It was a damn good article.

All games are getting more casual and easy. Its just the way it is.

Fallout came out 10 years ago. That game, and a few similar titles that followed (Planescape: Torment, etc.) clearly defined what the future of the genre should have been.
The designers of these games understood the player's role as central protagonist in an interactive story; entire gameworlds were designed to provide ways for the player to make his desires known so that the game could respond appropriately. This is the primary distinction between output from this period and output in the present day; there is very little effort expended towards accommodating player choice, beyond a token selection of "good guy" and "bad guy" dialog options in scripted encounters. As a medium for interactive storytelling, the genre has not progressed in 10 years.

Everything seemed to end when Black Isle got the axe, not because Fallout 2 and Icewind Dale sold badly, but because Interplay ran itself into the ground. Troika only lasted a few years. There doesn't seem to be anyone left with the imagination to produce this kind of game and the business sense to deliver it to its audience.

Most of the opposition to making another game like Fallout is a lot of baseless hand-wringing, mainly having to do with the industry-wide phobia of turn-based systems in western RPGs. There's a vocal crowd who insist that turn-based systems were an archaic means of dealing with technological limitations; that they no longer serve any purpose. This is a lie. Turn-based gameplay is essential if you want to allow a range of possible actions greater than what a human being can select by mouse or hotkey in a few seconds of real-time play.
There's also the fact that a game of this type demands that resources actually be put towards gameplay, rather than superficial graphical upgrades.
Scenarios need to be planned, characters need to be developed, environments designed, branching story paths scripted and reams of dialog prepared to accommodate responses to the broadest range of player choices possible. If your first priority is competing graphically with The Elder Scrolls, that's not going to happen. Creative solutions to the graphics problem could be found but, again, that would take imagination.

We're in bad shape if Bethesda is leading the pack, when their work is some of the most misguided, unimaginative stuff you'll ever see. The period when you could see some progressive story ideas on a retail shelf may be over, for now. Wait and see if someone else is up for the financial risk; otherwise, the new direction will have to emerge from the primordial ooze of the "indie games" world (give it a couple decades.)

http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/

Makes good old style stuff. I enjoyed the first Geneforge quite a bit. It has interesting moral choices.

I remember, as a young game programmer in the mid-to-late 90's, being told by some bigwigs at my parent company, "We do not believe there is a substantial market for RPGs at this time."

RPGs were dead. Kaput. Dead genre. Nothing to see here. The "market" had all gone off to play first-person-shooters and real-time-strategy games, or had kids and given up playing games.The market had just gone away. Roleplaying games didn't sell. They had gone the way of the dinosaur, lost in the inevitable progress of evolution.

That was the prevailing wisdom. Or rather, that HAD been the prevailing wisdom at a couple of years earlier. By the time these guys told me that, the winds had already changed. Diablo had happened. Baldurs Gate had happened. Final Fantasy VII had happened.

Then one day these execs and marketers woke up and found out that a third of the top-20 games on the PC and Playstation were RPGs. What was their response?

"The market has changed to be more favorable to RPGs."

Yeah. That's it. The market had changed. It wasn't that people had finally come out with decent games that were actually worth the consumer's money, combined with decent marketing and a little bit of good luck. Nope. Instead, all the gamers in the world instead just came to the conclusion at the same time that... wow... they actually liked RPGs after all.

So yeah, I get a little suspicious about "common wisdom" about what the market will or will not prefer. It's really just a case of the industry attempting to clone the success of the most recent hit(s), same as every other genre. What gets called "evolution" is really just a race to one-up the competition in a battle to do a bigger, better clone of the last hit. And then we count the resulting consumer ennui as a "cooldown in the market."

Until some other game comes along that throws conventional wisdom on its ear.

Kinda like Diablo did, when "RPGs were dead," and it pretty much started out with the idea of taking the gameplay from the age-old ASCII game "Rogue" and turning it into something another segment of the market might like...

Ah, was waiting for this one. Thanks.