good morning from Brazil.I was playing Oblivion after playing M&M3 and I started to think about the main differences between old and new CRPGs.
I created this topic for discussion between the differences and I ask to not fall under a flame war.
the first thing about it is the quest system.back them you got to take notes,memorize where to go,who to talk and what to do,now is all marked in your map and I feel that the game is holding my hand.
PS:I didn't watched highlander 2 and epic movie,instead I watched Men in Tights and Spaceballs

It's called user-friendly.

One of the main differences between old and new crpg is the dumbing down on stats. Used o be it was all stat based for character creation where you can fine tune strength,dexterity etc now with the like of skyrim most of this is removed.

Also most new crpg are shorter than the old ones many lasting 30-40 hours compared to the 200+ hours of Baulders Gate 2.

Skrim tends to be different as its more open world but a lot of other new games seem to feel short.

I like not having to write everything down. A well sorted journal was a great innovation for the genre, but do I need a floating arrow where to go or everything highlighted? No, still got a few functioning cells left in my brain.

New CRPGs are fairly cinematic. Many old CRPGs barely had a story at all.

You can play an entire game without dyeing or with only dyeing a few times.

Ultima 4 to 8 have exellent stories,Fallout 1 and 2 also have great stories

What no mention of PS:T and BG2??

Even the SSI gold boxers had fairly good plots, albeit ones that refered you to specific pages in an actualy physical book to read to yourself at the relevent times!

Voice acting. It nearly killed the genre. Were you had plenty of information given to you by NPCs, you nowadays get a questmarker ....

wut

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didn't play those.I'm buying them on christmas

That's the most creative misspelling of Baldur's Gate I've seen to date ;-)

Oblivion isn't an RPG. If it is then so is Dead Island. Both games have a completely meaningless levelling system, quests and bugger all else in common with RPGs. So if one is then they both must be. In my book, Dead Island is sure as hell not an RPG. So nor is Oblivion.

So that's why Oblivion doesn't seem anything like an old school RPG. You might as well be calling Diablo an RPG.

Note that I'm not calling these crap games. I'm saying that mislabelling them creates false expectations that can make them seem to fall far short of perceived goals they never in fact actually had.

Lol was good lack of sleep and not enough caffine.

I have been playing CRPGs since the early 1980s. I say contemporary CPRGs are, generally, far superior than ancient CRPGs in so many ways: storytelling, execution, choices, user interface, etc. The only reason why people would say older CRPGs are better is because of nostalgia, and old people always think the games (or music, or movies, or TV shows) from their time are better than the new stuff.

Characters = stories.

Mass Effect characters have dynamic facial expressions and body languages during the actual gameplay. That really, really improves the overall experience of the storytelling -- by a lot. Before Mass Effect, I had always thought the stiff, expressionless NPCs in CRPGs were huge distractions. It's hard to suspend disbelief and get into the story when I watched a bunch of poor, lousy "performers" on-screen. I had hoped that someday I would see lifelike characters with dynamic on-screen performances in a CRPG. Mass Effect finally fulfilled my wish.

I consider Mass Effect and its dynamic characters as a watershed moment in the evolution of CRPG. I am surprised that, even though Mass Effect has already been out for a few years now, no other CRPG developers have followed suit. (Surprisingly, the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic will have old-style NPCs with no expression. That is why I am skipping it. That and I absolutely refuse to play MMO.)

Video game is supposed to be a visual medium. Newer CRPGs are becoming more and more "visual". Newer CRPGs show instead of tell the stories. Older CRPGs, due to limitation of old technology, often told instead showed us the stories. Case in point: Planescape: Torment, which has a good story. Unfortunately, Planescape too often tells instead of shows us the story. The game would use long-winded descriptions to narrate parts of the actions, fights, etc. instead of just showing us on-screen. That is a major weakness of older CRPGs. Nowadays, games can just play out the entire action or transition scenes on-screen instead of giving us a long-winded written narration, which is really not the good way to tell a story in a visual medium.