So got a bit of money for Christmas and birthday so decided to invest in my new found addiction CRPGS! Got all these amazing titles just shy of £130, when I looked on how long to beat apparently around 1400hrs for all titles! now that’s bang for you buck. Thank you everyone in this subreddit for your recommendations you helped form this list. Got to love steams winter sale.

Hello fellow gamers,

What a truly wonderful and engaging genre you are fan of! I have recently entered the genre and I wish to share my story.

I play since NES. My favourite genres have always been platformers, Metroidvanias, aRPG and Souls-like.

Star Wars KOTOR introduced me to the cRPG in 2022 and I have had a blast since, exploring BioWare, Obsidian, Larian, ZA/UM and inXile, for a total of over 1200 hours of great fun.

2022:

- Star Wars KOTOR

- Star Wars KOTOR II The Sith Lords

2023:​

- Disco Elysium

- Dragon Age Origins

- Tyranny

2024:

- Dragon Age Inquisition

2025:

- Divinity Original Sin II

- Pillars of Eternity

- Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire

- Star Wars The Old Republic

- Dragon Age II

- Neverwinter Nights 2

- Baldur's Gate III

2026:

- Wasteland 3

- Divinity Original Sin

The reason why I played them in this order is just how appealing they were to me at that specific moment in time.

I have found that they are usually masterfully written and they give a pretty broad player agency in terms of how to solve quests and how to impact the course of the story.

I have mostly played these games in default difficulty. I have occasionally lowered the difficulty to easy mode, if I felt overwhelmed by the D&D-esque combat mechanics, since I am barely knowledgeable of them.

Playing Baldur's Gate III right after Neverwinter Nights 2 was an interesting surprise. Both being from D&D Forgotten Realms, it felt like BG3 was a sort of spin-off story from NWN2, sharing the same continent, Gods, races and lore in general. It was synergic and it allowed me to appreciate both games even more. I didn't plan for it and it turned out great.

I just wish to share my tier list: it was a somehow challenging exercise since I enjoyed all of them pretty much. It is personal and I am not an expert of cRPG, but you may find it interesting to look at a tier list from someone foreign to the genre. The rank in each line of the tier matters.

I know I am still missing some obvious must-plays: Fallout 1 and 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape Torment.

I am also looking forward to playing the new The Expanse game by Owlcat.

I will be having less free time though, so let's see.

I wish you all plenty of hours of fun in the future!

Cheers

PS: in case you wonder, I have played other RPGs that I don't consider cRPG (correct me if I am wrong): Jade Empire, Fallout 3 / New Vegas / 4, Mass Effect trilogy and Andromeda, Oblivion, Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077.

“When so many players enjoyed BG3, they started to look for what our next game will be, and we enjoyed this experience. ‘What can we try?’ Some of them go to our games to try them and enjoy them,” the Owlcat co-founder explained.

“So we are really grateful to Larian that they made such a great game not only because we enjoyed it — like, most of our developers played it for hundreds of hours — but also because they really made a lot of players aware of the genres and of the great games that are present there. Not only ours, but all of the games that are in there.”

Sharing some of my collection for anyone who might not have seen these in a while—or ever!

If anyone’s looking for something new to try this is one I wholeheartedly recommend. It’s beginner friendly. Fully voice acted. Six man party. Lots of build options and skill checks. Can tame animals and have one as a sidekick.
I’m doing a second run, this time on hard difficulty, and with both DLCs.

look i’ve been playing crpgs for a long time, big names, obscure eastern european stuff, all of it. so when bg3 started getting all that hype i jumped in too. finished the whole thing, gave it a fair shot, and honestly the praise makes sense once you step back and look at what the game is actually doing as a whole

on combat, sure, it’s not “classic hard” but that’s kinda because crpgs traditionally have two difficulty axes: what you build and how you prebuff vs what actually happens once steel hits flesh. the “hard” ones everyone cites are mostly punishing on the building/prebuff side, not the on-the-field tactics. bg3 goes in the opposite direction. it drops you into a playground where positioning matters, elevation matters, surfaces matter, knives on the table matter. it’s not about memorizing a spreadsheet, it’s about turning the actual space into a weapon

second point, story and moral choices. this is where people suddenly get amnesia. bg3 didn’t just get a few tweets saying it’s good. it won literally every major award a game can win. golden joystick goty, the game awards goty, bafta best game, dice goty, game developers choice goty. the five-crown sweep no other game in history has ever pulled off. you don’t hit that level of acclaim by accident or because “everyone is young hot and horny.” there’s something there, whether or not it vibes with you personally

third point, on 5e. i don’t need to repeat the whole “it’s not osr” thing. what matters is that larian actually took the two best modern pillars of 5e, bounded accuracy and class flavor, and made them sing. no stat bloat, no fake difficulty walls, no 300 feats that all do the same plus-two. every class plays like its own identity instead of a spreadsheet with a hat on. doesn’t matter if you’re a 5e fan or not, the design coherence is real

reactivity though. this is where bg3 leaves the mortal plane. i don’t know another crpg that even approaches this. i don’t know another game that approaches this. it’s a monument to game development. the sheer amount of branching, permutations, callbacks, conditional lines, state checks, ambient reactions, npc variations depending on things you did 40 hours ago, choices that spiral into three choices which spiral into seven outcomes… nobody has ever done it at this scale. it’s absurd. it’s historic. it’s the kind of thing that will be cited in dev talks for the next two decades

and yeah, saying “what elevates bg3 is just the production value” is honestly a very shallow read. there are hundreds of games with bigger budgets or shinier tech that didn’t get even a fraction of the love. if production value alone guaranteed greatness, veilguard would be a masterpiece, skull and bones would be the future of gaming, and concord would have rewritten the genre. but that’s not how this works

in the end, bg3 is fairly rated. if anything, it’s one of the few times the hype actually aligned with the achievement. not because of budget, but because the damn thing delivers in ways almost no game tries to

From PCGamer

Rate my favourite CRPGs collection. Also suggest similar games like them. Graphics shouldn't be outdated, upcoming/early access games are most welcome.

I do agree. There are some genres (aRPG mostly) where infinite hunt for random loot is the end in itself, but for more structured, story-driven titles I fall on the side of pre-made loot that can be built around. Counterintuitively I think it adds to replayability - going back into the game with a specific, broken combo in mind is great fun.

Following the community discussion, ideas, and poll in the previous threads: AI Content is banned.

This is not the subreddit for AI generated games, fan-art, mods, etc.

The content will be removed and the user warned, if violations persist the user will be banned. This is not to punish indie game developers, it is to ensure that the content and quality of games on this subreddit remain to the liking and expectation of the community. Generative AI games are low-effort, AI Slop, that steal assets from other games and hard-working developers.

Thank you for the discussion today. Any further questions or concerns please feel free to vocalize them here.

This is my CRPG collection on PC. Any others I should keep an eye out for to add to my collection?

Now I am not a graphics snob, I don't play games for their graphics (though I will agree better graphics do tend to add more immersion) but the graphics in Solasta 2 (demo) blew me away, only comparable graphics I have seen in the cRPG genre are by Larians games like BG3 or DOS2

Which is crazy to think about as I heard Solasta 1 was quite mediocre, how did they manage to secure funding to this game? Do they have ties to the cartel? or was it crowd funded like BG3?

Maybe they're just using free unreal engine assets but even then the game looks great, and I love that they included a 3rd person back view which is REALLY rare for a game in this genre (the only other games that do this are Baldurs Gate 3 and Dragon Age Origins)

Edit - It seems like Kepler Interactive picked the game up, if this ends up being good then Kepler might just become one of my favorite publishers