechanically

TracyDMcGrath

I think they’re all on gog, but Jeff Vogel and his company Spiderweb Software have been making very good indie CRPGs for nearly 30 years or so. They’re definitely worth checking out, but would probably look a bit uninteresting on this map haha

TracyDMcGrath

Avernum: Escape From the Pit is probably the best entry point it’s a remake of a remake of the first game from 1994

TracyDMcGrath

Also might go without saying, and they probably aren’t the best place to start, but there are a ton of CRPGs before Wasteland. Interplay was making the Bard’s Tale series which Wasteland shares a lot with. Wizardry, Ultima, and Might and Magic were all huge franchises that started in the 80s but were getting regular new games up until the late 90s and were huge influences on all of the games on that list. Early 90s games like Darklands and the Gold Box DnD and Buck Rogers games were also massive influences on basically everyone working in this space as well.

A good place to look into those super old games that are probably more worth watching or reading about tham playing is https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com , a blog of someone who’s been playing through every crpg ever released in chronological order and is now into the 90s, and Scorpia, one the first big video game critics, she specialized in CRPGs and reviewed them for much of the 80s and 90s and was very influential in her own right, even getting in game jabs and shoutouts in some of the series she was reviewing.

sdate

tomjonjon the kind that would be fourty an ounce after californian taxes