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Older games tended to be more clear-cut than today. The CRPG games of the 1980s and 1990s were heavily concrete in their mechanics, often simulating aspects such as weight, weapon proficiency, class and spells, traps, and agility. By design, many of these games followed very closely the
Dungeons and Dragons rulesets of the day, which were very concrete in their own fashion. Many of these games were also dungeon crawlers and early MUDs, built from the ground up based on a ruleset that already existed.
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As noted in
previous articles, however, by the mid-1990s the CRPG market began to falter, primarily through bad game design, staleness of the overall genre, and poor coding by the game developers. Titles like
Fallout and
Bladur’s Gate rescued the CRPG market in the late 1990s, offering fresher takes on that concrete design than ever before and showing that even today, these type of games can still be quite popular.
Fallout continues to use both the VATS and SPECIAL system in combat and character creation.
Pillars of Eternity by inXile created their own ruleset, but use the ruleset in a way that offers more simulation and concrete statistic tracking as the primary feature of the game. So games focused on concrete mechanics are not going anywhere.
Abstract design has always been present, however, even in concrete games. The difference is the abstract design is taken for granted in older titles. CPRG games, because of their rule-heavy mechanics and general statistics, often handwaved some of the more abstract elements of their games as they were not the focus of the design. For console role-playing games, the abstract design took root in most instances, offering a “gameplay first” mentality in titles such as
Chrono Trigger and
Final Fantasy.
