I’ve only played a few hours of CRPGs before this year, and I bounced off my first one hard. Divinity: Original Sin 2 was my first foray into the genre, at the behest of a housemate who had poured three figures of hours into it. He knew I liked fantasy, and we’d played Civilisation together for countless hours already, so he knew I wasn’t averse to whiling my life away in front of a screen, so it was a good recommendation.
I played for around a dozen hours, enough to finish the first island that tutorialised the myriad systems in play. As the vastness of Divinity’s huge continent dawned on me, I knew I needed to respec. I’d just guessed at attributes and made a half-arsed character thus far, and I wanted to do things properly if I was to continue in the game. I wasn’t going to min-max it or anything, but specialising is key in tactical games like this, so I knew I needed to start over. The problem was, I couldn’t be bothered doing the whole tutorial all over again, even if it would be quicker the second time around. I never touched the game again.
My next foray into CRPGs was with Disco Elysium, which I (and everybody else) loved. However, it lies on the peripheries of the CRPG genre, refusing to be labelled and having key distinctions from other games of its ilk. So, while I lapped up every line of Studio ZA/UM’s masterpiece, I didn’t turn to other CRPGs. They wouldn’t be exactly like Disco Elysium, so what was the point?
As with many things, I’ve come around to CRPGs thanks to Warhammer. Warhammer got me into the Total War series, Warhammer boxed games like Silver Tower and Space Hulk got me into wider tabletop play, and now Warhammer has got me into CRPGs. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, to be precise.
Rogue Trader is brilliant. I’ve already talked about how it nails the bureaucracy and tedium of the 41st millennium, as well as how much I want to 3D print my character, the warp-born swashbuckler Teresa Valpuren. She’s intelligent and methodical – but can hold her own with a sniper rifle if the situation requires it – and I love navigating through the galaxy with her. It’s the first game I’ve played this year that has truly blown me away, and I’ll likely have finished with the beta just as Baldur’s Gate 3 launches in late August.
I’ve not played any of the Baldur’s Gate betas or demos, as I wasn’t too interested before now. But the devastating combination of a new interest in CRPGs and my first game of vanilla D&D means I’m suddenly and surprisingly excited for its release. Starfield excites me too, and the two releasing so close to one another may mean that Bethesda’s space RPG overshadows Larian’s fantasy tale, but I know I’ll come back to it. It’ll probably take me a week to create my character, so I’ll just spend my time fine tuning them before jumping into Starfield, only actually playing any of BG3 after I’ve gotten bored traveling the stars.
After that, the whole genre will be open to explore. Maybe I’ll stick to known entities and play the early Fallout games or Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe I’ll explore Owlcat’s famous Pathfinder games, seeing as I like its treatment of the Warhammer universe so much. There’s a whole world waiting for me to explore, and while it may not scratch the surface of Starfield’s 1,000 planets, I imagine I’ll be able to dig far deeper beneath the surface when I land.