Geo Da Sponge said:
Thespian said:
It's not tedious, it must not be an RPG, blargh!
No. It is an RPG, it just is not a traditional RPG. People get terrified when things don't fit their exact specifications. The most important aspect of a Role Playing Game is that you play a role... Anything beyond that is a variation.
For example, FPS games are often known for sacrificing good writing for action packed scenes and fast-paced combat, but does this mean that Half-Life or Portal don't count? Of course they do. The core aspect of an FPS (it's in first person and you shoot...) is still there, thus it is still an FPS.
Same with Mass Effect as an RPG.
I'll just agree with this guy and leave, because this argument has boiled down to:
"It's an RPG! It has all the gameplay elements of an RPG!"
"Yeah, but they're not RPGy
enough."
Actually there is no arguement involved in this. It's not an RPG.
Let me explain something, being an RPG has nothing to do with storyline, dialogue, or moral choices. Those are all things tacked onto the framework. The reason why it's a "Role playing game" is not because you act the part of a role, as much as it's the role your playing that determines the outcome of events. A good way of demonstrating this is the combat. In Mass Effect 2 if you put the targeting recticle over an opponent and hit attack your bullets go straight to the target and do damage. There is no variable there other than your abillity to aim ena dhoot. In Mass Effect 1, the determining factor was the weapon skill of the character. If you were unskilled with a weapon or the opponent has substantial defenses, you could line up a shot perfectly and still miss because the role your playing isn't good enough at shooting to make the shot your trying for. It's that dependance on stats for outcomes rather than player abillity that makes something an RPG. If your a pure action gamer you probably think this idea is stupid, if your an RPG gamer that's what your looking for. There are plenty of people who appreciate both styles of gaming, but many more who look down on the other camp.
I think a lot of the arguement is based around the idea that RPGs have a reputation for being for smart people. This comes from them being a purely intellecual exercise, and the kind of person who can get satisfaction of playing with numbers and seeing the results in a somewhat detached format. Action games on the other hnd are generally accepted as something that any meathead can play and appreciate. The general result has been the dumbing down of RPGs and trying to turn them into action games, and people trying to defend the results, even when devoid of much in the way of RPG elements at all as being RPGs.
The misunderstanding about what role-playing entails comes from conflicts within the PnP RPG community. The arguements between gamers and storytellers are legendary, and have been going on for many years now. Arguements about whether the plot and story are all important when it comes to a game, or whether the stats are equally important in making the game a sort of simulation. Truthfully doing things "right" involves a balance between the two, with a definate slant towards the stats end of things because that's what makes it a "game" as opposed to a bunch of people verbalizing bad fanfiction. You'll notice that as the genere turned more and more towards the storytelling (which is easier to write, and attitudes about ignoring game mechanics means being able to be sloppy in designing them), PnP RPGs themselves wound up gravitating increasingly towards a younger and younger audience. The games started as being the pastime of collegiate intellectuals, with children being a small prescence in the community, to a situation where today the majority of gamers tend to be teens with a few increasingly old fogeys who ramble about the good old days. If you checked out "Dragon Magazine" and it's forums for a long time it was kind of creepy how you saw letters early on about adults dealing with kids wanting to game, amd then you saw the exact same arguements in reverse about adults wanting to play with kids, including some comments about it being creepy about 40 year olds wanting to hang out and play with a bunch of teeny boppers (when really it became increasingly harder to find all-adult groups). Incidently while a lot of things have caused another decline in PnP RPGs, one of the big issues is of course kids losing interest in it for a lot of a reasons, the whole problem with sacrificing a stable market for kids with few financial responsibilities.
