Tenth Anniversary!

Today, the Ides of February, is the 10th anniversary of the CRPG Addict.

I have no long screed for you today. The value that I get from this project, my gratitude toward my readers and commenters, my hopes for the future, have mostly been encapsulated already in my recent 10th-anniversary entries:
             

• 10 Reasons I’m Still Blogging
• My 10 Most Controversial Opinions
• 10 Years of Commenters

             
I had originally planned to do a lot more of these, but most of my ideas required going through my blog from the beginning. I thought I was going to have time for that during the winter, but it turned out not to be the case. I might still get to a few more.

Today, I’d like to simply announce three things:

1. If you haven’t already noticed, we have a new banner! Sebastian from Switzerland, who previously made my GIMLET logo, put this together. (That’s part of my map of Fate: Gates of Dawn in the background.) I just love the shield.

2. I just posted a couple of helpful new pages. Both were created by longtime commenter Abacos, and the first organizes many of the games I’ve played into their series, both in a macro sense (e.g., “Forgotten Realms”) and a micro sense (e.g., “Infinity Engine”). Yes, he has places for those yet-to-come, too.

The second page is a long-awaited index of special topics entries over the years. Both are accessible from the right-hand navigation bar on desktop and from the top navigation menu on mobile.

3. Finally: You’re going to be seeing a fairly significant change on “The CRPG Addict”: a relaxing of my rules to allow me, slowly and cautiously, to move forward without necessarily finishing every game from the previous year.

I know this move will not be popular with everyone, but I feel it is necessary. After more than two years of work, I still have 23 games remaining in 1992. There are 80 for 1993. I’ve managed to cover 350 games in 10 years; that many again will barely get us through 1997. I want to play Baldur’s Gate and Morrowind again before I die, not to mention some classics that I’ve never played, like the first two Fallout games, Planescape: Torment, and Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates.

However, I’m going to put some strict rules on the endeavor, one of which is that at least one-third of the games that make up my “upcoming” list will be the earliest games that I have not yet played. I will thus still keep sweeping up the past, still finishing years, still designating “games of the year,” and so on.

Beyond that, I don’t really want to explain my rules just yet. I floated some ideas with my Patreon subscribers and received some great comments. I’m going to experiment with a few methods of selecting games from my long list. However, there is one rule that is very important for me, to ensure that my blog still remains chronologically relevant: I can play no game before its antecedents. I mean this in several ways:
            

• Direct antecedents: Icewind Dale must come before Icewind Dale II.

• Spiritual antecedents: Dark Souls must come before Lords of the Fallen because the latter is clearly designed to evoke the former.

• Technical antecedents: Neverwinter Nights must come before Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic because they both use the Aurora Engine.

• Cultural antecedents: Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes, the first Hungarian RPG, should come before any other RPGs from Hungary.

• Source antecedents: Even though they’re not part of the same specific series, Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny must come before The Dark Eye: Drakensang because they’re both based on The Dark Eye tabletop setting.

• Major thematic antecedents: The first game to do something significant should be played before other games that include the same element. For instance, Ultima Underworld should be played before any other dungeon crawler with continuous movement.

• Personnel antecedents: As the first BioWare game, Baldur’s Gate should come before any others from that developer.

           
You can see how this rule ensures that I won’t be jumping to Mass Effect 3 any time in the near future. Indeed, the “central tendency” of my blog will likely remain in the early 1990s for quite some time. Trust me for now, watch what happens over the next year, and we’ll do an evaluation on my next anniversary. In the meantime, help me by telling me if I’ve missed any clear antecedents. Thematic and technical ones are particularly difficult to look up. If you see a game on my “upcoming” list that shouldn’t be there, let me know and I’ll replace it with its antecedent, if I agree.

Thanks as always for your readership and participation. I have no intention of quitting or slowing down, and I look forward to the next 10 years!