Fairly recently, more and more multiplayer CRPGs have appeared. For instance, Diablo features a system by which different players can enter the same world and cooperate against the enemies, trade equipment, or, should they wish, kill one another. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), huge open-ended worlds with hundreds of interacting characters, have also appeared, pioneered by systems like Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron's Call.
An interesting entry into the CRPG world is Pokemon (a.k.a. Pocket Monsters), a fairly simplistic set of games whose main innovation is the replacement of the party by creatures that can be captured, collected, and trained for beetle fighting. Its success has been phenomenal, leading to a huge industry with many spin-off products, including other games, cartoons, and endless merchandise.
In 1997, a new Internet fad began. Influenced by console RPGs, a large group of young programmers and aficionados began creating independent CRPG games, based mostly on the gameplay and style of the older SNES and Genesis games. The majority of such games owe to simplistic game development kits such as the Japanese RPG Maker series. This started the Independent RPG Video Games movement.
Warcraft III is one of the modern computer role-playing games which has blurred the line between computer role-playing games and real-time strategy gamesMore recently, with the advent of games like Deus Ex and Warcraft 3, the idea of what it means to be a RPG has become blurred. Many non-RPG games are increasingly featuring aspects traditionally seen in RPGs, such as a skill system, experience, and dilemmas. Meanwhile, many self-declared RPGs, such as the more recent Zelda games, dispense altogether with traditional RPG aspects. The expansion of traditional RPG elements into 3-D game engines is creating a myriad of hybrid game categories, crowding successors to earlier representations of CRPGs.
The representation of RPG elements in first and third person shooters is indistinguishable from the game simply incorporating a story with cut-scenes and traditional FPS problem solving, and developments to the incorporation of the genre's usual character building (such as getting better weapons). As FPS develop and increase in these characteristics it remains to be seen whether the games will simply be called FPS (or TPS), break off into a new category of FPS/RPG, or just adopt the RPG name.
