CRPGs in the classic style are pretty common these days, from massive revivals of beloved series like Baldur's Gate 3 to throwbacks from storied developers like Pillars of Eternity and even fully indie projects like SKALD: Against the Black Priory. But once upon a time, the genre seemed all but dead – thanks in part to retailers who believed nobody wanted to buy them.
That's according to Josh Sawyer, delivering a keynote address at the GCAP 2025 conference (as transcribed by our friends at PC Gamer). Sawyer is now studio design director at Obsidian, and these days is probably best known as lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas, but his early credits include beloved CRPG classics like Icewind Dale.
Icewind Dale and its sequel were both built on the Infinity Engine, a piece of technology developed by BioWare that was initially used for Baldur's Gate. This engine gave shape to the traditional, isometric role-playing games that the term "CRPG" now conjures, but despite how beloved these games were (and still are), by the mid-'00s they had very much fallen out of favor.
"The reason we stopped making Infinity Engine games was because retailers told us no one wanted to buy them," Sawyer says. "We asked if we could see the research and they basically told us to trust them."
As Sawyer explains, this was a period where brick and mortar stores were still the only place for most developers to sell their games, and retailers were very picky about what they stocked – and, since they often had the power to make publishers buy back unsold stock, they had a lot of leverage on the types of games getting made. But then, Sawyer continues, digital distribution changed things, giving studios of all sizes fewer barriers to getting their games into players' hands.
Of course, digital distribution has created issues of its own – most notably the fact that there are now so many games launching every day that it's tough for any one of them to get noticed. But it's also meant that fans of niche genres, whether that be CRPGs, point-and-click adventure games, or even match-3 hentai puzzlers, have more options for what to play than ever before.
The best RPGs out there today owe no shortage of debt to the CRPG classics that came before.
