Yep. It has high production values and they're professional actors, but in style and essence it is basically how I've always played.When I look at CR, and how my goddaughter plays, and how people talk about young players expecting a game "like Critical Role", I... don't think I know what they mean by "like Critical Role" because... it isn't really groundbreaking in its style. It isn't all that dissimilar from the game I ran for her myself, honestly. And I've been playing D&D since the 80s.
You should hyphenate out-of-combat when you use it like this. I thought at first that you meant they wanted to get more from the combat rules and scenarios. Your point seemed incoherent to me until I re-read and realized you meant they wanted more rules for and scenarios focusing on things outside of combat.I personally think (and I think this dates back to the late 90's) that over time players have wanted more out of combat scenarios and more out of combat rules.
On a wargame perspective DnD is an awful evolution.
Combat grossly favor one side,
balance is crappy,
the referee also control one side,
I wonder why wargame lover would play dnd?
The game was LITERALLY adapted from a war game.
Which does not change the fact that the game was created primarily for combat.
Even modern D&D we can go through the PHB and DMG and MM and see how much of each is devoted to combat in some way vs not combat.