The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games

The computer role-playing game is the oldest ambition in the medium: put a whole person inside a machine. Not a score, not a run, a person, with a sheet of numbers standing in for a soul, choices that close doors behind you, and a world that remembers what you did in it. The genre was born twice in 1981, when Wizardry and Ultima shipped within months of each other, and it has never really stopped arguing with itself since: turn-based or real-time, party or lone wanderer, prewritten hero or blank sheet.

This is our complete guide. The hub you are reading maps the whole territory by era. From here, dedicated guides go deep on the golden age, the dungeon crawler, Dungeons & Dragons on the PC, the Kickstarter renaissance, the post-apocalyptic school, the European tradition, and the science-fiction RPG. Every era gets its shelf; every shelf is a door.

The first age

Between 1981 and 1999 the CRPG went from wireframe mazes to Planescape: Torment, which is roughly the distance from cave painting to the Sistine Chapel in eighteen years. Wizardry and Ultima set the two poles early: the dungeon as a system to be beaten, and the world as a place to be lived in. SSI's Gold Box games put real Dungeons & Dragons rules on a floppy disk, Wasteland made the wasteland itself the author, and by the time Fallout and Baldur's Gate arrived the genre had learned to write. Our golden age guide covers all of it in depth.

The winter, and the spring that followed

Between roughly 2004 and 2011 the classic CRPG nearly died. Publishers wanted cinematic action; isometric parties and dice rolls read as a rounding error in a console budget. The form survived in exile: in Germany and Poland, where Gothic and The Witcher kept the faith, and in a handful of American studios burning goodwill to ship New Vegas in eighteen months. Then, in 2012, a few laid-off veterans asked the internet directly, and the internet said yes to the tune of four million dollars at a time. The Kickstarter class of 2012 to 2019 did not just revive the genre. It shipped some of the best games the genre has ever produced.

The schools

Every CRPG belongs to a lineage, and the lineages are the real map. The dungeon crawler descends from Wizardry through Dungeon Master to Legend of Grimrock. The D&D line runs from the Gold Box through the Infinity Engine to Baldur's Gate 3. The post-apocalyptic school starts at Wasteland and never left the desert. The European tradition, Gothic to The Witcher to Kingdom Come, builds hand-made worlds that do not care whether you survive them. And science fiction gave the genre its conscience, from Mass Effect's crew to Citizen Sleeper's rented body. Each school has its own guide below; each guide carries the full shelf.

The studios that built the genre

The CRPG has always been a studio genre: a handful of rooms, most of them now legendary, a few of them still shipping. Interplay hatched Fallout and published Baldur's Gate. Sir-Tech built Wizardry and kept it weird for twenty years. Origin stamped 'We Create Worlds' on the box and meant it. BioWare, Obsidian, Larian and Owlcat carried the torch into the present tense. Each has a full profile.