Tim Cain knows better than nearly anyone that the earliest computer RPGs – like Fallout, which he helped create – had a huge advantage over their feeble brethren on consoles, which were afflicted with hardware limitations for at least two decades. After that, we were living in a post-Morrowind society.
"In the '80s, console RPGs were incredibly primitive. I'm talking, stone knives and bear skins," Cain says on his YouTube channel in response to a fan question wondering about how consoles changed the RPG market over time. "I mean, tabletop RPGs were really the way to go if you wanted really in-depth rules, but even computer RPGs had more complex rules than console RPGs, because everything from the graphics, to the system mechanics, and sound effects all had to be really, really simplified and reduced to fit in that very limited memory storage that it had, and CPU bandwidth."
"To me, console RPGs were kind of like toys that you could kind of play," Cain continues. Their controllers demanded select screens rather than the point-and-drag you could accomplish on PC, and checkpoint saves were a necessity for preserving their limited storage. But "all of this changed in 2002," when Bethesda launched The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
"Morrowind came out on the Xbox. It was an open-world Western RPG that felt like it had none of the limitations of previous console games," says Cain. "It was a PC game playing on an Xbox."
"It stunned me when it came out, because I remember thinking, 'This…this is it,'" he adds. "Not so much because of what the game was, but what it represented, which was – from now on, there's going to be a lot more parity between these two things.
GamesRadar+'s Morrowind review apparently published in 2006 frothily declares "a new standard in role-playing games. [Morrowind is] astonishing in its depth and detail, and also sets a new benchmark in graphics."
Morrowind was an in-depth spectacle – and not easily replicated. Cain thinks that buggy launches became more common for console games by at least the mid-2000s, once the Xbox 360 and PS3 had established digital storefronts where people could directly buy and download their games, which "meant it was also easy to patch them."
"Maybe this was a coincidence, maybe it wasn't," Cain says generously, "but, suddenly, console games seemed to ship with bugs in a way they had never shipped with bugs before. They weren't as tight. Then, by the 2010s and 2020s, it felt like parity had been established and reached between PCs and consoles." With both of them covered in bugs, PC and console had reached equality at last.
