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CRPG Renaissance

When players paid for the old-style role-playing game

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From 2012, veterans of Interplay, Black Isle and Troika asked players on Kickstarter to pay for the kind of party-based, isometric computer role-playing game that publishers would no longer fund. Wasteland 2, Project Eternity (Pillars of Eternity), Torment: Tides of Numenera and Divinity: Original Sin raised millions between them, and the revival led, by 2023, to Larian's Baldur's Gate 3.

In 2012 the people who had made the great computer role-playing games of the late 1990s stopped asking publishers for money and asked the players instead. Brian Fargo, who had published Fallout and Baldur’s Gate at Interplay, wanted $900,000 for a sequel to Wasteland and got nearly $3 million. Six months later Obsidian Entertainment, founded by Black Isle’s leaders, raised almost $4 million for a game in the style of Baldur’s Gate. The party-based role-playing game seen from above, with its long conversations and pausable or turn-based fights, came back. Eleven years later a descendant of the same line, Baldur’s Gate 3, won Game of the Year.

Fast facts

  • Started: 2012, after Double Fine’s adventure-game Kickstarter.
  • First role-playing campaigns: Wasteland 2 (inXile, March 2012) and Project Eternity, later Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian, September 2012).
  • Other funded games: Shadowrun Returns, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Divinity: Original Sin, Pathfinder: Kingmaker.
  • Crowdfunding sites: Kickstarter; later Fig.
  • Later landmark: Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023).

The Infinity Engine years

The games the revival looked back to were made in a burst between 1997 and 2000. By the late 1990s, as Computer Gaming World later put it, “everyone said that RPGs are dead”. Then came Interplay’s Fallout (1997) and Baldur’s Gate (1998), made by BioWare and published under Interplay’s Black Isle Studios label. Baldur’s Gate sold more than a million copies. “Remember when everyone said that RPGs are dead?” the magazine asked in 1999. “Now, following the massive success of Baldur’s Gate, the genre is hotter than ever.” BioWare’s Infinity Engine, which drew Baldur’s Gate’s 2D world and let the player pause a real-time fight to give orders, went on to run Black Isle’s Planescape: Torment (1999) and Icewind Dale (2000). The Western RPG entry tells that story.

It did not last. Interplay lost money and in 2001 passed to Titus; Black Isle was closed in 2003, and Troika Games, founded by Fallout’s makers, shut in 2005 after failing to find a publisher for another game. Looking back in 2019, Wireframe described the fans of the old style as “hardly catered for through the lean decade-and-a-bit” that followed.

Kickstarter, 2012

The spark came from an adventure game. On 8 February 2012 Tim Schafer of Double Fine asked players for $400,000 to make a point-and-click adventure. More than 87,000 backers pledged $3,336,371 on Kickstarter, and, Retro Gamer reported, “a whole wave of other developers” followed.

Fargo, by then running inXile Entertainment, was one of the first. Publishers had turned down his Wasteland sequel. At one meeting, he told Edge, sitting beside the Fallout co-creator Jason Anderson, “the executive was text messaging during the entire presentation”. On 13 March 2012 inXile asked Kickstarter for $900,000, with Fargo offering $100,000 of his own money if it got that far. The campaign closed at $2,933,252, raised in 30 days. Fargo later explained the moment to Wireframe: “It was clear that the RPG audience wanted to return to the gameplay of the isometric games from the nineties… Previously, we were kept apart due to retailers not wanting to support the category, or lack of publisher funding, but Kickstarter and digital sales allowed us to break down those walls.”

Obsidian had made its living for years on sequels to other studios’ games. After Double Fine’s success its co-founder Chris Avellone wrote that player funding was “proof certain genres aren’t dead and sequels may have more legs than they seem. And the idea of not having to argue that with a publisher is appealing.” In September 2012 Obsidian asked for $1.1 million for Project Eternity, a party-based game in the style of the Infinity Engine games, set in a world of its own. It closed in October with $3,986,929 from 73,986 backers, the most any video game had raised on Kickstarter at that time, with more pledged through PayPal. Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun Returns, reached its $400,000 target in 28 hours and finished on $1,836,447.

More campaigns, 2013

In March 2013 inXile went back to Kickstarter for Torment: Tides of Numenera, a successor to Planescape: Torment. It asked for $900,000 and raised $4,188,927, more than Project Eternity, and brought Planescape: Torment’s writer Chris Avellone on board. The Belgian studio Larian, which had made its Divinity role-playing games since 2002 for a small audience, crowdfunded Divinity: Original Sin. Wireframe thought a computer role-playing game “seemed a risky choice when the campaign launched, given the genre had been written off as dead”, but Larian raised more than £750,000.

The games arrive

The games took longer to make than the campaigns promised, but they came.

Game Developer Released Crowdfunding
Divinity: Original Sin Larian 2014 Kickstarter, more than £750,000
Wasteland 2 inXile September 2014 Kickstarter, $2,933,252
Pillars of Eternity Obsidian March 2015 Kickstarter, $3,986,929
Torment: Tides of Numenera inXile 2017 Kickstarter, $4,188,927
Divinity: Original Sin II Larian 2017 Kickstarter
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Obsidian 2018 Fig, about $4.4 million
Pathfinder: Kingmaker Owlcat 2018 Kickstarter, $909,057
Wasteland 3 inXile 2020 Fig

Divinity: Original Sin was the one that changed its studio. Wireframe recorded “huge amounts of praise for its atmosphere, writing, and old-school RPG sensibilities”, and wrote that after its launch “the studio suddenly became hugely respected across the industry”. Crowdfunding also launched new studios: the Russian studio Owlcat Games, whose Pathfinder: Kingmaker used Paizo’s tabletop rules, raised about $2 million on Kickstarter for its follow-up, Wrath of the Righteous (2021).

Fig, a crowdfunding site Fargo had set up himself, paid for Obsidian’s Deadfire and inXile’s Wasteland 3. In November 2018 Microsoft bought both Obsidian and inXile.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Larian was then handed Baldur’s Gate, the series that Wireframe called “such a huge influence on the studio”. Baldur’s Gate 3 came out in August 2023 and won Game of the Year at The Game Awards that year. By December 2025, Larian’s founder Swen Vincke told Bloomberg, it had sold more than 20 million copies.

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