The Glade 4.0

RPG's aim not to tell the story of a character or to provide narrative, they aim to have an emotional impact by creating a link between character and player. They aim to put you into a character's shoes and mind set, hoping to elicit sadness when they hurt, happiness when they succeed, and all the emotions in between. The personal connection is what matters, not the fact that you can level up, get higher stats and change your gear.

So what I'm hearing from Lenas and Riov is that Half-Life is an excellent RPG.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

RPG doesn't fall into a play style like you could say for FPS or RTS games. So I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you.

Heavy Rain is probably one of my favorites, but that's classified as an action adventure game.

Ooh. And we can't forget Gears of War. Man, when Marcus felt pain, did I feel pain.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Alright, be snarky. You guys are right, every single game ever created is a role playing game.

**** that, you're being so obtuse it's frustrating. There are no options in Super Mario or Gears of War. No choices that the player needs to make, nothing to put you in their shoes. You move forward, you kill enemies, or you lose. The illusion of choices, whether they have different outcomes or not, is what helps create the character connection that I'm talking about. Running down a hallway shooting Locust and seeing a cutscene when they're dead is not what I'm talking about.

A serendipitous quote:

This is a stupid argument. Since the games do not have to fit a specific definition -indeed many games cross through many genres, there is no single defining characteristic or bright line that defines a RPG versus some FPS. The fact of the matter is that Games like Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3 & NV, are far closer to RPG than any other classification, and attempts to pull out one quality and claim its not an RPG based on playing the game outside the 'primary' method of playthrough is absurd.

How can you avoid it? I finished it in like six hours.

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Raell Kromwell

You install a mod that obviates the need for the opening sequence and thus allows you to access all of the content (narrative or otherwise) in the game except for the Companions and the Main Quest.

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I'm fairly certain that the one thing we can take away from your posts and Lenas's contribution is that narrative quality matters; no matter how much you both want to say it does not, every definition, standard, or characteristic you're put before me relies on narrative and narrative quality.

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Narrative is a part of it, but something having a narrative does not make it an RPG. At no point did I say narrative did not matter.

I'm pointing out that a game with all the qualities you state are part of an RPG must have a compelling, competent narrative to be an RPG. Skyrim does not. It's pretty simple: you cannot achieve the level of immersion and character attachment an RPG relies upon without a competent and compelling narrative. If that narrative is lacking, the game is something else. Sandbox games have fairly universally terrible narratives (there are exceptions, and I'd include those in the RPG category).

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Even playing Skyrim modded as you have still provides a changing world condition as the game progresses. There is still character advancement as your reputation increases, and your relationship with NPCs changes.

What you're really saying is that "When I go out of my way to ignore the narrative my game doesn't have all the signposts of a traditional RPG" -- The game itself, *IS* you're just hacking out that part of it, using it only as a 3D fantasy engine and then whining about how its not really a RPG because its missing the parts you chopped out.

having a "compelling, competent" narrative is not a requirement. It may be that there does have to be some form of narrative to be a rpg, but just because something executes something poorly doesn't mean its not a member of that class.

The 71 Ford Pinto may be a poorly executed car, but its still a car.

Not one bit, since Skyrim only has nominal faction tracking elements and primarily relative to fixed, major arc factions. If character progression is the defining part, then we need to include

Hacking out parts? I don't have to hack anything out. In fact, the main narrative and all of that content is still accessible in my modded game. You can play through it, trigger it, even get the starting sequence to play and get a free re-roll if you maintain that option. The point of Skyrim is not the narrative: the primary narrative content is secondary; ancillary to all of the work and effort put into the fantasy simulation engine that is the game. See Raell's post for more confirmation that the main narrative is not the core or even a high level component: 6 hours in a game people average 300-400 hours playtime with on time. 2% of the game is the primary narrative? You really wanna say that the 98% is subordinate to the 2% almost all of us are ignoring?

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I'm not really arguing for Skyrim to be called an RPG. I tend to agree with you about the game, actually. My only gripe was applying the RPG label to things like mario, or indeed, every game ever made.

Depends on how big you want taxonomic umbrellas to be. The 71 Pinto, incidentally, wasn't poorly executed. 32 mpg highway, 25 mpg city, ample space for 2 adults and 2+2 seating. I assuming you're basing your opinion of execution based on Nader's deliberate misinformation about rear-end collisions and explosions? That's minor though ...

If you want a meaningful taxonomy for video games, then the details matter and the quality of individual components, their weighting relative to the rest of the title by the developers, and the amount of content they represent overall matters. Quite honestly, I participate in this part of the forum primarily for giggles: you guys think I'm overly negative and critical; I think most of you have an insufficient consideration of our ostensibly shared interest -- video games. I generally have a very specific list of things a game did wrong; the things a game does right never reach the front of my mind, because if a game is doing what it should, I'm not analyzing its execution or mechanical systems for faults to work around.

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In fairness, Khross wasn't arguing that all games are RPGs. He was arguing with my definition of an RPG, (by making the bizarre argument that the characteristics I ascribed to RPGs are present in all games-- they're not), but at no time did he argue that Mario was a RPG.

The only three realistic ways to do that would be
a) to not allow characters to go off the rails, which eliminates choice and takes it out of the RPG genre to me, but accomplishes your narrow focus on narrative
b) Offer a limited number of choices which hampers player freedom (KOTOR), and destroys immersion
c) determine a world and story that can adapt on the fly. Way way outside our current programming capabilities, this can only be done by a flesh & blood GM.

It was sometime in the '80s that the question "What is a role playing game?" started to be pontificated on. Since then, of course, it's been non-stop. Every newly published game designer takes their crack at it. Here's just a few bits from some PDFs I have at hand.



Once CRPGs started to be a widely distributed thing, the statements started to modify a bit. I suspect if Lord British has ever gone on record with a statement, you'd see the start of the fork. Obviously, it took him a few tries to get his mechanical systems down enough that he could actually start exploring the role-play aspect, but he got there, and was one of the earliest to do so.

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Sorry Riov, a limited number of options does not destroy immersion. An unlimited amount of options, on the other hand, makes me lose interest in a game world faster than you can drop a hat.

That's not so much my position as the argumentative tack for pointing out that TheRiov's definitions are neither specific or functional enough. I'm not trolling; I'm trying to have an honest conversation about how we (and we is the Glade, because for this I really don't care about the rest of the internet) classify and describe games.

Role play is a fundamental part of EVERY video game. A "role playing game," however, centers itself on the role play. The player assumes a personage, persona, or identity (I could probably get broader here, because there are some neat indie takes on MUDs and MUSHes), but that component is shared with every video game. Older games, Pong, abstracted the human part as necessary, but the human role still exists. Pong is a tennis game. The paddle is your racket. Your motions, amusingly, translate almost 1:1 with paddle travel on the original units. In SMB, you're playing Mario. That's role-play. Whether or not SMB is an RPG, that's another question.

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Even if we use that premise, that is a definition of RPG's that you assigned to me, not one that I made.

I guess at the end of the day, my thoughts toward the genre are thus: you aren't playing one if you don't have the option of choice, illusory or otherwise. It's those choices that put you into the actual role of the character, instead of being in the role of player and just controlling the character. It's the difference between being a director and being an actor.

I'm not sure i like the analogy Lenas, but I get what youre saying. Actors are an integral part of the creative process. A game player in a non rpg has no creative input

But even d&d can be just a tactical simulator. Rpg involves what the player brings to it

He used the same argument to try to convince me that SW:TOR isn't a good MMO because he chose not to play any of the multi-player content.