GameSpotting: Dungeon Crawl

GameSpot has dished up another GameSpotting feature entitled Dungeon Crawl in which they discuss RPG improvements and shortcomings, among other things. Check it out:
With the biggest strength of the RPG genre identified and isolated, some game developers are refining the genre and stripping away the garbage. The best examples of RPG improvements are seen in Freedom Force and Star Wars: KOTOR. In both of these games, if one of your party members reaches zero health, he is just knocked out of the fight, not killed outright. This unrealistic but wonderful improvement results in better gameplay, because now the battles are more evenly matched, and you can keep fighting, even if you are down to just one man, instead of reloading every time the weakest member of your party gets killed. In most RPGs, a character that is lost in a battle is lost for good, and so reloading can be painful, frequent, and frustrating.