Niche Gamer - A Brief History of the European CRPG

There's a fairly comprehensive article on Niche Gamer dealing with the history of European style CRPGs examing why they appeared in the first place and how they relate to their American and Japanese style siblings.

Two excerpts:

European CRPGs are, as anyone who has played any within the past 15 years can tell, markedly different than their American-made counterparts. This difference is seen most strongly in the combat and world navigation systems, which are often very hard to grasp or lack the kind of feedback and ease-of-use that most gamers have been taught to expect. Lacking instantaneous fast travel options, quest markers, and having melee attacks that are often difficult to pull off without hours of practice, many mistake them as having been poorly designed. In reality, they are merely emulating the style of CRPG that existed in the 1980s. A style that, unlike America, Europe did not abandon.

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Though Gothic didn’t outsell Morrowind, it did manage to create a strong interest for more of the games in the states. Enough of an interest for several European-based publishers to take a risk and begin sending their games stateside. Thanks to Gothic’s success, and the European CRPG renaissance it kicked off, several of the most beloved CRPGs of the 2000s were made by developers who were not from North America or Japan.