What is a RPG?

[Joccaren]

Why can't a role-playing simply just have to focus on role-playing and nothing else?

I'll get to the rest of the stuff later, but a response to this:
Because that tells us NOTHING about the game, and the whole point of having genres is to tell us something about each game.

As I said, you've never heard of CoD before, I tell you its an RPG. What do you expect? Most people will expect a top down tactical experience with stats, levels, progression and a good story. You, apparently, would expect nothing except dialogue choices ala Mass Effect.

If there is no point to a genre, why even have it exist?. There is no point to the RPG genre under your definition, and therefore no reason for it to exist.

'Shooters must involve shooting' of course, like RPGs must involve role playing, but shooters must involve shooting - in Starcraft 2 my marines shoot. Does that make it a third person shooter?
Hell, I can even force sniper shots from my ghost, so I have control over my shots when I turn on cease fire.
Jagged Alliance contains a lot of shooting - is it a shooter?
In Skyrim I shoot magic and bows - is it an FPS?

Simply 'it must involve shooting' tells us very little about the game itself. Vague comments like this help none at all.

Now, on to other posts - note to mods: Please forgive me if I don't constantly do an edit, I will try to but its getting close to time for work and I may forget in the rush to get ready.

What this means is that we must have a quantifiable line of 'Affects the direction and outcome of the game' that playing a role must meat in order to qualify as role playing. You quantify this line as being in control of more than just whether [character] lives or dies. By deciding whether the character lives or dies however, you have already achieved a greater level of control than any other medium - and gained the capacity to change the outcome of the game. In a movie, you cannot change how it will end. When playing any game, you can change how it ends. You die, it ends differently to if you survive and finish the game.

Granted, in games like Batman there is not a lot of ability to change the direction of the game, other than a sudden turn to death, but there isn't a ton of that in Mass Effect 2 either. The direction of the game is always towards attacking the collector base. Now, add in Mass Effect 3 when it comes out, and there may be some more of that if you include the series as one big RP (Which I would argue it should be: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts), but as of yet we have no idea whether it will or won't.

I ask you, why do you quantify the line as being able to change more than whether the character lives or dies? Other than you just don't feel like its role playing, I would like to hear your perspective on the matter.

If you consider having say over the main character living or dying role-playing, then 99+% of games are RPGs then. And, dying doesn't change the outcome of a game unless you literally stop playing the game after you die. Batman AC still ends the same way regardless of whether you die 100 times or never die. You can't alter Batman's fate or any other character's fate at any point in the game. You actually have more role-playing to do as Catwoman than Batman because there is a different ending depending on what you do as Catwoman (although it's more of an Easter egg than anything). If there was a game that played out exactly like Die Hard, the game would still end exactly like the movie; John McClane would forget his shoes, Hans Gruber will be looking for his detonators, etc. Even with the control and interactivity given to the player, almost every game plays out just as a movie does. You don't really have a say in anything. Giving you control and interactivity does not unequivocally result in role-playing. In Heavy Rain, death actually changes things and has consequences because if a character dies, the game continues on. Heavy Rain is actually kind of close to being a role-playing game, it would need much more dialog choice as it already has pretty good story choice for a video game.

I will accept that as a reason, though the whole 'The game will always end the same way as you can reload' is a bit of bull right there. Reloading is for those who either:
a) Don't want to RP
b) Are too weak to restart the whole game

I would equate it to a DM giving some divine intervention to a player that would otherwise die, or letting them re-roll a particularly bad dice roll. That whole scenario therefore has no role playing as it all ends the same way as you can just keep rerolling until you get it right as your DM is so nice.
The main story will end the same way, but that can be said of many RPs too. The story always has an end goal, but how you get there differs.

Batman Arkham city example again. The mad hatter. He does some funky psychological thing to make you think what you most wanted to think. That, for Batman, was that Alfred had developed a cure, shipped some to him, and was preparing some for the rest of Gotham. Right from the start, that just felt wrong. Not even Mr Freeze had made a cure, yet Alfred somehow had? I went to investigate, and got into the whole Mad Hatter level. I could have roleplayed Batman to be smarter. He may not have gone there, it would have been perfectly feasible within his character. He may have realised it was likely a trap, and let it go. When out in the City of Arkham city, you RP Batman. There are political prisoners being bashed you can save, or that you can just leave to keep getting bashed as there are more important matters at that time.

Even though in Mass Effect 2 you have to go to the Collector ship, having the decision to destroy it or keep it is a big choice. And, you decide how all the loyalty missions end. Also, you can actually make your own Shepard character arc in Mass Effect. If you are being too nice and get screwed over one time too many, that becomes a turning point for your Shepard to stop taking crap and being more of a Malcolm Reynolds type character via the Renegade options. That character development was all you and it wasn't scripted by the game. Same thing goes for the love interests as well, there will be that moment where you feel a certain character and Shepard just click and you decide that romance. You decide how Shepard interacts with all the NPCs as well. You shape Shepard into who he/she is and not the script. In Batman AC, you are Batman, there's no shaping of the character to be done for you. There is even a point in Batman AC where there's a pretty big decision to be made, but you have no choice in the matter. Hell, Batman himself doesn't even get to make the choice.

A binary choice at the end that any Shepard could pick either one for any number of reasons. It is similar to saying that the final choice in Deus Ex HR was a big choice, as there were four of them you could choose that had an effect on the whole world.
Throughout the loyalty missions there is sometimes some RP to be had, but often there is purely a binary choice that has no effect thus far. Now, come to ME3 and view the series as a whole, it will have some decent RP in it most likely.
Also, I don't exactly agree with the whole dialogue thing being a part of Role Play in the Mass Effect series. Quite often it is like saying you RP all those character's who say something in random mumbo jumbo, but the NPCs know what they are saying. You are RPing them as you make up what they say, and their tone. Mostly the same in the Mass Effect Franchise, though of course there are exceptions.

Pure RPGs will not have player skill. Hybrid RPGs may have some. How far that hybrid goes along the 'RPG with X elements, RPG-X Hyrbrid or X with RPG elements' bar will depend on how well it sticks to not only that RPG element, but also to the others.

I don't understand your obsession with the term pure RPGs. Everything changes as time goes on. To only call a RPG that is exactly what the very 1st RPG was a pure RPG is dumb. Everything evolves over time, football is a much different game than how it started out, the point is to keep the core components. And, that's like saying every Metal Gear Solid after the 1st game is not pure MGS but hybrid MGS. The 1st MGS was limited by the hardware at the time, and now MGS controls like a full-on 3rd-person shooter. MGS4 is not hybrid MGS, it's just plain MGS. The core of a RPG is the role-playing, emphasis on role-playing is all a RPG needs to be a RPG. A 1st-person shooter just needs a 1st-person perspective and an emphasis on shooting, it doesn't matter if it's exactly like the very 1st FPS.

Pure RPGs dictates the Pure RPG formula. The whole insistence that Pure RPGs do not exist thereby dictates that RPGs themselves do not exist. Only RPG elements that are added into other games, all of which are now allowed to be called RPGs based off some arbitrary definition that many individuals choose differently from each other.

Anyways, work now [Gotta stop reading forum news so much...], will get back later.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Why can't a role-playing simply just have to focus on role-playing and nothing else?

I'll get to the rest of the stuff later, but a response to this:
Because that tells us NOTHING about the game, and the whole point of having genres is to tell us something about each game.

As I said, you've never heard of CoD before, I tell you its an RPG. What do you expect? Most people will expect a top down tactical experience with stats, levels, progression and a good story. You, apparently, would expect nothing except dialogue choices ala Mass Effect.

If there is no point to a genre, why even have it exist?. There is no point to the RPG genre under your definition, and therefore no reason for it to exist.

If someone gave me a game I knew nothing about and said it was a RPG, I'd have no idea how it would play. The following is from my initial post:

The following are games that are universally considered RPGs by professional gaming journalism: Final Fantasy XIII, Skyrim, Demon's/Dark Souls, World of Warcraft, Star Ocean, Resonance of Fate, Disgaea, Deus Ex, Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol, Valkyria Chronicles, and many more. Pretty much all of those games listed have gameplay that are nothing like each other. Demon's/Dark Souls is as different from Mass Effect as Bayonetta is from Call of Duty. Basically, if I were to hand you a game you knew nothing about (brand new intellectual property) and tell you it was a RPG and nothing else, you'd have no idea how the game would actually play; you wouldn't know if it had turn-based combat, 1st/3rd-person shooting, hack and slash combat, etc. The only thing that would be pretty much guaranteed to be present is someway to level up your character(s) by increasing stats and/or skills and abilities.

Therefore, the RPG genre is the most nondescript genre in video games. At least if every RPG focused on role-playing, every RPG would then have a common major element.

'Shooters must involve shooting' of course, like RPGs must involve role playing, but shooters must involve shooting - in Starcraft 2 my marines shoot. Does that make it a third person shooter?
Hell, I can even force sniper shots from my ghost, so I have control over my shots when I turn on cease fire.
Jagged Alliance contains a lot of shooting - is it a shooter?
In Skyrim I shoot magic and bows - is it an FPS?

Simply 'it must involve shooting' tells us very little about the game itself. Vague comments like this help none at all.

For a game to be a shooter, you have to controlling the character and actually aiming and shooting yourself. There really aren't any shooters that don't have those characteristics. That's why a game like Valkyria Chronicles isn't a shooter. Also, the game has to focus on shooting as well. If Skyrim only had bow and arrow shooting, then it would be a shooter.

I would equate it to a DM giving some divine intervention to a player that would otherwise die, or letting them re-roll a particularly bad dice roll. That whole scenario therefore has no role playing as it all ends the same way as you can just keep rerolling until you get it right as your DM is so nice.
The main story will end the same way, but that can be said of many RPs too. The story always has an end goal, but how you get there differs.

That's an awfully nice DM then. DMs are supposed to do things that go unnoticed by the players to help them out or even make things tougher. If the DM realizes he made the dungeon too tough, then he'll take out a monster here and there.

Isn't the journey almost always more important than the story? Look at Lord of the Rings, the story is real simple. The only times the story really shines is when it's really complex like say the movie The Prestige. And, you can only do stories like that in a completely scripted manner anyways.

Batman Arkham city example again. The mad hatter. He does some funky psychological thing to make you think what you most wanted to think. That, for Batman, was that Alfred had developed a cure, shipped some to him, and was preparing some for the rest of Gotham. Right from the start, that just felt wrong. Not even Mr Freeze had made a cure, yet Alfred somehow had? I went to investigate, and got into the whole Mad Hatter level. I could have roleplayed Batman to be smarter. He may not have gone there, it would have been perfectly feasible within his character. He may have realised it was likely a trap, and let it go. When out in the City of Arkham city, you RP Batman. There are political prisoners being bashed you can save, or that you can just leave to keep getting bashed as there are more important matters at that time.

Those are really just choices on whether you wanna do the sidequest or not. That's the same as choosing to do or not do the loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2, those aren't real choices. Batman can't actually decide the fate anyone in the game, that political prisoner you chose not to save will be ready to be saved next time you glide by. Now, if you could choose to not save the political prisoner because you don't agree with his politics and aid in the beating, then that would be something.

A binary choice at the end that any Shepard could pick either one for any number of reasons. It is similar to saying that the final choice in Deus Ex HR was a big choice, as there were four of them you could choose that had an effect on the whole world.
Throughout the loyalty missions there is sometimes some RP to be had, but often there is purely a binary choice that has no effect thus far. Now, come to ME3 and view the series as a whole, it will have some decent RP in it most likely.
Also, I don't exactly agree with the whole dialogue thing being a part of Role Play in the Mass Effect series. Quite often it is like saying you RP all those character's who say something in random mumbo jumbo, but the NPCs know what they are saying. You are RPing them as you make up what they say, and their tone. Mostly the same in the Mass Effect Franchise, though of course there are exceptions.

Deus Ex HR's final choice would've been a lot bigger if the game wasn't a prequel, but you already now how the future is going to play out so it made the choice seem rather unimportant.

I pretty sure you could go into the meeting with the Asari chick at Omega being respective of her power there or more aggressive (hey I'm a Spectre, *****). Of course, the NPC has scripted response based on how you go about that meeting, but that's the limitation of video games.

Pure RPGs dictates the Pure RPG formula. The whole insistence that Pure RPGs do not exist thereby dictates that RPGs themselves do not exist. Only RPG elements that are added into other games, all of which are now allowed to be called RPGs based off some arbitrary definition that many individuals choose differently from each other.

I'm not saying that pure RPGs don't exist, but you act like a pure RPG has to have like 100 exact elements to be considered a pure RPG. Half-life, Call of Duty, and Vanquish are very different shooters but I would call them all pure shooters, I wouldn't call any of them hybrid shooters. You gotta have the same core components to a pure whatever game.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

An RPG is defined by agency and nothing more. The greater the player's perceived agency of character or narrative, the more likely a game is to be recognized as an RPG. Modern Warfare offers no agency nor even a perception that it might exists; by contrast Skyrim offers some degree of agency in character construction and the way their character approaches problems. As such, the former is generally not regarded as an RPG while the latter is.

The primary confusion I personally see is that people attach particular meaning to a mechanical expression of agency and use that as a definition of RPG. An inventory screen is one such example commonly cited in a great many games but such a system is just one way to afford agency over a character; there are, it turns out, others.

 

[Joccaren]

If someone gave me a game I knew nothing about and said it was a RPG, I'd have no idea how it would play. The following is from my initial post:

The following are games that are universally considered RPGs by professional gaming journalism: Final Fantasy XIII, Skyrim, Demon's/Dark Souls, World of Warcraft, Star Ocean, Resonance of Fate, Disgaea, Deus Ex, Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Alpha Protocol, Valkyria Chronicles, and many more. Pretty much all of those games listed have gameplay that are nothing like each other. Demon's/Dark Souls is as different from Mass Effect as Bayonetta is from Call of Duty. Basically, if I were to hand you a game you knew nothing about (brand new intellectual property) and tell you it was a RPG and nothing else, you'd have no idea how the game would actually play; you wouldn't know if it had turn-based combat, 1st/3rd-person shooting, hack and slash combat, etc. The only thing that would be pretty much guaranteed to be present is someway to level up your character(s) by increasing stats and/or skills and abilities.

Therefore, the RPG genre is the most nondescript genre in video games. At least if every RPG focused on role-playing, every RPG would then have a common major element.

When someone told me a game was an RPG, I would instantly think of RPG elements, things that, you know, kinda share their name with RPGs as they are omnipresent in them. Now, of course RPGs of different descriptions exist. Action RPGs - focus more on combat than the anything else - JRPGs - more focus on turn based combat and inventory up until some of the more recent titles, with less on you controlling every decision the player makes - Hardcore RPGs - focuses on heavy RPG elements in all sections: Inventory, levelling, combat, agency, ect. - story RPGs - where the story and agency come in reasonable balance, with RPG mechanics - linear RPGs - The western equivalent of JRPGs, though to varying degrees of linearity - and then the Hybrid RPGs - games like Mass Effect 2 that, whilst they have some RPG elements, also have strong elements from other genres, such as shooting.
Why so many categories? For the same reason the whole genre system exists in the first place: Information.
What is the point of the RPG genre if it quite honestly tells us nothing about the game?
'You will have more agency than a usual game'. I have more agency in GTA than your average game these days. It is not an RPG.
The label RPG MUST carry certain values with it. Mechanics are an important part of this. Whilst all the RPG types listed above will have different individual attributes, there are certain factors that will stay omnipresent, except in the hybrids (To which I would be told 'Shooter with RPG elements/RPG with shooter elements' rather than just 'RPG'). The thing that changes is how much focus is put on each element. In JRPGs and Linear RPGs, your Agency is taken back a lot, but the other RPG elements are still strong. Play the earlier final fantasy games and tell me they don't have strong levels of other RPG elements. Hardcore RPGs to Action RPGs though will all have the strong inventory system, levelling system, stat based combat - RPG elements - in them. The difference is often which it focuses on.
Hybrid RPGs offer the exception. They keep some RPG elements - usually player Agency and interactivity with the world - and apply different genre's mechanics to them. Dependent on where the focus lies - the RPG elements or the other game elements - will depend on where it falls on that scale I mentioned earlier.

For a game to be a shooter, you have to controlling the character and actually aiming and shooting yourself. There really aren't any shooters that don't have those characteristics. That's why a game like Valkyria Chronicles isn't a shooter. Also, the game has to focus on shooting as well. If Skyrim only had bow and arrow shooting, then it would be a shooter.

So now we see, it is more than just 'It must involve shooting' for it to be a shooter, similar to how it is more than 'it must involve role playing' for it to be an RPG.

That's an awfully nice DM then. DMs are supposed to do things that go unnoticed by the players to help them out or even make things tougher. If the DM realizes he made the dungeon too tough, then he'll take out a monster here and there.

Not necessarily. You need to roll a 1 to fail a test on a lethal trap that you are dodging. The only way you can fail and die is if you roll a one. It is pretty much certain that you will roll anything but a one. You roll a one. Is the DM awfully nice for going 'That was a seriously crap roll, give it another shot'?
Then there's also the DM that just wants to get your character through their story, rather than having to deal with a different character coming in. Likely as they have something planned for your character specifically later on, which can no longer happen. That's more of a story focused DM than a awfully nice DM. They may have even written it in for the story to kill you, but not there or then. Dependent on the version of D&D you play, the DMs story can be more important than you making a difference to it.

Isn't the journey almost always more important than the story? Look at Lord of the Rings, the story is real simple. The only times the story really shines is when it's really complex like say the movie The Prestige. And, you can only do stories like that in a completely scripted manner anyways.

Hehe, Lord of the Rings. That just reminds me of a spoof I saw where after they all meet up they fly the giant eagles to Mordor, and Frodo drops the ring into the volcano from the back of one of the Eagles whilst the other characters grab Sauron's attention by saying his mother had cataracts.
And yes, often the journey is more important than the story. Look at Lord of the Rings though. Your own example of the journey being more important than the story. The journey is 100% linear with no roleplaying (By your definition anyway), so what is the point of bringing it up?
What I find, and that you may be neglecting, is that the journey is actually a part of the story. The basic plot and outline of the story, the blurb, back cover preview, synopsis - ect - is less important than the story when it takes place. The journey, if you will.

Those are really just choices on whether you wanna do the sidequest or not. That's the same as choosing to do or not do the loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2, those aren't real choices.

Actually, they are dependent on how you do the choices. If you go down the 'I don't want to do this sidequest, so I wont do it' route, yes, it isn't a good choice. If you exclude player knowledge and go by a character based decision, it is a real choice. First time I player AC, I had no idea what the Mad Hatter quest was - or even that there was one. I merely got a radio broadcast about a cure drop, and my character became hopeful and suspicious at the same time. He ended up deciding to investigate, as if it was dangerous might as well deal with it now, whilst if it was true then it would provide a great advantage as now you no longer needed to get the cure from Joker. He then found out that the Mad Hatter had tricked him, and did the sidequest. That wasn't a 'Oooh, another sidequest' sort of thing. That was a, from my character's point of view 'I'm dying, nearly dead, and running out of time. Apparently Harley has already got the cure to Joker, so if its gone its already gone, whereas this presents an opportunity to survive and get cured even if it is gone. If it is a trap, then I am living on borrowed time anyway and should be able to handle it. It is worth the risk to investigate it if it may save my own, and much of Gotham's citizen's, life/ves'.
Same sort of thing in ME2. If you decide to not do Jack's loyalty quest as your character doesn't like her, not because you can't be bothered, then that is a legitimate decision and a part of role playing. If you make your decisions based off how it will benefit you in the game, not on how your character would make that decision, you aren't roleplaying.

Batman can't actually decide the fate anyone in the game, that political prisoner you chose not to save will be ready to be saved next time you glide by.

Come now, don't pretend its any different in Mass Effect 1 or 2 (In two there is one mission that is timed and has an effect if you don't do it there and then - the end one - but otherwise its all the same). If you don't recruit your squad fast, and spend more time joyriding and doing side missions, the collectors will not attack Horizon until you are ready. If you don't save Feros early, or Liara on Therum early, they'll be in the exact same state when you get there later. Hell, a lot of the time you can just abandon the mission and come back to it later from memory, so it is pretty much the same thing.

Now, if you could choose to not save the political prisoner because you don't agree with his politics and aid in the beating, then that would be something.

That, however, would never happen as it is not in Batman's character. He would save the political prisoner (More often a political prisoner because they helped build Arkham city than because they had different politics to Strange), and question him or inform him to change his policy rather than helping beat him up. Its Batman's character. Saying something like that is like saying Shepard should be allowed to start off as a simple colonist rather than someone in the military. Its part of his character that he's in the military. it is a semi pre-defined character. With Shepard you get a fair bit more freedom, but some things are still restricted as Shepard wouldn't do that, and to help the story progress further.

Deus Ex HR's final choice would've been a lot bigger if the game wasn't a prequel, but you already now how the future is going to play out so it made the choice seem rather unimportant.

That among the lack of buildup to the choice. The story had a unique advantage of being able to show both the positive and negative side of Augmentation. It focused on the negative. Based off what you saw throughout the game's main story, there isn't a lot of reason to pick a Pro-Augmentation option. Some sidequests showed the good side of Augmentation, but the main story itself focused almost exclusively on the bad. It can be used to control people, to hack places, to build an army to conquer the world, to destroy the world, any number of bad things are bought up. Most of the time, the only positive thing you'll hear about it will be a random NPC talking about that amazing new construct that was only possible thanks to augmentation. Its almost trying to force you to pick anti augmentation. I will agree that some of this likely still comes down to the original games and the decision that was made for them, but showing some of the positive effects of Augmentation more prominently would have been possible without ruining the continuity of it all.

I pretty sure you could go into the meeting with the Asari chick at Omega being respective of her power there or more aggressive (hey I'm a Spectre, *****). Of course, the NPC has scripted response based on how you go about that meeting, but that's the limitation of video games.

Thing is, limitation of video games is limited responses, not that all responses must be the same. It is the limit of the ME2 story that means that no matter what she will help you. It would be quite easy to make her decide to make you a wanted man on Omega if you were too rude to her - the story would be broken because of such though, and thus it would never be implemented.
The of what to say, like so many in the Mass Effect Franchise, has no effect on what ends up happening. Not due to a technical error, but due to the story being Pseudo Linear. At certain points you will be allowed to change things. At most, you will not.

I'm not saying that pure RPGs don't exist, but you act like a pure RPG has to have like 100 exact elements to be considered a pure RPG. Half-life, Call of Duty, and Vanquish are very different shooters but I would call them all pure shooters, I wouldn't call any of them hybrid shooters. You gotta have the same core components to a pure whatever game.

Learn the definition of pure.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pure
"free from anything of a different, inferior, or contaminating kind; free from extraneous matter"
RPG elements free from the elements of other games. 100% exact RPG elements, and it is a pure RPG.
A pure shooter is a game that has shooter elements and nothing else. I'm not going to bother defining shooter elements, as they should be obvious.
There are, of course, universal elements. A story - or context - of some kind will be in pretty much every game, and is one of the building blocks of modern games. These don't effect how 'pure' a game is, neither does their complexity, as it is a universal element. It would be like saying Pure gold is not pure as it has different isotopes in it.
When you get to games like Mass Effect, they are not pure shooters as they contain RPG elements. Multiplayer shooters these days are no longer pure shooters due to the intensive level up and unlock bonuses systems.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Pretty much every JRPG is not a RPG because those games have no role-playing in them.

No.

I'm sorry, but I'm fucking sick of everyone assuming JRPGs are all linear corridors with no customisation involved, when it simply isn't fucking true. Just because some Final Fantasy games have been incredibly linear, that doesn't mean you to to write off the whole genre as No True Scotsman.

Final Fantasy 7 allowed to you use the Materia system to shape the characters however you wanted. You could make Cloud a Summoner, Barrett a White Mage, Tifa a Black Mage, etc. That's part of the definition of role-playing.

In fact, while we're talking about FF: Final Fantasy created the fucking Jobs system, widely regarded as one of the most important gaming mechanics in allowing players to customise their characters to whatever playstyle they wanted. How can a genre which created one of the key mechanics of role-playing not be called a roleplaying genre? Even if you look outside of Final Fantasy, you still have games like:

Shin Megami Tensei- a series that refutes pretty misconceptions and assumption about the genre that you have.

Chrono Trigger- a game that included far more non-linearity and choice than any Mass Effect game, and stands to this day as one of the greatest examples of an RPG story reacting to your choices.

Legend Of Mana- a game where you build your character from scratch, then wander out into a world where you can take quests in different orders, and even make moral choices about which characters to side with. Oh my, kind of sounds like an early version of Skyrim...

Dark Souls- an RPG made in Japan that's so good, the WRPG fanboys are trying to come up with excuses as to why it's not a JRPG at all, and just a plain old RPG. Despite, y'know, being made in Japan.

OP: You've taken one example of a WRPG, Mass Effect, and try to act as if the whole of the RPG genre can be held to this standard. Likewise, you try and claim that all JRPGs are linear grindfests, when in actuality you're holding them to the completely different standard of a rather poor recent FF release. That is, in fact, the definition of a double standard. If you're going to judge JRPGs for their roleplaying, then judge them by the best of what the genre has to offer (as you do with Western RPGs) or don't fucking bother at all. Because right now, you've proven yourself highly ignorant of the history of the JRPG genre, and just what JRPGs offer to the players in terms of choice and customisation.

I did not say ALL JRPGs should not be considered RPGs, I said almost all. I'm not a JRPG aficionado by any stretch. I didn't play many JRPGs before the PS2 because I absolutely HATE random battles, I tried so very hard to play FFVI on the SNES, but I just gave up because of a fucking battle every 3 steps. Plus, random battles make the world seem incredibly lifeless as there is no life on the map.

These are the JRPGs I have played: FFVI (a good portion of it), FFX, FFXII, all of Xenosaga, Eternal Sonata, Resonance of Fate, Valkyria Chronicles, and Dark Souls (playing it now, just finished Anor Londo last night). I've had Neir for awhile, bought it for $15 but I haven't played it yet. All those games have no role-playing in them. I wasn't judging them, I was just classifying them as not being RPGs. I'm absolutely loving Dark Souls but it's basically DnD without the role-playing, it's a straight-up dungeon crawler; it's like the video game equivalent of playing through a massive DnD dungeon, that's all it focuses on and it excels at that.

I usually have a problem with JRPG's combat systems as they usually WERE turn-based with little to no strategy, DnD's battle system is a lot more strategic than almost all JRPGs (not counting the tactic/strategy games like FF Tactics, Disgaea, etc. as most turn-based JRPGs weren't those type of games). A turned-based system should be strategic because if it's not, then it could and should be done in real-time. For example, FFX's battle system was so simple and that made it boring because it was turn-based. Then, FFXII used FFX's battle system but let you set gambits so you didn't have to go through menus to do all the obvious commands. My character has 25% health so I'll heal them or everyone's doing fine, I'll attack the enemy. FFXII just let you program what you would do in most situations, that shows you how little strategy was in the FFX battle system. Xenosaga II's battle system is an example of how turn-based battle systems should be. Positioning should be important in a turn-based system; however, most JRPGs are the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other side just attacking back and forth.

What JRPGs do better than WRPGs is create unique worlds, races, characters, etc. They still have a lot of cliches though, but at least 90% of them aren't based in the standard DnD/Tolkien world that I'm so completely tired of like most WRPGs. And, JRPGs have the advantage of being completely scripted so the story and characters have the POTENTIAL to be better than a WRPG. That's what I judge JRPGs on, on what they are trying to accomplish, it's the same way judge anything. You have no say over your character's personality or where the story goes in JRPGs, the characters' dialog and the story are completely pre-scripted. Most JRPGs are basically adventure games with a combat system, that is not me putting down them, it's just me describing what they are. The demo of Catherine had more role-playing than most JRPGs.

I have plenty of hate to go around on both JRPGs and WRPGs as the majority of both of them have some serious flaws and cliches.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

This thread is full of so much fail in the OP I want to smash my fist threw my laptop, reach through the internet slap them and then direct them to this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game] page. You went through all that for a definition and came up with the wrong wiki page(lol wiki for research) what kinda research is that?

Here's the 1st paragraph from that Wiki page (others have posted it):
Role-playing video games (commonly referred to as role-playing games or RPGs) are a video game genre with origins in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. The player in RPGs controls one character, or several adventuring party members, fulfilling one or many quests. The major similarities with pen-and-paper games involve developed story-telling and narrative elements, player character development, complexity, as well as replayability and immersion. Electronic medium removes the necessity for a gamemaster and increases combat resolution speed. RPGs have evolved from simple text-based console-window games into visually rich 3D experiences.

Notice the "player character development" part. That's character development that the player has a hand in crafting, which is just not simple leveling up as that is called character advancement, which is much different than character development.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

This thread is full of so much fail in the OP I want to smash my fist threw my laptop, reach through the internet slap them and then direct them to this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game] page. You went through all that for a definition and came up with the wrong wiki page(lol wiki for research) what kinda research is that?

Here's the 1st paragraph from that Wiki page (others have posted it):
Role-playing video games (commonly referred to as role-playing games or RPGs) are a video game genre with origins in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. The player in RPGs controls one character, or several adventuring party members, fulfilling one or many quests. The major similarities with pen-and-paper games involve developed story-telling and narrative elements, player character development, complexity, as well as replayability and immersion. Electronic medium removes the necessity for a gamemaster and increases combat resolution speed. RPGs have evolved from simple text-based console-window games into visually rich 3D experiences.

Notice the "player character development" part. That's character development that the player has a hand in crafting, which is just not simple leveling up as that is called character advancement, which is much different than character development.

Ok so you are saying that most JRPGs are actually the true successors and WRPGs are just action games where you make your own avatar. Arbitrary moral choices does not make a video game RPG neither does make your own avatar. Character development and stories in WRPGs aside from some of the old school CRPGs tends to be very very poor and black and white.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

What is the point of the RPG genre if it quite honestly tells us nothing about the game?

The label RPG MUST carry certain values with it.

Right now, I see no point of the RPG genre for classifying gameplay (you said video game genres should classify games on gameplay, that's why you don't like that role-playing should be a core component of a RPG because that's not gameplay) because like I said Dark Souls and Mass Effect have pretty much nothing in common gameplay-wise and just knowing they are RPGs tells you nothing about them. Even a game like Super Mario Brothers and Mirror's Edge share platforming in common, SMB is a 2D platformer and Mirror's Edge is a 3D 1st-person platformer but they still share the platforming. My point is that if role-playing was a necessity for a RPG, then you'd at least know the game had role-playing in it and it focused on role-playing, because right now, you know nothing about a game if all you know is that it's a RPG. There's nothing wrong with expanding into sub-genres but you shouldn't need to know what sub-genre it is to know what type of game it is. Right now, just knowing a game is a RPG is meaningless, you pretty much have to know what the sub-genre is to have an idea of what the game entails. That is not so for any other game genre.

For a game to be a shooter, you have to controlling the character and actually aiming and shooting yourself. There really aren't any shooters that don't have those characteristics. That's why a game like Valkyria Chronicles isn't a shooter. Also, the game has to focus on shooting as well. If Skyrim only had bow and arrow shooting, then it would be a shooter.

So now we see, it is more than just 'It must involve shooting' for it to be a shooter, similar to how it is more than 'it must involve role playing' for it to be an RPG.

You're making some rather big leaps. Everybody knows that a shooter must focus on shooting and you must be aiming and doing the shooting for it to be a shooter; it's just that I forgot to add in that last part in and you started calling RTSs shooters. Just like in platformers, you control the character and you do the jumping, a game with context sensitive jumping (where you move the character to a edge and press X for him to jump) is not a platformer. And then in a RPG for role-playing, you control the character and you do the role-playing. It's just that simple.

And yes, often the journey is more important than the story. Look at Lord of the Rings though. Your own example of the journey being more important than the story. The journey is 100% linear with no roleplaying (By your definition anyway), so what is the point of bringing it up?
What I find, and that you may be neglecting, is that the journey is actually a part of the story. The basic plot and outline of the story, the blurb, back cover preview, synopsis - ect - is less important than the story when it takes place. The journey, if you will.

Obviously, LotR has no role-playing and it's 100% linear cause it's a book and then made into movies. The point is that the journey is almost always more important than the plot points. I understand that the journey is part of the story. In the journey, the characters develop and make choices that define them just like Shepard does is Mass Effect. You have a hand in developing Shepard's character and defining him/her with important decisions.

Those are really just choices on whether you wanna do the sidequest or not. That's the same as choosing to do or not do the loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2, those aren't real choices.

Actually, they are dependent on how you do the choices. If you go down the 'I don't want to do this sidequest, so I wont do it' route, yes, it isn't a good choice. If you exclude player knowledge and go by a character based decision, it is a real choice. First time I player AC, I had no idea what the Mad Hatter quest was - or even that there was one. I merely got a radio broadcast about a cure drop, and my character became hopeful and suspicious at the same time. He ended up deciding to investigate, as if it was dangerous might as well deal with it now, whilst if it was true then it would provide a great advantage as now you no longer needed to get the cure from Joker. He then found out that the Mad Hatter had tricked him, and did the sidequest. That wasn't a 'Oooh, another sidequest' sort of thing. That was a, from my character's point of view 'I'm dying, nearly dead, and running out of time. Apparently Harley has already got the cure to Joker, so if its gone its already gone, whereas this presents an opportunity to survive and get cured even if it is gone. If it is a trap, then I am living on borrowed time anyway and should be able to handle it. It is worth the risk to investigate it if it may save my own, and much of Gotham's citizen's, life/ves'.
Same sort of thing in ME2. If you decide to not do Jack's loyalty quest as your character doesn't like her, not because you can't be bothered, then that is a legitimate decision and a part of role playing. If you make your decisions based off how it will benefit you in the game, not on how your character would make that decision, you aren't roleplaying.

Again, if the role-playing of a game is just deciding on doing sidequests or not, then that's not enough. The game has to FOCUS on the role-playing throughout the game, not just give you an opportunity here and there. I totally knew that the Mad Hatter sidequest was fake and wasn't the cure, I didn't know it was the Mad Hatter sidequest but I knew there was no cure at that point and time in the game (especially from Alfred). I just went there to play through whatever content was there, nothing else, just like I did the loyalty missions mainly to play through that content as they were some of the best parts of Mass Effect 2. Yes, if you really get into it, it can be role-playing like you explained in detail, but if that's all the game has for role-playing, then that's just not enough. It would be like only 1 world (out of the standard 8) having platforming in a Mario game, it wouldn't be a platformer if only 1 world was platforming.

Batman can't actually decide the fate anyone in the game, that political prisoner you chose not to save will be ready to be saved next time you glide by.

Come now, don't pretend its any different in Mass Effect 1 or 2 (In two there is one mission that is timed and has an effect if you don't do it there and then - the end one - but otherwise its all the same). If you don't recruit your squad fast, and spend more time joyriding and doing side missions, the collectors will not attack Horizon until you are ready. If you don't save Feros early, or Liara on Therum early, they'll be in the exact same state when you get there later. Hell, a lot of the time you can just abandon the mission and come back to it later from memory, so it is pretty much the same thing.

You decide that fate of a race in Mass Effect.

Now, if you could choose to not save the political prisoner because you don't agree with his politics and aid in the beating, then that would be something.

That, however, would never happen as it is not in Batman's character. He would save the political prisoner (More often a political prisoner because they helped build Arkham city than because they had different politics to Strange), and question him or inform him to change his policy rather than helping beat him up. Its Batman's character. Saying something like that is like saying Shepard should be allowed to start off as a simple colonist rather than someone in the military. Its part of his character that he's in the military. it is a semi pre-defined character. With Shepard you get a fair bit more freedom, but some things are still restricted as Shepard wouldn't do that, and to help the story progress further.

Shepard is like playing a DnD character with a set alignment. Batman is a completely set character, you just get to move him around and fight as him.

Thing is, limitation of video games is limited responses, not that all responses must be the same. It is the limit of the ME2 story that means that no matter what she will help you. It would be quite easy to make her decide to make you a wanted man on Omega if you were too rude to her - the story would be broken because of such though, and thus it would never be implemented.
The of what to say, like so many in the Mass Effect Franchise, has no effect on what ends up happening. Not due to a technical error, but due to the story being Pseudo Linear. At certain points you will be allowed to change things. At most, you will not.

Again, being able to alter Shepard's personality is an important part of the game, you have a hand in crafting Shepard's character, that is available in very few games. The loyalty missions give you chances to make lasting decisions because those are like mini-stories and don't affect the main story.

Learn the definition of pure.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pure
"free from anything of a different, inferior, or contaminating kind; free from extraneous matter"
RPG elements free from the elements of other games. 100% exact RPG elements, and it is a pure RPG.
A pure shooter is a game that has shooter elements and nothing else... Multiplayer shooters these days are no longer pure shooters due to the intensive level up and unlock bonuses systems.

The problem is there would be no agreement on what the RPG elements are that make up a pure RPG. RPGs started with adding role-playing to the wargames, so are the elements of wargames plus role-playing the core elements of a RPG? Or can a RPG exist w/o the elements of wargaming. Or is a pure RPG a game that just has the exact elements of the very 1st RPG? All I'm trying to say is a RPG should have role-playing as a major element, not what a pure RPG would be as that would encompass so much more.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Ok so you are saying that most JRPGs are actually the true successors and WRPGs are just action games where you make your own avatar. Arbitrary moral choices does not make a video game RPG neither does make your own avatar. Character development and stories in WRPGs aside from some of the old school CRPGs tends to be very very poor and black and white.

I said nothing along those lines in any post in this whole thread. Making an avatar is not character development. Playing as Shepard in Mass Effect is like playing DnD with a character with a set alignment, you are limited in what you can do but you still have freedom to shape Shepard's personality and make major choices.

 

[Joccaren]

Right now, I see no point of the RPG genre for classifying gameplay (you said video game genres should classify games on gameplay, that's why you don't like that role-playing should be a core component of a RPG because that's not gameplay) because like I said Dark Souls and Mass Effect have pretty much nothing in common gameplay-wise and just knowing they are RPGs tells you nothing about them. Even a game like Super Mario Brothers and Mirror's Edge share platforming in common, SMB is a 2D platformer and Mirror's Edge is a 3D 1st-person platformer but they still share the platforming. My point is that if role-playing was a necessity for a RPG, then you'd at least know the game had role-playing in it and it focused on role-playing, because right now, you know nothing about a game if all you know is that it's a RPG. There's nothing wrong with expanding into sub-genres but you shouldn't need to know what sub-genre it is to know what type of game it is. Right now, just knowing a game is a RPG is meaningless, you pretty much have to know what the sub-genre is to have an idea of what the game entails. That is not so for any other game genre.

Where did I say that you should classify games only on gameplay, and where did I say Role Playing was not gameplay? "Mechanics is an important PART of this" is what I said.
There is also a lot of double standard here. You claim that you know nothing about RPGs because Mass Effect and Dark Souls have completely different gameplay, whilst I can say the same thing about Role Playing. They have completely different role playing, therefore we know nothing about RPGs under your definition. It doesn't work that way. I think you assume I am trying to keep every current RPG labelled game as an RPG by my label. No. Mass Effect by my label is a Shooter RPG Hybrid, not an RPG. Dark Souls I haven't played as Namco hasn't released it for the PC, so I have no clue on how close that falls to RPG. I have pointed out things all RPGs share in common: Stat based combat without player skill, levelling, inventory, ect. So to say that they share nothing in common under my definition goes completely against what I have said.
On to your platformer comparison: Portal and SMB (Since I have sadly never played Mirrors Edge). SMB is jumping around in a 2D space (At least in the early iterations). Portal is jumping in a 3D space. Its about as much difference as you'll get between RPGs by my definition. Also, note Portal is a Platformer Puzzle Hybrid. What's the point in having the Platformer/Puzzle genre if you need to know the sub genres to know what type of game it is? /sarcasm

For a game to be a shooter, you have to controlling the character and actually aiming and shooting yourself. There really aren't any shooters that don't have those characteristics. That's why a game like Valkyria Chronicles isn't a shooter. Also, the game has to focus on shooting as well. If Skyrim only had bow and arrow shooting, then it would be a shooter.

So now we see, it is more than just 'It must involve shooting' for it to be a shooter, similar to how it is more than 'it must involve role playing' for it to be an RPG.

You're making some rather big leaps. Everybody knows that a shooter must focus on shooting and you must be aiming and doing the shooting for it to be a shooter; it's just that I forgot to add in that last part in and you started calling RTSs shooters. Just like in platformers, you control the character and you do the jumping, a game with context sensitive jumping (where you move the character to a edge and press X for him to jump) is not a platformer. And then in a RPG for role-playing, you control the character and you do the role-playing. It's just that simple.

And yes, often the journey is more important than the story. Look at Lord of the Rings though. Your own example of the journey being more important than the story. The journey is 100% linear with no roleplaying (By your definition anyway), so what is the point of bringing it up?
What I find, and that you may be neglecting, is that the journey is actually a part of the story. The basic plot and outline of the story, the blurb, back cover preview, synopsis - ect - is less important than the story when it takes place. The journey, if you will.

Obviously, LotR has no role-playing and it's 100% linear cause it's a book and then made into movies. The point is that the journey is almost always more important than the plot points. I understand that the journey is part of the story. In the journey, the characters develop and make choices that define them just like Shepard does is Mass Effect. You have a hand in developing Shepard's character and defining him/her with important decisions.

Again, if the role-playing of a game is just deciding on doing sidequests or not, then that's not enough. The game has to FOCUS on the role-playing throughout the game, not just give you an opportunity here and there. I totally knew that the Mad Hatter sidequest was fake and wasn't the cure, I didn't know it was the Mad Hatter sidequest but I knew there was no cure at that point and time in the game (especially from Alfred). I just went there to play through whatever content was there, nothing else, just like I did the loyalty missions mainly to play through that content as they were some of the best parts of Mass Effect 2. Yes, if you really get into it, it can be role-playing like you explained in detail, but if that's all the game has for role-playing, then that's just not enough. It would be like only 1 world (out of the standard 8) having platforming in a Mario game, it wouldn't be a platformer if only 1 world was platforming.

So you didn't Role play in AC or ME2, fine. Doesn't mean its not Role Playing. You can go through the entirety of ME1 & 2 making decisions tactically based off your knowledge of what will happen in the future, rather than playing Shepard and deciding his decisions. Therefore, its not a Role Playing Game by your definition?
Any time that you are not in a cutscene in AC, you are Role Playing Batman if you choose to. The difference between ME and AC in that aspect is that ME pushes dialogue choices onto you in cutscenes to continue the opportunity for Role Play there, but you don't have to Role Play that either.
Hell, in Mass Effect 2, outside the cutscenes there is often less opportunity for RP then AC, and only in the cutscenes are you allowed to.
In Arkham city, you can decide as Batman whether to deal with those thugs down in the Street, or let them be. You can decide to save Joker's crew who have been caught by Penguin, and vice versa. You sometimes have an opportunity to sneak past an entire fight rather than getting involved in it. Mass Effect 2, you are forced into each fight with no chance to sneak past them, and your only Role Playing is deciding whether or not to look for/pick up sidequests, which according to you isn't enough. By my standards, more binary choices in cutscenes is not Role Playing. How you act Shepard out through the whole game is Role Playing, and those cutscenes ME does so well aren't enough if everything else is linear.

You decide that fate of a race in Mass Effect.

And coming out of nowhere is a random comment. Please tell me what this has to do with being able to ignore missions for as long as you like? Nothing so far as I can tell.
And BTW, you can decide the fate of numerous thugs around the City in AC. The decision, however, isn't forced onto you. You are left to make it without a dialogue choice.

Shepard is like playing a DnD character with a set alignment. Batman is a completely set character, you just get to move him around and fight as him.

Not just a set alignment, but a semi-set history as well.
With Batman, you don't just move around and fight as him. You decide WHO you fight. Do you want to fight that group of thugs just hanging around, or is it ok to just leave them? Do you want to sneak past the people in this room, or take them all down? The boss fights are forced on you, but so are the decisions in Mass Effect. It is part of the story.

Again, being able to alter Shepard's personality is an important part of the game, you have a hand in crafting Shepard's character, that is available in very few games. The loyalty missions give you chances to make lasting decisions because those are like mini-stories and don't affect the main story.

Very few games recently. There are a lot of games in the grand history of games in which you can choose the personality of your character. Hell, I will re-mention all those ones with a silent or voiceless protagonist. You decide the personality of them, how the AI reacts to you is always the same though, as it is in Mass Effect.

The problem is there would be no agreement on what the RPG elements are that make up a pure RPG. RPGs started with adding role-playing to the wargames, so are the elements of wargames plus role-playing the core elements of a RPG? Or can a RPG exist w/o the elements of wargaming. Or is a pure RPG a game that just has the exact elements of the very 1st RPG? All I'm trying to say is a RPG should have role-playing as a major element, not what a pure RPG would be as that would encompass so much more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game
Using much of the same terminology, settings and mechanics as Pen and Paper Role Playing Games.
Aka:
-Stat Systems over Player Skill systems
-Inventory systems
-Levelling systems
Need I go on again?
I will agree with you that a pure RPG requires Role Playing too. However, a simple 'RPG' definition indicates a pure RPG of some subgenre, as opposed to an RPG X Hybrid game. I am not saying Role Playing isn't an RPG element. It most certainly is. It is not all that is required for a game to be simply an 'RPG' though. Mass Effect is not an 'RPG'. It is a Shooter-RPG Hybrid. Mass Effect 2 is a Shooter with RPG elements. Skyrim is an action adventure game with RPG elements. They are not plain and simple RPGs, as that singular term implies that it is ONLY an RPG, a pure RPG if you will. Describing games with more than one genre making them up, calling them by only one of their genres does no justice. I'm sure you would object to Mass Effect being called simply a shooter - but it is a shooter. Dependent on which aspects the player focuses on, the combat or the dialogue, depends on how far it sways for that particular person towards each side. By its own, it is a Shooter RPG hybrid though.

 

[Berenzen]

A role playing game (RPG) is where a character is defined by the player. The character development and the story is defined by the player. This is typically done through various choices, normally in terms of dialogue and skills, spells and abilites.

This means that a game like GoW, while it puts you into a role, is not an RPG, because ultimately, the game doesn't allow for player choice further than weapon choice. Compared to something like Alpha Protocol- also a third person shooter- gives you dialogue choices, as well as choices in terms of the various skills, which allows you to choose your playstyle. In both games you're given a person with a set name and face, but the difference is that in AP, you get a plethora of choices of how to play the game, while in GoW, you get the choice of which box to hide behind.

 

[FURY_007]

an RPG is a Rocket Propelled Grenade, with the newest one, the RPG-7, and they've come from Russia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-propelled_grenade

Oh... nvm

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Where did I say that you should classify games only on gameplay, and where did I say Role Playing was not gameplay? "Mechanics is an important PART of this" is what I said.

My fault, I thought you said stuff about classifying games by gameplay and saying role-playing wasn't gameplay. I've responded to so many people in the thread.

There is also a lot of double standard here. You claim that you know nothing about RPGs because Mass Effect and Dark Souls have completely different gameplay, whilst I can say the same thing about Role Playing. They have completely different role playing, therefore we know nothing about RPGs under your definition. It doesn't work that way. I think you assume I am trying to keep every current RPG labelled game as an RPG by my label. No. Mass Effect by my label is a Shooter RPG Hybrid, not an RPG. Dark Souls I haven't played as Namco hasn't released it for the PC, so I have no clue on how close that falls to RPG. I have pointed out things all RPGs share in common: Stat based combat without player skill, levelling, inventory, ect. So to say that they share nothing in common under my definition goes completely against what I have said.

I wouldn't classify Dark Souls as a RPG, there's only a little bit of RPing in the game. Dark Souls is a straight-up dungeon crawler. It's the video game equivalent of playing through a massive DnD dungeon by yourself; it's basically DnD but without the role-playing and 100% action-oriented combat. Dark Souls is like a very dark and serious Zelda, it's an action adventure game more than anything. Mass Effect is a completely different game from Dark Souls and they share almost nothing in common except leveling up, that's it. Leveling up doesn't describe what to expect out of the game in any way, Batman AC has leveling too. Both Mass Effect and Dark Souls are considered RPGs by gaming journalists. I've been saying that for a RPG to be a RPG, it has to focus on role-playing, thereby giving you at least one major component to expect out of a game if it's called a RPG. You go into Mass Effect not expecting shooting (if you know nothing about the game except it's a RPG), but at least half of the game is role-playing, and only the other half is a surprised. If you gave someone Mass Effect and told them it's a RPG and that's it, they played it, then they asked for another RPG, and you give them Dark Souls, they would be in for a completely different experience. That is what I mean by the RPG genre is meaningless in it's current state, you have to go into RPG sub-genres to get any kind of feel for the what the game entails. Hell, most people will just say RPG X is like RPG Y and not even use sub-genres or anything when labeling RPGs.

On to your platformer comparison: Portal and SMB (Since I have sadly never played Mirrors Edge). SMB is jumping around in a 2D space (At least in the early iterations). Portal is jumping in a 3D space. Its about as much difference as you'll get between RPGs by my definition. Also, note Portal is a Platformer Puzzle Hybrid. What's the point in having the Platformer/Puzzle genre if you need to know the sub genres to know what type of game it is? /sarcasm

I've played Portal but not Portal 2 yet; however, Portal is not a platformer, it's a puzzle game. The game isn't about making jumps to get through a level, it's about figuring out the puzzle to get through a level. Just because a game has a jump button doesn't mean it's a platformer.

So you didn't Role play in AC or ME2, fine. Doesn't mean its not Role Playing. You can go through the entirety of ME1 & 2 making decisions tactically based off your knowledge of what will happen in the future, rather than playing Shepard and deciding his decisions. Therefore, its not a Role Playing Game by your definition?
Any time that you are not in a cutscene in AC, you are Role Playing Batman if you choose to. The difference between ME and AC in that aspect is that ME pushes dialogue choices onto you in cutscenes to continue the opportunity for Role Play there, but you don't have to Role Play that either.
Hell, in Mass Effect 2, outside the cutscenes there is often less opportunity for RP then AC, and only in the cutscenes are you allowed to.
In Arkham city, you can decide as Batman whether to deal with those thugs down in the Street, or let them be. You can decide to save Joker's crew who have been caught by Penguin, and vice versa. You sometimes have an opportunity to sneak past an entire fight rather than getting involved in it. Mass Effect 2, you are forced into each fight with no chance to sneak past them, and your only Role Playing is deciding whether or not to look for/pick up sidequests, which according to you isn't enough. By my standards, more binary choices in cutscenes is not Role Playing. How you act Shepard out through the whole game is Role Playing, and those cutscenes ME does so well aren't enough if everything else is linear.

The little sidequest with Mad Hatter was really weak in AC unlike the Scarecrow sections in Arkham Asylum. It was obvious from Batman's or your perspective that something was up with the that all too convenient cure drop. If you were role-playing as Batman, you wouldn't have went to open that container with the "cure," that had trap written all over it. Batman would've at least contacted Alfred or Oracle to ask what is up with that cure. Whereas in AA with the Scarecrow sections, you don't know you got drugged and you see Gordon dead, both Batman and you the player are like "Oh shit, Gordon is dead."

Sounds like you're saying a game with linear levels can't have role-playing then. Every RPG not in a sandbox or open world isn't a RPG then. Mass Effect has it's role-playing sections (dialog choices and other decisions) separate from it's combat sections just like Batman has it's stealth sections and it's beat'em up sections separate from each other. And, putting a character in a sandbox doesn't make it a RPG just because you can then decide to beat up random thugs or not. Arkham City has thugs all over so if the player wants to beat up more thugs, they can; the developer didn't put thugs there for role-playing purposes. Many critics and gamers complained there was nothing to do after beating Arkham Asylum so Rocksteady gave you a sandbox and a bunch of sidequests so you have more to do, not for role-playing purposes.

A role playing game (RPG) is where a character is defined by the player. The character development and the story is defined by the player. This is typically done through various choices, normally in terms of dialogue and skills, spells and abilites.

This means that a game like GoW, while it puts you into a role, is not an RPG, because ultimately, the game doesn't allow for player choice further than weapon choice. Compared to something like Alpha Protocol- also a third person shooter- gives you dialogue choices, as well as choices in terms of the various skills, which allows you to choose your playstyle. In both games you're given a person with a set name and face, but the difference is that in AP, you get a plethora of choices of how to play the game, while in GoW, you get the choice of which box to hide behind.

I wholeheartedly agree with Berenzen.

I guess if GoW was a sandbox, it would be then have role-playing according to your standards because then you could choose to kill even more enemies than the hundreds in the main storyline.

I was able to take Marcus Fenix's machoism from 10 to 11 by killing even more enemies so a GoW sandbox game is totally a RPG. /sarcasm

You decide that fate of a race in Mass Effect.

And coming out of nowhere is a random comment. Please tell me what this has to do with being able to ignore missions for as long as you like? Nothing so far as I can tell.
And BTW, you can decide the fate of numerous thugs around the City in AC. The decision, however, isn't forced onto you. You are left to make it without a dialogue choice.

I wasn't commenting on the ignoring of missions, I was saying you decide the fate of a race and that's a pretty damn meaningful decision regardless if you can ignore that mission and it'll still be there or not. You don't decide the fate of any thugs in AC, you decide to knock them out or leave them be. If you knock them up out, they are just taking a nap for awhile, you're not deciding their fate, just how much sleep they get. The game literally doesn't let you kill thugs when you actually can kill them. In the top of the tower of Wonder City where Strange is, you can knock out thugs buy hanging them off the side of the tower, but the game won't even allow you to cut the line with a batarang like you can in the rest of the areas in the game (I tried doing it several times). The game forces you to play exactly as Batman would.

Shepard is like playing a DnD character with a set alignment. Batman is a completely set character, you just get to move him around and fight as him.

Not just a set alignment, but a semi-set history as well.
With Batman, you don't just move around and fight as him. You decide WHO you fight. Do you want to fight that group of thugs just hanging around, or is it ok to just leave them? Do you want to sneak past the people in this room, or take them all down? The boss fights are forced on you, but so are the decisions in Mass Effect. It is part of the story.

A semi-set history that you choose.

Again, you only decide how many thugs to take down. You don't have a choice of who to fight, you can't fight that mystery stranger (I forgot his name) if you wanted to. When going through the main story, the game makes you fight X amount thugs. Then, there's the stealth sections where you must clear the room, you can't sneak past the thugs and leave them alone and get to the next area. I'm sure there's some places where you can just run away in the main story missions but probably only a few places when you can do that. I know you can skip that museum fight with Catwoman because Batman opened the gate previously and you can slide under as Catwoman.

Again, being able to alter Shepard's personality is an important part of the game, you have a hand in crafting Shepard's character, that is available in very few games. The loyalty missions give you chances to make lasting decisions because those are like mini-stories and don't affect the main story.

Very few games recently. There are a lot of games in the grand history of games in which you can choose the personality of your character. Hell, I will re-mention all those ones with a silent or voiceless protagonist. You decide the personality of them, how the AI reacts to you is always the same though, as it is in Mass Effect.

I know there are many more games than Mass Effect that give you dialog choice. However, when you move over to JRPGs, barely any of those games have role-playing, as the characters in JRPGs are as set in stone as Batman is. So there's a lot of RPGs that would no longer be RPGs if RPGs required role-playing to be a core component.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game
Using much of the same terminology, settings and mechanics as Pen and Paper Role Playing Games.
Aka:
-Stat Systems over Player Skill systems
-Inventory systems
-Levelling systems
Need I go on again?
I will agree with you that a pure RPG requires Role Playing too. However, a simple 'RPG' definition indicates a pure RPG of some subgenre, as opposed to an RPG X Hybrid game. I am not saying Role Playing isn't an RPG element. It most certainly is. It is not all that is required for a game to be simply an 'RPG' though. Mass Effect is not an 'RPG'. It is a Shooter-RPG Hybrid. Mass Effect 2 is a Shooter with RPG elements. Skyrim is an action adventure game with RPG elements. They are not plain and simple RPGs, as that singular term implies that it is ONLY an RPG, a pure RPG if you will. Describing games with more than one genre making them up, calling them by only one of their genres does no justice. I'm sure you would object to Mass Effect being called simply a shooter - but it is a shooter. Dependent on which aspects the player focuses on, the combat or the dialogue, depends on how far it sways for that particular person towards each side. By its own, it is a Shooter RPG hybrid though.

Since the genre is called Role-playing games, role-playing should be a focus to be a RPG. If role-playing is not a focus, then it's not a RPG.

From the Wiki link:
Role-playing video games also typically attempt to offer more complex and dynamic character interaction than what is found in other video game genres.

Which is why Batman is not even close to being a RPG and why Mass Effect is a RPG.

More from the Wiki link:
In more recent years, some within the RPG community have criticized action JRPGs as not being "true" RPGs for different reasons: heavy usage of scripted cut scenes and dialogue, and a frequent lack of branching outcomes. Japanese RPGs are also sometimes criticized for having relatively simple battle systems in which players are able to win by repetitively mashing buttons, though it has been pointed out that Japanese RPG combat systems such as in Final Fantasy X and Xenosaga have become increasingly complex over the years, with more of an emphasis on strategy and timing, and with each new game often introducing their own rules and systems.

That's exactly what I'm talking about with JRPGs. And, LMFAO at Final Fantasy X being an example of a complex battle system, FFX is brain dead easy. Xenosaga II is a tad bit complex but both Xenosaga I and Xenosaga III have really simple turn-based combat. DnD's combat system is much more complex than 90% of JRPGs as positioning is rarely even a part of a JRPG battle system.

Mass Effect focuses on role-playing first and foremost, that's why it's a RPG, it just so happens to have shooting in its combat system. It's not a shooter with RPG elements, it's a RPG with shooter elements. Additionally, you technically don't have to shoot in Mass Effect if you don't want to, you can choose the Biotic class. Or you can be a Sentinel, wear down the enemies shields with your tech powers, then throw the enemy, or you can freeze the enemy and punch them, or you can turn on your armor, run up, and punch the enemy. There are ways to play the game without shooting as your primary offensive attack. That by definition makes Mass Effect not a shooter; a shooter requires you to shoot enemies as your primary attack. Therefore, your classification of Mass Effect as a shooter with RPG elements is wrong on multiple levels. Don't come back with the fact that I'm sure if you wanted to, you could go through a CoD campaign just knifing people as you would have to go way out of your way to do that, plus it would be very hard to do under a normal or higher difficulty level. Mass Effect gives you classes where your main offensive attacks don't require shooting a gun.

 

[Joccaren]

You go into Mass Effect not expecting shooting (if you know nothing about the game except it's a RPG), but at least half of the game is role-playing, and only the other half is a surprised. If you gave someone Mass Effect and told them it's a RPG and that's it, they played it, then they asked for another RPG, and you give them Dark Souls, they would be in for a completely different experience. That is what I mean by the RPG genre is meaningless in it's current state, you have to go into RPG sub-genres to get any kind of feel for the what the game entails. Hell, most people will just say RPG X is like RPG Y and not even use sub-genres or anything when labeling RPGs.

You missed the double standard part eh?
I could give a gamer Mass Effect and tell them its an RPG, then give them Dark Souls and tell them its an RPG, and they would be totally confused by the different 'Role Playing' in it under your definition. I am NOT trying to make all currently labelled RPGs stick as RPGs, so pointing out a Dark Souls example is pointless if it does not fall under my RPG banner, same as Mass Effect. A better example would be DA:O and KotOR 2. Many things different, but basically the same sort of game.
We both agree that there is something wrong with the way RPGs are labelled today, but throwing two games that, under my label, are not RPGs at me and using it as a flaw in my system is entirely flawed in itself.
Under my system, sub genres do not change what the game entails, and what makes it up. It changes how intense each element is portrayed. From 2D Mario to 3D Mario if you will.

I've played Portal but not Portal 2 yet; however, Portal is not a platformer, it's a puzzle game. The game isn't about making jumps to get through a level, it's about figuring out the puzzle to get through a level. Just because a game has a jump button doesn't mean it's a platformer.

I'm guessing you missed all the jumping from platform to platform, and jumping between platforms over acid, and you know, the platforming, then? Granted, Portal also has a lot of puzzles in it. That is why it is a platforming puzzle game. If you missed the times where jumping from platform to platform without using any portals was important, you need to replay the game.

The little sidequest with Mad Hatter was really weak in AC unlike the Scarecrow sections in Arkham Asylum. It was obvious from Batman's or your perspective that something was up with the that all too convenient cure drop. If you were role-playing as Batman, you wouldn't have went to open that container with the "cure," that had trap written all over it. Batman would've at least contacted Alfred or Oracle to ask what is up with that cure. Whereas in AA with the Scarecrow sections, you don't know you got drugged and you see Gordon dead, both Batman and you the player are like "Oh shit, Gordon is dead."

That really depends on how much you expect each, and how you react to them then doesn't it?
As much as the cure drop off seemed sus, Batman was desperate. Joker had the cure, and was taunting Batman that he MIGHT save some for him. Under those circumstances, a risk for a possibly great reward was well worth it.
Also note, if Batman had of contacted Alfred or Oracle, he would have perceived them saying it was true thanks to that funky mind crap the Mad Hatter pulled. The AC team just decided not to make him contact them.

Sounds like you're saying a game with linear levels can't have role-playing then. Every RPG not in a sandbox or open world isn't a RPG then. Mass Effect has it's role-playing sections (dialog choices and other decisions) separate from it's combat sections just like Batman has it's stealth sections and it's beat'em up sections separate from each other. And, putting a character in a sandbox doesn't make it a RPG just because you can then decide to beat up random thugs or not. Arkham City has thugs all over so if the player wants to beat up more thugs, they can; the developer didn't put thugs there for role-playing purposes. Many critics and gamers complained there was nothing to do after beating Arkham Asylum so Rocksteady gave you a sandbox and a bunch of sidequests so you have more to do, not for role-playing purposes.

*sigh*

Sounds like you're saying a game with linear levels can't have role-playing then. Every RPG not in a sandbox or open world isn't a RPG then.

Much like you are saying any game without a cutscene dialogue choice system can't have roleplaying am I right?

Mass Effect has it's role-playing sections (dialog choices and other decisions) separate from it's combat sections just like Batman has it's stealth sections and it's beat'em up sections separate from each other.

Mass Effect has its tactical-choice dialogue system and its combat sections. Each system is what you make of it. The capacity to roleplay is not defined by having dialogue options. It is by having the ability to role play. Simply because you can role play in dialogue does not mean you will. Similar to how simply being able to role play in a sandbox does not mean you will.
Discrediting all sandbox actions from role play kinda puts you at odds with a lot of the community. People say Skyrim has role playing not because you get an choice of whether to save that priest, or get an awesome staff, but because they can go out into the fields and role play themselves as a hunter. If you exclude how you behave in Arkham City during its sandbox points but not that sort of stuff, there is some double standards going on here.
Being in a sandbox gives you opportunity to role play. Dialogue choices give you the opportunity to roleplay. They both fall under one RPG element: The Capacity to role play.
Want more capacity to Role Play in AC? The opportunity to pay your respects to Batman's dead parents. Hugo Strange even taunts Batman, asking him whether he's the kind that still feels deeply for them and misses them, and will likely take the opportunity to pay his respects, or whether he has repressed it all, and is more likely to keep going. You don't have to pay your respects, you can just move on. It doesn't add anything in the way of combat, it doesn't unlock anything except an arbitrary achievement on Steam, it does nothing for the game but allow you to Role Play Batman and his reaction to his parents death.

And, putting a character in a sandbox doesn't make it a RPG just because you can then decide to beat up random thugs or not.

No, it does not. It would require more RPG elements to be an RPG, something which AC is missing. Its got levels abilities and inventory, as well as capacity to roleplay, but it is missing things like stat based skills and combat rather than player skill based.

Arkham City has thugs all over so if the player wants to beat up more thugs, they can; the developer didn't put thugs there for role-playing purposes. Many critics and gamers complained there was nothing to do after beating Arkham Asylum so Rocksteady gave you a sandbox and a bunch of sidequests so you have more to do, not for role-playing purposes.

As a part of the cure. What they added in for more to do after beating Arkham City was the Story Plus mode.
The point of the Sandbox was to grant more to do by virtue of freedom. Freedom to be Batman in Arkham City, to imagine yourself as him, and act as him. If that was not the purpose, they would have left it with Story Plus and Riddler's Revenge.
Add to that that it is a large point of it being a Batman game that the player gets to Play as Batman, imagining themselves as him and Role Playing as him in this incident. It ain't Ninja Assassin City, it's Batman Arkham City.

A role playing game (RPG) is where a character is defined by the player. The character development and the story is defined by the player. This is typically done through various choices, normally in terms of dialogue and skills, spells and abilites.

This means that a game like GoW, while it puts you into a role, is not an RPG, because ultimately, the game doesn't allow for player choice further than weapon choice. Compared to something like Alpha Protocol- also a third person shooter- gives you dialogue choices, as well as choices in terms of the various skills, which allows you to choose your playstyle. In both games you're given a person with a set name and face, but the difference is that in AP, you get a plethora of choices of how to play the game, while in GoW, you get the choice of which box to hide behind.

I wholeheartedly agree with Berenzen.

Even this part?

as well as choices in terms of the various skills

'cause you know, AC does that too. It gives choices for your playstyle. I think you are interpreting his statement along the lines that the Dialogue lines are the most important part of it, whilst overall the message is that it gives you different ways to play it.
In GoW, you seriously only have a choice of hiding behind a certain block of cover, and which gun you want to shoot enemies with.
In the stealth sections of AC, you have a choice of how you want to deal with the room. Do you want to just drop down and engage them all in a fight, using smoke and your grappling gun to your advantage (Very possible to do), do you want to hang in the rafters and silently take each one down. Do you want to throw a distraction to draw one of them away, then drop down and fight them and run away before others arrive. How you approach each situation can greatly differ from game to game, and the abilities aid you in having more ways to deal with each room.
This was part of his point in the

choices of how to play the game

Note: Not 'Choices of what happens in the story', but 'Choices of how to play the game'.

I guess if GoW was a sandbox, it would be then have role-playing according to your standards because then you could choose to kill even more enemies than the hundreds in the main storyline.

It would have the capacity for role playing. Each game is what you make of it. I have played through the entirety of Mass Effect without any role playing. I made every choice as a tactical war game choice. Does that make it not an RPG as you have to try to role play in it?
If Gears put you on that continent and gave you free roam of the world, added in the sidequests that would obviously go with that, and kept its main story in the same places, but had them connected by the world, it would have a fair capacity for Role play. You could search for sidequests and survivors first, main storyline later because your character thought that was more important. You could hunt down every Locust in the city so they no longer pose a threat, or your character might think that it was more important to rush through and get to the heart of the threat to stop it there, and leave the city to its fate whilst you did so. It would have the capacity to role play. Simply because you can role play doesn't mean you have to, but there is absolutely NO game where you have to role play.

I was able to take Marcus Fenix's machoism from 10 to 11 by killing even more enemies so a GoW sandbox game is totally a RPG. /sarcasm

You change from 'Has Role Playing' to 'A RPG'. Don't mess up my definition with yours. More than simple role play is needed for a game to be an RPG.

I wasn't commenting on the ignoring of missions, I was saying you decide the fate of a race and that's a pretty damn meaningful decision regardless if you can ignore that mission and it'll still be there or not.

Which is a bit of a red herring when we were talking about the fact that you could ignore missions in Arkham City, and in ME.

You don't decide the fate of any thugs in AC, you decide to knock them out or leave them be. If you knock them up out, they are just taking a nap for awhile, you're not deciding their fate, just how much sleep they get. The game literally doesn't let you kill thugs when you actually can kill them.

Oh Contrare. I knocked a person off a 4 story building. Do you think they survived when they landed on their head?
There is also the indirect influencing of fate. Those people who are a part of Penguin's crew that were caught by Jokers crew after Penguin blew up the bridges; Do you knock out Jokers crew and save them, or do you let them get what they deserve. Hell, the game even pushes this at you with their dialogue with Penguin after you leave the GCPD for the first time.
That and knocking people out right right before Protocol 10 commences, on top of rooftops and in the middle of the street so they have no chance of escaping the choppers and missiles. Indirect to the max, but you did influence them getting killed.

In the top of the tower of Wonder City where Strange is, you can knock out thugs buy hanging them off the side of the tower, but the game won't even allow you to cut the line with a batarang like you can in the rest of the areas in the game (I tried doing it several times). The game forces you to play exactly as Batman would.

Of course it forces you to play as Batman would, you're Batman. That's the entire point of it being a Batman title. To play it as Batman would, to Role Play Batman. Besides, don't leave them hanging off the tower, somehow kick them off it and watch them fall to their deaths. I have yet to figure out how to make this happen, but it is possible. I have done it numerous times.

A semi-set history that you choose.

That is why it is a semi-set history. You get to choose one of three set histories, leaving it overall as a semi-set history.

Again, you only decide how many thugs to take down. You don't have a choice of who to fight, you can't fight that mystery stranger (I forgot his name) if you wanted to.

And your point is? You can't shoot any number of characters in Mass Effect, so why does this matter?

When going through the main story, the game makes you fight X amount thugs. Then, there's the stealth sections where you must clear the room, you can't sneak past the thugs and leave them alone and get to the next area.

In some places, you can. There are specific places where you must stealth everyone in the room to death or else Batman will go 'I don't have time for this' when you try to hack the exit doors, but not every enemy in every part of every mission has to be killed. There are some that you can sneak past.

I'm sure there's some places where you can just run away in the main story missions but probably only a few places when you can do that. I know you can skip that museum fight with Catwoman because Batman opened the gate previously and you can slide under as Catwoman.

ROFL. Didn't bother with the Catwoman post-Protocol-10 stuff. The fact that everyone had guns and Catwoman has no life or armour kinda led to say 'Fuck it' and leave it alone.

I know there are many more games than Mass Effect that give you dialog choice. However, when you move over to JRPGs, barely any of those games have role-playing, as the characters in JRPGs are as set in stone as Batman is. So there's a lot of RPGs that would no longer be RPGs if RPGs required role-playing to be a core component.

Undeniably. Hell, there'd be a lot of RPGs of every sub genre that wouldn't be RPGs under each of our definitions. The question then becomes though, what do many of these JRPGs become? I know some with every RPG element except Role Playing, and no other elements so to speak. What would they then be classified as? RPG seems the only option for it. Even though it misses one component, the others are still intact and 'uncontaminated' by other game elements.

Since the genre is called Role-playing games, role-playing should be a focus to be a RPG. If role-playing is not a focus, then it's not a RPG.

This is why many say the genre name is misleading. It should focus on an RPG element to be an RPG, and not have any elements from other games in it. RPG elements all allow a certain level of role play, but I', pretty sure we both agree that that isn't true role play, picking which move to use in a fight.
If a game has all RPG elements except full on role playing, and no elements from other games, there is nothing else you can really class it as.
I will agree with you that Role Playing is an important RPG element, and how well it is done helps differentiate between a good RPG and a bad RPG, but it is not the only thing an RPG is.

From the Wiki link:
Role-playing video games also typically attempt to offer more complex and dynamic character interaction than what is found in other video game genres.

Which is why Batman is not even close to being a RPG and why Mass Effect is a RPG.

Also from the wiki link:
RPGs rarely challenge a player's physical coordination, with the exception of action role-playing games
It then later goes on to say:
features from action games, creating a hybrid action RPG game genre
Stating that Action RPG is a Hybrid genre, not default RPG, and therefore Mass Effect is also not an RPG. Note: I have never once said that the Original Mass Effect was not a Hybrid Shooter Cross RPG - an Action RPG if you will (Seeing as shooters technically fall under the larger label of Action games) - You however have insisted it is a default RPG.

More from the Wiki link:
In more recent years, some within the RPG community have criticized action JRPGs as not being "true" RPGs for different reasons: heavy usage of scripted cut scenes and dialogue, and a frequent lack of branching outcomes. Japanese RPGs are also sometimes criticized for having relatively simple battle systems in which players are able to win by repetitively mashing buttons, though it has been pointed out that Japanese RPG combat systems such as in Final Fantasy X and Xenosaga have become increasingly complex over the years, with more of an emphasis on strategy and timing, and with each new game often introducing their own rules and systems.

Note: some within the RPG community
It never says they are not true RPGs. It says that some in the community do not find them to be. Really, it depends on the game, much like it depends on the game with all Western 'RPGs' too.

That's exactly what I'm talking about with JRPGs. And, LMFAO at Final Fantasy X being an example of a complex battle system, FFX is brain dead easy. Xenosaga II is a tad bit complex but both Xenosaga I and Xenosaga III have really simple turn-based combat. DnD's combat system is much more complex than 90% of JRPGs as positioning is rarely even a part of a JRPG battle system.

I get what you are talking about with JRPGs. Not all of them are like that though, and before you do the whole 'I never said all', I realise this too.
Agreed that most JRPGs end up really simple. Its one of the flaws of that style turn based combat, whilst the DnD style has been turned into real time as it just flows better that way.

Mass Effect focuses on role-playing first and foremost, that's why it's a RPG, it just so happens to have shooting in its combat system.

I'd beg to differ. The shooting in its combat system is quite a big deal and focus of the game. Its why Bioware put more emphasis on it in 2, and sadly crossed over the line from...

It's not a shooter with RPG elements, it's a RPG with shooter elements.

That really depends on which one you are talking about, thankyou for using my classification system by the way. The first Mass Effect I will agree with you for that on. It had a fair focus on Shooting, but the majority of its focus was on its RPG elements.
The second one had the majority of its focus on the shooting. The conversations were still there, but had had maybe 10 interrupts added in for the whole game, whereas the shooting had a total rework, was made completely different, and shown off as one of the cool new features, was the subject of a lot of the marketing pictures (Sadly much like ME3 so far) and was very clearly Bioware's focus for 2.

Additionally, you technically don't have to shoot in Mass Effect if you don't want to, you can choose the Biotic class. Or you can be a Sentinel, wear down the enemies shields with your tech powers, then throw the enemy, or you can freeze the enemy and punch them, or you can turn on your armor, run up, and punch the enemy. There are ways to play the game without shooting as your primary offensive attack. That by definition makes Mass Effect not a shooter; a shooter requires you to shoot enemies as your primary attack. Therefore, your classification of Mass Effect as a shooter with RPG elements is wrong on multiple levels. Don't come back with the fact that I'm sure if you wanted to, you could go through a CoD campaign just knifing people as you would have to go way out of your way to do that, plus it would be very hard to do under a normal or higher difficulty level. Mass Effect gives you classes where your main offensive attacks don't require shooting a gun.

Pa-lease. In ME1, I'll give. You don't HAVE to shoot all too often, though you are also going out of your way not to shoot almost as much as you are going out of your way not to shoot in CoD.
In ME2, You are REALLY going out of your way not to shoot. Like, Really. Especially on anything above normal, where everything is basically immune to biotics, techs can take down their shields and armour but not much more without shooting, and all three non-combat focus classes (Going by the ME1 class focus thing down the bottom where combat was soldier, and partially in Infiltrator and Vanguard) had nothing BUT shooting to do in between waiting for their ability to cool down.

Also, Pa-lease, CoD was so MW1 age. BF3 you can blow things up with grenades or C4 or as roadkill or through blowing up a building and if you are extremely lucky, through the Defrib (There seems to be one very small area you can Defrib kill an enemy in. Really, Really impractical to try), or through knifing, or with a blowtorch, or by flying an aerial drone into them or through landmines or through cutting their vehicle to shreds with a blowtorch, ect.
Dependent on what class you play, you may not get most of your kills from a gun.
What I find lols though is that they made Jihaad Jeeping MORE effective. Get an ally to place it on your jeep, ram into something, then have them detonate it. You don't even get hurt, everything around you dies. ROFL.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

You missed the double standard part eh?
I could give a gamer Mass Effect and tell them its an RPG, then give them Dark Souls and tell them its an RPG, and they would be totally confused by the different 'Role Playing' in it under your definition. I am NOT trying to make all currently labelled RPGs stick as RPGs, so pointing out a Dark Souls example is pointless if it does not fall under my RPG banner, same as Mass Effect. A better example would be DA:O and KotOR 2. Many things different, but basically the same sort of game.
We both agree that there is something wrong with the way RPGs are labelled today, but throwing two games that, under my label, are not RPGs at me and using it as a flaw in my system is entirely flawed in itself.
Under my system, sub genres do not change what the game entails, and what makes it up. It changes how intense each element is portrayed. From 2D Mario to 3D Mario if you will.

I wouldn't consider Dark Souls a RPG. I was talking about games labeled as RPGs by professional gaming journalism, not what games you would call RPGs. If someone is looking to buy some RPGs and they are just looking at Best RPGs of the Year lists, both Mass Effect and Dark Souls would be on those lists. Both games play absolutely nothing alike so there's literally no point of the RPG genre the way it is currently classified. If you make role-playing a prerequisite for being a RPG, at least all RPGs will have something in common.

I'm guessing you missed all the jumping from platform to platform, and jumping between platforms over acid, and you know, the platforming, then? Granted, Portal also has a lot of puzzles in it. That is why it is a platforming puzzle game. If you missed the times where jumping from platform to platform without using any portals was important, you need to replay the game.

I played Portal just last year for the 1st time, there is only one point of the game that had what I would call a "tricky" jumping section. There are very few hard jumps to make in Portal, most of the jumps don't require precision jumps or fast jumping; therefore, it's not a platformer. Portal requires you to solve puzzles, not make jumps to get through levels.

That really depends on how much you expect each, and how you react to them then doesn't it?
As much as the cure drop off seemed sus, Batman was desperate. Joker had the cure, and was taunting Batman that he MIGHT save some for him. Under those circumstances, a risk for a possibly great reward was well worth it.
Also note, if Batman had of contacted Alfred or Oracle, he would have perceived them saying it was true thanks to that funky mind crap the Mad Hatter pulled. The AC team just decided not to make him contact them.

The Mad Hatter sidequest was literally just a very short beat'em up segment. I expected much more from a Mad Hatter sidequest, something along the lines of what was done in Arkham Asylum with the Scarecrow. Batman wasn't that desperate at the point as he got an extension via Ra's al Ghul, that was when he was at his most desperate.

Sounds like you're saying a game with linear levels can't have role-playing then. Every RPG not in a sandbox or open world isn't a RPG then.

Much like you are saying any game without a cutscene dialogue choice system can't have roleplaying am I right?

Choosing what your character says and how they act in key situations is a pretty important part of role-playing. You need some kind of dialog choice system whether you are picking exactly what your character says or something like picking an attitude ala Alpha Protocol. Even the few "dialog bosses" in Deus Ex HR were pretty cool, and I think that will be an element that other RPGs start implementing.

Mass Effect has its tactical-choice dialogue system and its combat sections. Each system is what you make of it. The capacity to roleplay is not defined by having dialogue options. It is by having the ability to role play. Simply because you can role play in dialogue does not mean you will. Similar to how simply being able to role play in a sandbox does not mean you will.

A game having a dialog system means that one of the game's focuses is the role-playing. Being able to choose what your character says is pretty important element to role-playing. DnD basically became a role-playing game because of the added talking/acting. Of course, a mute character wouldn't have anything to say. However, having all dialog for a character scripted and said in-game with no player interaction (like Batman) is a much different than playing a mute character.

Discrediting all sandbox actions from role play kinda puts you at odds with a lot of the community. People say Skyrim has role playing not because you get an choice of whether to save that priest, or get an awesome staff, but because they can go out into the fields and role play themselves as a hunter. If you exclude how you behave in Arkham City during its sandbox points but not that sort of stuff, there is some double standards going on here.
Being in a sandbox gives you opportunity to role play. Dialogue choices give you the opportunity to roleplay. They both fall under one RPG element: The Capacity to role play.
Want more capacity to Role Play in AC? The opportunity to pay your respects to Batman's dead parents. Hugo Strange even taunts Batman, asking him whether he's the kind that still feels deeply for them and misses them, and will likely take the opportunity to pay his respects, or whether he has repressed it all, and is more likely to keep going. You don't have to pay your respects, you can just move on. It doesn't add anything in the way of combat, it doesn't unlock anything except an arbitrary achievement on Steam, it does nothing for the game but allow you to Role Play Batman and his reaction to his parents death.

I wasn't discrediting sandbox RPG elements. I was saying the purpose of those elements in Batman AC is to allow the player to get into fights whenever they want to instead of only having fights along the path of the story like in Batman AA. Plus, in Skyrim you have a whole world reacting to you (to a degree), you can kill a shopkeeper and see what happens. In Batman AC, thugs just react to what you do. The Pay Your Respects thing is more of an Easter egg than anything. Batman still cares for his parents (via the short scene before getting to Ra's al Ghul) whether you choose to do the Pay Your Respects bit or not.

What they added in for more to do after beating Arkham City was the Story Plus mode.
The point of the Sandbox was to grant more to do by virtue of freedom. Freedom to be Batman in Arkham City, to imagine yourself as him, and act as him. If that was not the purpose, they would have left it with Story Plus and Riddler's Revenge.
Add to that that it is a large point of it being a Batman game that the player gets to Play as Batman, imagining themselves as him and Role Playing as him in this incident. It ain't Ninja Assassin City, it's Batman Arkham City.

The thugs are there so you can still participate in the combat system while doing the sidequests after beating the game. It would feel really weird to have no thugs around when getting all of the Riddler trophies or doing the Deadeye sidequest. Arkham Asylum was completely empty after beating the game, and it just felt weird. New Game+ is to let you replay the game with all your upgrades and giving you a decent challenge by throwing tougher thugs at you and changing some of the boss fights.

I wholeheartedly agree with Berenzen.

Even this part?

as well as choices in terms of the various skills

'cause you know, AC does that too. It gives choices for your playstyle. I think you are interpreting his statement along the lines that the Dialogue lines are the most important part of it, whilst overall the message is that it gives you different ways to play it.

Yeah, you should have at least some character customization in what skills your character gets. Even if a game makes you play as a mage, you should get a choice of what spells you choose to use. What your character says is pretty important part of the character and if you have no say over that, then the game is probably not a RPG. In real life, what you say is pretty damn important to the person that you are.

In the stealth sections of AC, you have a choice of how you want to deal with the room. Do you want to just drop down and engage them all in a fight, using smoke and your grappling gun to your advantage (Very possible to do), do you want to hang in the rafters and silently take each one down. Do you want to throw a distraction to draw one of them away, then drop down and fight them and run away before others arrive. How you approach each situation can greatly differ from game to game, and the abilities aid you in having more ways to deal with each room.

Almost all good games give you a choice in how to dispatch enemies way back in even Super Mario Brothers. That's not really a RPG element, more of an element of just being a good game. In Batman you are forced into stealth situations. A game like Deus Ex or Fallout 3 gives you the ability to play the whole game stealthily instead of set sections.

I wasn't commenting on the ignoring of missions, I was saying you decide the fate of a race and that's a pretty damn meaningful decision regardless if you can ignore that mission and it'll still be there or not.

Which is a bit of a red herring when we were talking about the fact that you could ignore missions in Arkham City, and in ME.

Not really, almost all games are set up in a way to not lock out content. I don't think any quests get locked out in Skyrim unless a bug causes it (Note: I haven't played Skyrim but a few friends do).

You don't decide the fate of any thugs in AC, you decide to knock them out or leave them be. If you knock them up out, they are just taking a nap for awhile, you're not deciding their fate, just how much sleep they get. The game literally doesn't let you kill thugs when you actually can kill them.

Oh Contrare. I knocked a person off a 4 story building. Do you think they survived when they landed on their head?
There is also the indirect influencing of fate. Those people who are a part of Penguin's crew that were caught by Jokers crew after Penguin blew up the bridges; Do you knock out Jokers crew and save them, or do you let them get what they deserve. Hell, the game even pushes this at you with their dialogue with Penguin after you leave the GCPD for the first time.
That and knocking people out right right before Protocol 10 commences, on top of rooftops and in the middle of the street so they have no chance of escaping the choppers and missiles. Indirect to the max, but you did influence them getting killed.

I'm sure that guy you knocked off a 4 story building was still labeled as unconscious. I didn't even realize you could save Penguins' thugs from Joker's crew after the bridge collapse. Saving people from Protocol 10 is a bit of a stretch, and you can't knock out people before it starts either because that's when you have to do the helicopter thing and I'm pretty sure any thugs you knocked out as Catwoman on the way to save Batman will respawn when the game switches back to Batman. Plus, stopping Protocol 10 will save more people than trying to save them while it's going on. Plus, that whole time when you are getting to Strange, people are dying.

ROFL. Didn't bother with the Catwoman post-Protocol-10 stuff. The fact that everyone had guns and Catwoman has no life or armour kinda led to say 'Fuck it' and leave it alone.

The thing that sucks as playing as Catwoman was that her thief vision doesn't tell you if they have guns or not. If you know if the group of thugs are armed, you can still dispatch them pretty easily as Catwoman. You really only get screwed if you go in punching, then realize they have guns.

Hell, there'd be a lot of RPGs of every sub genre that wouldn't be RPGs under each of our definitions. The question then becomes though, what do many of these JRPGs become? I know some with every RPG element except Role Playing, and no other elements so to speak. What would they then be classified as? RPG seems the only option for it. Even though it misses one component, the others are still intact and 'uncontaminated' by other game elements.

I'd call most JRPGs as simply adventure games with a combat system or combat adventure games.

Since the genre is called Role-playing games, role-playing should be a focus to be a RPG. If role-playing is not a focus, then it's not a RPG.

This is why many say the genre name is misleading. It should focus on an RPG element to be an RPG, and not have any elements from other games in it. RPG elements all allow a certain level of role play, but I'm pretty sure we both agree that that isn't true role play, picking which move to use in a fight.
If a game has all RPG elements except full on role playing, and no elements from other games, there is nothing else you can really class it as.
I will agree with you that Role Playing is an important RPG element, and how well it is done helps differentiate between a good RPG and a bad RPG, but it is not the only thing an RPG is.

Then, those games are basically wargames as that's what they were called before the role-playing element was added in.

Also from the wiki link:
RPGs rarely challenge a player's physical coordination, with the exception of action role-playing games
It then later goes on to say:
features from action games, creating a hybrid action RPG game genre
Stating that Action RPG is a Hybrid genre, not default RPG, and therefore Mass Effect is also not an RPG. Note: I have never once said that the Original Mass Effect was not a Hybrid Shooter Cross RPG - an Action RPG if you will (Seeing as shooters technically fall under the larger label of Action games) - You however have insisted it is a default RPG.

Again, the reason player skill was not in pen and paper RPGs is because of the limitation of table-top gaming. I don't think RPGs need to be inherently devoid of player skill. I would think the chances are pretty high that pre-table-top RPGs did involve player skill in some manner.

I get what you are talking about with JRPGs. Not all of them are like that though, and before you do the whole 'I never said all', I realise this too.
Agreed that most JRPGs end up really simple. Its one of the flaws of that style turn based combat, whilst the DnD style has been turned into real time as it just flows better that way.

My whole thing with turn-based vs action combat systems is that if you can do said system as action-based combat, you should. If the battle system is too complex to do in real-time, then make it turn-based. DnD's combat system is pretty complex and you would probably have to do that in a turn-based manner if you recreated it exactly in a video game. Whereas in Final Fantasy X, that combat system is so simple there is no reason to not do it in a real-time system, and it becomes so very boring because it's so simple and it's turn-based. Final Fantasy XII is almost exactly the same system as FFX but done in real-time.

It's not a shooter with RPG elements, it's a RPG with shooter elements.

That really depends on which one you are talking about, thankyou for using my classification system by the way. The first Mass Effect I will agree with you for that on. It had a fair focus on Shooting, but the majority of its focus was on its RPG elements.
The second one had the majority of its focus on the shooting. The conversations were still there, but had had maybe 10 interrupts added in for the whole game, whereas the shooting had a total rework, was made completely different, and shown off as one of the cool new features, was the subject of a lot of the marketing pictures (Sadly much like ME3 so far) and was very clearly Bioware's focus for 2.

I've only played Mass Effect 2 as I only have a PS3. I've seen some gameplay of Mass Effect 1 at a friends house. Just from my limited ME1 knowledge, it seemed like ME2 improved the shooting, which doesn't make it less or more of a RPG in my eyes. Almost everyone felt the shooting in ME2 is better. Improving an element of the game is only a positive. There's no reason a RPG can't have the smooth shooting of a shooter if that is indeed the RPG's combat system. I see improving the shooting in ME2 merely as improving the combat system and nothing else. I said in my 1st post that RPGs can have any gameplay they want as along as the game focuses on role-playing. A RPG based in a world with sword and shield combat is going to play like a hack and slash to a degree if it uses an action combat system just like a RPG set in a present day to futuristic world will probably have shooting as it's combat system. Sword and shield combat doesn't make a game more RPGish than a game with shooting combat.

Pa-lease. In ME1, I'll give. You don't HAVE to shoot all too often, though you are also going out of your way not to shoot almost as much as you are going out of your way not to shoot in CoD.
In ME2, You are REALLY going out of your way not to shoot. Like, Really. Especially on anything above normal, where everything is basically immune to biotics, techs can take down their shields and armour but not much more without shooting, and all three non-combat focus classes (Going by the ME1 class focus thing down the bottom where combat was soldier, and partially in Infiltrator and Vanguard) had nothing BUT shooting to do in between waiting for their ability to cool down.

Dependent on what class you play, you may not get most of your kills from a gun.

I haven't tried playing as a Biotic or Sentinel in ME2. I would think you can choose to more a field commander as those classes, as you wait for your powers to recharge you can be instructing your squad instead of shooting. I played as an infiltrator and I found that I really didn't need to be commanding my squadmates as much as I thought, and for the most part, I let them do whatever they were doing. I do want to do a biotic run at some point, and I would think I would be doing a lot more of issuing orders as my powers were recharging instead of shooting, that would be my plan going in at least. Plus, the sentinel class has tech powers to get through all the various shields and armors the enemies have.

 

[Ch@Z]

It seems like anything can be an RPG now.
I mean look at the RPGs of last year: the Witcher 2, Deus Ex:HR and Skyrim. These games are all considered RPGs but they all have almost nothing in common.

In the Witcher 2 you can't make your own character nor can you have your own play style (you only get 2 swords and 6 spells) but you get to make choices in the story and there are a lot of consequences in your decisions.

In Deus Ex:HR you can only play as Adam Jensen and don't get a lot of choices in changing the story but you get a lot of different play styles.

In Skyrim you can make your own character and get a lot of freedom in where to go but your actions almost never have consequences and you usually don't get to pick different paths in quest lines.

So to me the term "RPG" is like what the word "Rock" is in music. Rock can be anything really.

 

[Joccaren]

I wouldn't consider Dark Souls a RPG. I was talking about games labeled as RPGs by professional gaming journalism, not what games you would call RPGs. If someone is looking to buy some RPGs and they are just looking at Best RPGs of the Year lists, both Mass Effect and Dark Souls would be on those lists. Both games play absolutely nothing alike so there's literally no point of the RPG genre the way it is currently classified. If you make role-playing a prerequisite for being a RPG, at least all RPGs will have something in common.

I get you wouldn't consider Dark Souls an RPG. And yes, we both agree that current RPG labelling is just pathetic. The main problem with having Role Playing as the only requirement for an RPG is that Role Playing is also somewhat vague, and you are talking about a specific type of Role Playing. We'll get to that later though, seeing as about a third of this has no become a 'What is Role Playing' discussion.

I played Portal just last year for the 1st time, there is only one point of the game that had what I would call a "tricky" jumping section. There are very few hard jumps to make in Portal, most of the jumps don't require precision jumps or fast jumping; therefore, it's not a platformer. Portal requires you to solve puzzles, not make jumps to get through levels.

There is no point in portal that I consider as having 'Tricky' puzzles, so its not a puzzler. All throughout the game there are jumping sections. Often they will integrate portals into it: Having to shoot a portal into a wall then shoot another one in front of you before jumping to the moving platform. There is a fair bit of jumping around from platform to platform in Portal; it isn't all one flat maze with no pitfalls or anything. Sometimes there is portalling to get from platform to platform, sometimes jumping, and many times a mix of both.

The Mad Hatter sidequest was literally just a very short beat'em up segment. I expected much more from a Mad Hatter sidequest, something along the lines of what was done in Arkham Asylum with the Scarecrow. Batman wasn't that desperate at the point as he got an extension via Ra's al Ghul, that was when he was at his most desperate.

I won't argue that the quest itself was't pretty pathetic - it really was just poor. If they had of worked to make it actually boggle your mind a bit in that clock world, have conditions change and that sort of crap, it would have been a bit more interesting.
Also, he was still desperate. Ras had given him an extra hour or two to live, he had little other hope of a cure, and Gotham had no cure either, and no Ras blood. At the door to Wonder City he was at his most weak, his most desperate probably in the fight with Clayface, but that doesn't mean he wasn't desperate after leaving the sewers either.

Choosing what your character says and how they act in key situations is a pretty important part of role-playing. You need some kind of dialog choice system whether you are picking exactly what your character says or something like picking an attitude ala Alpha Protocol. Even the few "dialog bosses" in Deus Ex HR were pretty cool, and I think that will be an element that other RPGs start implementing.

Choosing how you act in a key situation doesn't have to be in dialogue though, see Mass Effect 1; Bring Down the Sky DLC. After shutting off the third thruster (Or was it the second?), you are approached by a group of Batarians who tell you not to shoot, and that it doesn't have to end in bloodshed. There, you can just shoot them and end it, or you can actually get into the conversation, and pick the 'Attack' option, or actually talk to them. How you act with your character is really just as important, if not moreso, than having a dialogue choice. If you talk as a good guy, and say you're going to save everyone, but run round killing innocents when not in dialogue, what does that say about your character? Either that he lies in conversations, or that he's psychotic, or any number of other things. Simply because you talk nice doesn't make your character so if your actions don't reflect it.
And agreed, the Dialogue boss fights in HR were amazing. Probably the best part of that game IMO. The complete opposite to the normal boss fights.

A game having a dialog system means that one of the game's focuses is the role-playing. Being able to choose what your character says is pretty important element to role-playing. DnD basically became a role-playing game because of the added talking/acting. Of course, a mute character wouldn't have anything to say. However, having all dialog for a character scripted and said in-game with no player interaction (like Batman) is a much different than playing a mute character.

Not so. Lets bring up the Boss Battles in Deus Ex again. They present an opportunity to role play, and they give you dialogue options, but the point of them is not to say what Jensenn would say, but to pick the correct choice to win the round. It was meant as an alternate challenge to stealth, combat or hacking. In this case, the dialogue system does not focus on Role Playing, but on challenge. Roleplaying is, however, made more readily available by it.
DnD wasn't a Role Playing game purely because of its dialogue system. It was because of the utter freedom you had in the world. Even without talking to someone you were a specific person that you were playing the role of, and you were adventuring around the world acting as that person. If you wanted to slaughter an entire village because your character was a psychopath, you didn't need a dialogue choice system to role play that out, you just went in and massacred them. The Dialogue choice system merely added even more freedom of interaction.

I wasn't discrediting sandbox RPG elements. I was saying the purpose of those elements in Batman AC is to allow the player to get into fights whenever they want to instead of only having fights along the path of the story like in Batman AA. Plus, in Skyrim you have a whole world reacting to you (to a degree), you can kill a shopkeeper and see what happens. In Batman AC, thugs just react to what you do. The Pay Your Respects thing is more of an Easter egg than anything. Batman still cares for his parents (via the short scene before getting to Ra's al Ghul) whether you choose to do the Pay Your Respects bit or not.

You somewhat are discrediting all Sandbox RPG Elements simply with your insistence that its not role playing unless it has a dialogue choice system, implying that sandbox RPG elements aren't Role Playing.
The point of the enemies being randomly spread throughout the city is indeed to allow you to choose when you want to have a fight. The point of the city is to provide a playground for people to role play Batman.
In Skyrim, the whole world don't react to you. Its like GTA: The local area (Which in GTA is the whole world) reacts to you only if you have a bounty. Killing that shopkeeper gives you a bounty, and they react to you to arrest you. Kill them in secret and there will be no bounty, but nobody reacts to you or suspects the strong warrior who just entered town, or the assassin or W/E as being the killer, they just walk up to the body "Who did this!?" then walk off. That's pretty much the extent of reaction to you in Skyrim.
It is also obvious Batman cares for his parents, the question is whether he lets that flow freely, or whether he suppresses his feelings.

The thugs are there so you can still participate in the combat system while doing the sidequests after beating the game. It would feel really weird to have no thugs around when getting all of the Riddler trophies or doing the Deadeye sidequest. Arkham Asylum was completely empty after beating the game, and it just felt weird. New Game+ is to let you replay the game with all your upgrades and giving you a decent challenge by throwing tougher thugs at you and changing some of the boss fights.

The thugs are there for that point, and for the point of freedom to be Batman and chase them down through the streets. The whole point of it being a Batman game is to play off people's want to be Batman, and let them role play Batman. The city is there to provide opportunity for them to have freedom when Role Playing as Batman, the thugs are there for entertainment, and so that you can play Batman and drop in to take them out.
New Game+ and Riddler's Revenge are there for post game content. Its the reason they are unlocked post game (And throughout the game for RR). Personally I wish they had of added in a boss fight replayer too - I hate having to replay the whole campaign to participate in one fight.

Almost all good games give you a choice in how to dispatch enemies way back in even Super Mario Brothers. That's not really a RPG element, more of an element of just being a good game. In Batman you are forced into stealth situations. A game like Deus Ex or Fallout 3 gives you the ability to play the whole game stealthily instead of set sections.

The thing is, RPGs tend to have more varied offers of approaching things. Yes in SMB you could jump past all enemies or jump on them and kill them, didn't change a lot though.
Compare RPGs to many games in this one simple example;
-In RPGs, you get somewhere and the enemy doesn't know you are there. You are able to sneak past them, or assassinate them, or kill them, ect.
-In many games, you go there, and they MIGHT not know you are there, but there is no option for sneaking past or assassinating. Quite often the first shot you fire gives every enemy a 100% lock on your position, and there is no alternate path to dodge past them.
And in Batman you aren't forced into stealth sections per se, merely sections where stealth is the most effective means to the end. There have been times in these sections where I jump down straight up and fly into the first guy, knocking his gun out of his hand, before running towards the others, explosive gelling them, knocking the guns out of their hands, and grappling the guns out of the other's hands before engaging in a good old fashion beat down. Am I more hurt than if I had of done full stealth? Yep. That's how it goes with High Risk, High Reward strategies though.

Not really, almost all games are set up in a way to not lock out content. I don't think any quests get locked out in Skyrim unless a bug causes it (Note: I haven't played Skyrim but a few friends do).

Which leads me to ask why you bought such a thing up in the first place.
And in Skyrim, I know one that does, but that's only if you've done another quest line first, and there are a couple of missions here and there that are temporarily locked out whilst in some quest lines for story reasons. Nothing time based though.

I'm sure that guy you knocked off a 4 story building was still labeled as unconscious. I didn't even realize you could save Penguins' thugs from Joker's crew after the bridge collapse. Saving people from Protocol 10 is a bit of a stretch, and you can't knock out people before it starts either because that's when you have to do the helicopter thing and I'm pretty sure any thugs you knocked out as Catwoman on the way to save Batman will respawn when the game switches back to Batman. Plus, stopping Protocol 10 will save more people than trying to save them while it's going on. Plus, that whole time when you are getting to Strange, people are dying.

Well, I couldn't check if he was or not as he was kind of at the bottom of the ocean >.>
Saving Penguin's thugs ain't a quest or anything, its just Penguins thugs getting held hostage or what have you by Joker's thugs. Fly down there and knock out Joker's thugs and they run away and hide, and you can't fight them. Leave it long enough and they'll eventually become normal thugs, but eh.
And yeah, I did say Protocol 10 was indirect to the max.

The thing that sucks as playing as Catwoman was that her thief vision doesn't tell you if they have guns or not. If you know if the group of thugs are armed, you can still dispatch them pretty easily as Catwoman. You really only get screwed if you go in punching, then realize they have guns.

My problem with Catwoman there is that yes, I can dispatch a single group easily, but when EVERYONE is armed, and there are 10 or so individual groups, I can take each one out methodically, but make one mistake and you are dead as she has basically no health or armour, and you have to redo that all again. Really annoying.

I'd call most JRPGs as simply adventure games with a combat system or combat adventure games.

Adventure game is even less defined than RPGs in today's market. Really, its starting to reach the level of 'Strategy game' or 'Simulator' or 'Action Game'. Yeah, it tells you what it will have in it, but no specifics. Strategy games can be RTS, 4X, things like FF Tactics, 40K, Chess, ect. each playing in a somewhat unique way, but focusing on tactics.
Simulators can be flight simulators, business simulators, dating simulators, war simulators, ect. Each somewhat unique, but it is a simulation of something IRL.
You get the picture.
Personally, I think most JRPGs fall into the Dungeon Crawl party. That is a sub genre of RPGs, however, and falls under the broader RPG banner.

Then, those games are basically wargames as that's what they were called before the role-playing element was added in.

Play a war game like Chess or Starcraft, and tell me how it compares to Final Fantasy. Not really a lot alike. FF focuses on the journey and adventure and crap, with RPG element mechanics, whilst those games focus on the individual battles, not the journey. Hell, there is no journey in them. It is a battle, that's it.
War games will focus on a battle, not an adventure. The combat in RPGs is the same as war games in many cases, though also sometimes taken to greater depth, but a War Game is a single battle. After that battle you will move on to another battle, or get a chance to redesign/reequip your troops. The journey, and the mechanics involving that journey, are not included in War Games though.
It is why I classed it as a Dungeon Crawl. RPG elements, not a lot of Role Playing.

Again, the reason player skill was not in pen and paper RPGs is because of the limitation of table-top gaming. I don't think RPGs need to be inherently devoid of player skill. I would think the chances are pretty high that pre-table-top RPGs did involve player skill in some manner.

LARP. Live ACTION-Role Playing Game. They were around pre computers. Computers have allowed for things to happen in Real Time with the dice rolls and such, but they do not change what a genre is. Player Skill is in RPGs in Action-RPG hybrids.

My whole thing with turn-based vs action combat systems is that if you can do said system as action-based combat, you should. If the battle system is too complex to do in real-time, then make it turn-based. DnD's combat system is pretty complex and you would probably have to do that in a turn-based manner if you recreated it exactly in a video game. Whereas in Final Fantasy X, that combat system is so simple there is no reason to not do it in a real-time system, and it becomes so very boring because it's so simple and it's turn-based. Final Fantasy XII is almost exactly the same system as FFX but done in real-time.

You still do get Real Time combat that stays true to RPG conventions. See Dragon Age: Origins. Action based combat with player skill, however, has no place in pure RPGs.
And I'm not debating the childish simplicity of many JRPG combat systems, nor that they could be moved into real time. That does not, however, mean they should be moved into real time. Simply because you prefer it in real time does not mean others will too.

I've only played Mass Effect 2 as I only have a PS3. I've seen some gameplay of Mass Effect 1 at a friends house. Just from my limited ME1 knowledge, it seemed like ME2 improved the shooting, which doesn't make it less or more of a RPG in my eyes. Almost everyone felt the shooting in ME2 is better. Improving an element of the game is only a positive. There's no reason a RPG can't have the smooth shooting of a shooter if that is indeed the RPG's combat system. I see improving the shooting in ME2 merely as improving the combat system and nothing else. I said in my 1st post that RPGs can have any gameplay they want as along as the game focuses on role-playing. A RPG based in a world with sword and shield combat is going to play like a hack and slash to a degree if it uses an action combat system just like a RPG set in a present day to futuristic world will probably have shooting as it's combat system. Sword and shield combat doesn't make a game more RPGish than a game with shooting combat.

I'd recommend you play Mass Effect 1. You probably have a PC somewhere, it has low system reqs and is only about $20. Play that, then move onto ME2 and tell me where the focus was shifted.
In ME1, there was shooting, and it worked. It wasn't bad (Some people will disagree here), but ME2s isn't good either (Sitting behind a wall for 10 minutes isn't fun).
The problem is not so much that the shooting was improved, but that the shooting started becoming the team's focus. The change in Dialogue from ME1 to ME2 is negligible. Added in interrupts for more action whilst in dialogue, and changed the persuasion system so you didn't have to put points into it for it to work. Combat got a full overhaul and change that was specifically meant to target the CoD/GoW fanbase and get them interested in it for its shooting aspect, and the team and game focused on the shooting so as not to alienate them with the dialogue and RPG elements. Bioware basically envisions ME as both RPG and Shooter in equal measure, and that's what the games have become.
Do note, shooting was in ME1 too. The focus on it was not so much there for either the devs, or in game itself. In ME1, shooting was simply your combat. You had focus on choice, on exploration, on equipping yourself properly for the combat, ect. There is a major difference in the feel of each game, and that feel is the shift from the RPG elements and exploration to Shooting.

I haven't tried playing as a Biotic or Sentinel in ME2. I would think you can choose to more a field commander as those classes, as you wait for your powers to recharge you can be instructing your squad instead of shooting. I played as an infiltrator and I found that I really didn't need to be commanding my squadmates as much as I thought, and for the most part, I let them do whatever they were doing. I do want to do a biotic run at some point, and I would think I would be doing a lot more of issuing orders as my powers were recharging instead of shooting, that would be my plan going in at least. Plus, the sentinel class has tech powers to get through all the various shields and armors the enemies have.

What I think you'll find playing as the Biotic, especially on anything above normal, is that whilst yes, you can sit back and give orders to your squad, you're not doing anything most of the time. You WILL be going out of your way not to shoot in the end. Play above normal, you're abilities do nothing until your allies have shot an enemies defences down, and most of the time they are hopeless at that. They die a lot, don't hit all too often, and you can only issue so many orders. You'll use your ability, issue an order, then wait. It that time, you'll end up leaning over and firing your gun, and you'll end up finding its faster to do that than bother with abilities most of the time.
Sentinel is a bit of an odd case. It does have the ability to take out all defences with purely its abilities, but if you plan on using the shield there is no chance of that. In addition, the same thing as the Biotic still applies: Half the time its faster to just shoot them.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I get you wouldn't consider Dark Souls an RPG. And yes, we both agree that current RPG labelling is just pathetic. The main problem with having Role Playing as the only requirement for an RPG is that Role Playing is also somewhat vague, and you are talking about a specific type of Role Playing. We'll get to that later though, seeing as about a third of this has no become a 'What is Role Playing' discussion.

I would say role-playing should at least be the 1st prerequisite for a RPG to be a RPG. There probably needs to be some kind of leveling and a narrative as well. But the rest of the gameplay I think can be pretty much completely open to anything. Mass Effect 2 has about half the game as role-playing and about half as 3rd-person shooting in my opinion, the focus and dedication to the role-playing aspect makes it a RPG in my eyes. I would say role-playing should also entail (outside of character leveling) a way for the player to have a hand in creating the character arc of the character they are playing and making some major decisions along the way.

There is no point in portal that I consider as having 'Tricky' puzzles, so its not a puzzler. All throughout the game there are jumping sections. Often they will integrate portals into it: Having to shoot a portal into a wall then shoot another one in front of you before jumping to the moving platform. There is a fair bit of jumping around from platform to platform in Portal; it isn't all one flat maze with no pitfalls or anything. Sometimes there is portalling to get from platform to platform, sometimes jumping, and many times a mix of both.

I don't even get how you are making Portal out to be a platformer. You figure out how to get through each section by figuring out where the portals go, that is step 1. I never had to stop and think where I need to jump to. Now Mirror's Edge is a 1st-person platformer, you have to make hard jumps and you have to figure out your way through the environment by looking around to see where you need to jump to whereas, in Portal, you look around to see where to put portals.

Choosing how you act in a key situation doesn't have to be in dialogue though, see Mass Effect 1; Bring Down the Sky DLC. After shutting off the third thruster (Or was it the second?), you are approached by a group of Batarians who tell you not to shoot, and that it doesn't have to end in bloodshed. There, you can just shoot them and end it, or you can actually get into the conversation, and pick the 'Attack' option, or actually talk to them. How you act with your character is really just as important, if not moreso, than having a dialogue choice. If you talk as a good guy, and say you're going to save everyone, but run round killing innocents when not in dialogue, what does that say about your character? Either that he lies in conversations, or that he's psychotic, or any number of other things. Simply because you talk nice doesn't make your character so if your actions don't reflect it.
And agreed, the Dialogue boss fights in HR were amazing. Probably the best part of that game IMO. The complete opposite to the normal boss fights.

I wasn't trying to say how you act isn't important, but if you don't have any dialog choice, then you can have a character that isn't consistent to his actions and his words. You need both because a character that's very nice in cut-scenes then kills everything that moves in-game has no consistency. I didn't play Mass Effect 1 but in ME2, there a section in the Omega apartments where you could just end the conflict through talking or shooting and maybe not even intervene.

Lets bring up the Boss Battles in Deus Ex again. They present an opportunity to role play, and they give you dialogue options, but the point of them is not to say what Jensenn would say, but to pick the correct choice to win the round. It was meant as an alternate challenge to stealth, combat or hacking.

In this case, the dialogue system does not focus on Role Playing, but on challenge. Roleplaying is, however, made more readily available by it.
DnD wasn't a Role Playing game purely because of its dialogue system. It was because of the utter freedom you had in the world. Even without talking to someone you were a specific person that you were playing the role of, and you were adventuring around the world acting as that person. If you wanted to slaughter an entire village because your character was a psychopath, you didn't need a dialogue choice system to role play that out, you just went in and massacred them. The Dialogue choice system merely added even more freedom of interaction.

You are right about the Deus Ex dialog battles being more about choosing the right lines than role-playing. I'm sure later games will allow you to have a few options to get through those kind of sections like be able to intimidate, bluff, etc. your way through that kind of section instead of just picking the right lines.

The 2nd half I answered in the last section about character consistency.

The thing is, RPGs tend to have more varied offers of approaching things. Yes in SMB you could jump past all enemies or jump on them and kill them, didn't change a lot though.
Compare RPGs to many games in this one simple example;
-In RPGs, you get somewhere and the enemy doesn't know you are there. You are able to sneak past them, or assassinate them, or kill them, ect.
-In many games, you go there, and they MIGHT not know you are there, but there is no option for sneaking past or assassinating. Quite often the first shot you fire gives every enemy a 100% lock on your position, and there is no alternate path to dodge past them.
And in Batman you aren't forced into stealth sections per se, merely sections where stealth is the most effective means to the end. There have been times in these sections where I jump down straight up and fly into the first guy, knocking his gun out of his hand, before running towards the others, explosive gelling them, knocking the guns out of their hands, and grappling the guns out of the other's hands before engaging in a good old fashion beat down. Am I more hurt than if I had of done full stealth? Yep. That's how it goes with High Risk, High Reward strategies though.

I know you can beat down the thugs in the stealth areas because Batman is just so much more powerful in AC compared to AA, but they are pretty much designated stealth sections, that is their purpose. Just like the game has those designated beat down areas. And, Batman always picks stealth and intimidation over fighting if he has that option.

Not really, almost all games are set up in a way to not lock out content. I don't think any quests get locked out in Skyrim unless a bug causes it (Note: I haven't played Skyrim but a few friends do).

Which leads me to ask why you bought such a thing up in the first place.
And in Skyrim, I know one that does, but that's only if you've done another quest line first, and there are a couple of missions here and there that are temporarily locked out whilst in some quest lines for story reasons. Nothing time based though.

I brought it up because even a RPG like Skyrim with probably 100s of quests and only 1, you say, gets locked out. It's just how almost every game does things, the developer doesn't want to lock you out of content.

Adventure game is even less defined than RPGs in today's market. Really, its starting to reach the level of 'Strategy game' or 'Simulator' or 'Action Game'. Yeah, it tells you what it will have in it, but no specifics. Strategy games can be RTS, 4X, things like FF Tactics, 40K, Chess, ect. each playing in a somewhat unique way, but focusing on tactics.
Simulators can be flight simulators, business simulators, dating simulators, war simulators, ect. Each somewhat unique, but it is a simulation of something IRL.
You get the picture.
Personally, I think most JRPGs fall into the Dungeon Crawl party. That is a sub genre of RPGs, however, and falls under the broader RPG banner.

Adventure games are very well defined, they are games where you just go around talking to people, maybe solve some puzzles, while going on an adventure. The genre is actually pretty dead and barely anyone makes adventure games anymore. The Back to the Future games/episodes are adventure games. Same with Hotel Dusk on the DS, and Shadow of Destiny from last gen.

I don't really have a problem with the strategy genre. I wish there were more strategy games especially on consoles. You know what you are getting into if you just know it's a strategy game.

Simulators aren't really a genre. I don't ever feel in the mood to play a sim per se. However, I might feel like playing a racing game, but do I want an arcade or sim racing game? Just like sports games, do I want arcade basketball or sim basketball? Sims are subgenres of another genre like racing or sports or flight.

Play a war game like Chess or Starcraft, and tell me how it compares to Final Fantasy. Not really a lot alike. FF focuses on the journey and adventure and crap, with RPG element mechanics, whilst those games focus on the individual battles, not the journey. Hell, there is no journey in them. It is a battle, that's it.
War games will focus on a battle, not an adventure. The combat in RPGs is the same as war games in many cases, though also sometimes taken to greater depth, but a War Game is a single battle. After that battle you will move on to another battle, or get a chance to redesign/reequip your troops. The journey, and the mechanics involving that journey, are not included in War Games though.
It is why I classed it as a Dungeon Crawl. RPG elements, not a lot of Role Playing.

I haven't played Starcraft (I don't like RTS nor do I PC game) but I'm sure it has a story. I played one of the Advanced Wars on the DS, it has a story to it as well. I see the major different between a Starcraft and a Final Fantasy as just the scale of the battles as in RPGs, you have a small party (or just yourself) vs the world whereas in Starcraft it's army vs army. A game with a small party lends itself to being more about the characters. Even in a normal JRPG like FF, you fight battles to level up and upgrade/reequip your characters for the next battle. I guess I'd call the standard JRPG like adventure wargaming, I'd say a FF game is firstly an adventure game, then it has it's combat system, that's really all the game is. I wouldn't call FF games dungeon crawlers just because there not straight-up dungeon crawlers like Dark Souls is, the game is just literally one massive dungeon. I reserve the dungeon crawler name for games that are basically just killing stuff, most JRPGs have towns with a bunch of people to talk to, plenty of sidequests, lots of cutscenes, and some grandiose story to tell. Just lots of adventure game elements to me. Valkyria Chronicles is actually a pretty perfect blend of between large scale battles and party based battling.

LARP. Live ACTION-Role Playing Game. They were around pre computers. Computers have allowed for things to happen in Real Time with the dice rolls and such, but they do not change what a genre is. Player Skill is in RPGs in Action-RPG hybrids.

How can LARP be a hybrid form of RPGs when it existed before pen and paper RPGs? It was perhaps the first RPG, yet it is somehow a hybrid?

My whole thing with turn-based vs action combat systems is that if you can do said system as action-based combat, you should. If the battle system is too complex to do in real-time, then make it turn-based. DnD's combat system is pretty complex and you would probably have to do that in a turn-based manner if you recreated it exactly in a video game. Whereas in Final Fantasy X, that combat system is so simple there is no reason to not do it in a real-time system, and it becomes so very boring because it's so simple and it's turn-based. Final Fantasy XII is almost exactly the same system as FFX but done in real-time.

You still do get Real Time combat that stays true to RPG conventions. See Dragon Age: Origins. Action based combat with player skill, however, has no place in pure RPGs.
And I'm not debating the childish simplicity of many JRPG combat systems, nor that they could be moved into real time. That does not, however, mean they should be moved into real time. Simply because you prefer it in real time does not mean others will too.

FFXII is has isn't an action RPG, it's just real-time, it's similar to Dragon Age in fact. If a turn-based system is so simple it can be done in real-time, then it shouldn't be turn-based. Turn-based battle systems are needed when the game is too strategic to be done in real-time especially if the battle system has a lot to do with positioning. You basically shouldn't have to go through menus if you don't need to.

I'd recommend you play Mass Effect 1. You probably have a PC somewhere, it has low system reqs and is only about $20. Play that, then move onto ME2 and tell me where the focus was shifted.
In ME1, there was shooting, and it worked. It wasn't bad (Some people will disagree here), but ME2s isn't good either (Sitting behind a wall for 10 minutes isn't fun).
The problem is not so much that the shooting was improved, but that the shooting started becoming the team's focus. The change in Dialogue from ME1 to ME2 is negligible. Added in interrupts for more action whilst in dialogue, and changed the persuasion system so you didn't have to put points into it for it to work. Combat got a full overhaul and change that was specifically meant to target the CoD/GoW fanbase and get them interested in it for its shooting aspect, and the team and game focused on the shooting so as not to alienate them with the dialogue and RPG elements. Bioware basically envisions ME as both RPG and Shooter in equal measure, and that's what the games have become.
Do note, shooting was in ME1 too. The focus on it was not so much there for either the devs, or in game itself. In ME1, shooting was simply your combat. You had focus on choice, on exploration, on equipping yourself properly for the combat, ect. There is a major difference in the feel of each game, and that feel is the shift from the RPG elements and exploration to Shooting.

My computer is 10 years old, it can't play Mass Effect. And, I really don't like PC gaming. I don't like sitting at my PC to play games and then having some minor issue crop up and spend an hour or so looking through forums post to find the guy who find the solution to some random problem. I also hate using the keyboard for movement, the mouse is better for aiming, but I so loathe the keyboard as a game control device. I'm very knowledgeable about the computers, I just don't want to deal with stupid PC issues when gaming.

Almost everyone thinks the gameplay of ME2 is better, the shooting/combat is better, that is the majority sentiment I've seen pretty much everywhere; reviews, forums, and even here in these forums. What I see that people didn't like was the streamlining of other things like inventory and stuff. I was rarely hiding in cover in ME2, I was usually out in the open shooting most of the time. I played the game on whatever the Hard setting was called (like Veteran maybe) and I didn't feel like I was sitting behind cover waiting for the enemy to poke their heads out.

What I think you'll find playing as the Biotic, especially on anything above normal, is that whilst yes, you can sit back and give orders to your squad, you're not doing anything most of the time. You WILL be going out of your way not to shoot in the end. Play above normal, you're abilities do nothing until your allies have shot an enemies defences down, and most of the time they are hopeless at that.

Doesn't the singularity power work on enemies with shields and armor? It seemed pretty cool in the Shadow Broker mission with Liara. I know the powers like throw don't work on enemies with defense, which is pretty lame.

 

[Bostur]

There used to be a genre of video games, that were not roleplaying games, but relied heavily on roleplaying game rules/mechanics for their gameplay. Those games used to be called RPGs in a video game context.
A few examples:

Bard's Tale
Pool of Radiance
Baldur's Gate
Dragon Age: Origins


Since those games were not roleplaying games, the name of the genre was of course confusing like they often are. (single player video games can in my very humble opinion not be role playing games, since role playing is a group activity)

Now the genre RPG seems to sell games, so publishers put it on the box whenever they are able to, making the term even more confusing and useless.

RPG is a marketing term, that simply means "Our game is awesome".

 

[Joccaren]

I would say role-playing should at least be the 1st prerequisite for a RPG to be a RPG. There probably needs to be some kind of leveling and a narrative as well. But the rest of the gameplay I think can be pretty much completely open to anything. Mass Effect 2 has about half the game as role-playing and about half as 3rd-person shooting in my opinion, the focus and dedication to the role-playing aspect makes it a RPG in my eyes. I would say role-playing should also entail (outside of character leveling) a way for the player to have a hand in creating the character arc of the character they are playing and making some major decisions along the way.

Mass Effect 2 I do not deny being part RPG, but that is not all that it is. For it to be purely an RPG, it should play as a pure RPG does. It plays as a shooter - an action game sort of thing - with dialogue between fights.
Defining the character arc I'll agree with, but making major decisions is not a necessity. It makes it far more interesting, but it is by no means necessary. I guess it really comes down to what you think a major decision is, and to what extent 'defining the character arc' becomes 'acceptable' for it to be Role Playing.

I don't even get how you are making Portal out to be a platformer. You figure out how to get through each section by figuring out where the portals go, that is step 1. I never had to stop and think where I need to jump to. Now Mirror's Edge is a 1st-person platformer, you have to make hard jumps and you have to figure out your way through the environment by looking around to see where you need to jump to whereas, in Portal, you look around to see where to put portals.

I don't get how you missed that half the game was jumping from platform to platform. Yeah, it was almost always obvious where you had to jump to, but so it has been in games like the Original Mario. There were timed jumps, jumps between two moving platforms, and also jumps that involved Portals mixed with timed jumps between moving platforms.

I wasn't trying to say how you act isn't important, but if you don't have any dialog choice, then you can have a character that isn't consistent to his actions and his words. You need both because a character that's very nice in cut-scenes then kills everything that moves in-game has no consistency. I didn't play Mass Effect 1 but in ME2, there a section in the Omega apartments where you could just end the conflict through talking or shooting and maybe not even intervene.

This comes down to good role playing as much as good writing of characters. If you choose to go against who your character is for fun or something, you aren't really roleplaying. However, it is always best for devs aiming to allow free play of their character to make the dialogue somewhat neutral so that that character can be played freely without being contradictory. That or give the player no voice. It isn't being nice, it isn't being evil. Its up to you to interpret their actions.
And what is this part in the Omega apartments. I never came across it as far as I know.

You are right about the Deus Ex dialog battles being more about choosing the right lines than role-playing. I'm sure later games will allow you to have a few options to get through those kind of sections like be able to intimidate, bluff, etc. your way through that kind of section instead of just picking the right lines.

The 2nd half I answered in the last section about character consistency.

It would be interesting to see how such conversations would end up playing out. Whilst not mutually exclusive, adding more choices that allow a player to succeed in a talk reduces the overall difficulty of it, and increasing the difficulty will mean less possible options that will work. That or cluttering up the conversation with extra choices on just how you want a line to be said after you make the successful whatever, which would be annoying. As I said, the two are not mutually exclusive, and could be properly executed, I'm just interested in exactly how a dev will do it.

I know you can beat down the thugs in the stealth areas because Batman is just so much more powerful in AC compared to AA, but they are pretty much designated stealth sections, that is their purpose. Just like the game has those designated beat down areas. And, Batman always picks stealth and intimidation over fighting if he has that option.

The ability to do a beat down in the stealth sections, however, provides you a way to have control over your Batman. Yes, Batman will choose stealth over fighting, but now we come to role playing a fixed role as opposed to making your own.

I brought it up because even a RPG like Skyrim with probably 100s of quests and only 1, you say, gets locked out. It's just how almost every game does things, the developer doesn't want to lock you out of content.

The context you bought it up in was more of a 'Its not as much RP because it will still be there even after you go away', at least that's how I understood it. Sadly devs don't like locking people out of content, except with a crappy morality system. A good game would be a game in which you could have things change because you didn't deal with them in time. Of course you would need to be given some time, but it would add a lot more atmosphere to a game knowing that the Urgent Mission is actually urgent, and not just something you can leave until the end of the game.

Adventure games are very well defined, they are games where you just go around talking to people, maybe solve some puzzles, while going on an adventure. The genre is actually pretty dead and barely anyone makes adventure games anymore. The Back to the Future games/episodes are adventure games. Same with Hotel Dusk on the DS, and Shadow of Destiny from last gen.

So... similar to your definition of an RPG? Walk around and engage in conversations with people, with any gameplay. Adventure games are... Somewhat iffy in their definition. There are a lot of games where you travel around and talk to people, and go on an adventure. What you are saying is that it needs something more than that to classify as an adventure game. Same sort of thing to what I'm saying about RPGs needing more than a dialogue system (Among a broader array of Role Play enabling mechanics) to be an RPG.

I don't really have a problem with the strategy genre. I wish there were more strategy games especially on consoles. You know what you are getting into if you just know it's a strategy game.

Really, you don't know what you're getting into. You know some basics, but not much. A game like chess is only so similar to SC2, which is only so similar to Civ IV, which is only so similar to other strategy games. There is variety in the classification. You do know somewhat what you are getting into, but it is not uncommon to play a strategy game and get an unsettling experience as it plays very differently to other strategy games you've played.

Simulators aren't really a genre. I don't ever feel in the mood to play a sim per se. However, I might feel like playing a racing game, but do I want an arcade or sim racing game? Just like sports games, do I want arcade basketball or sim basketball? Sims are subgenres of another genre like racing or sports or flight.

Sims are a classification. They tell you that a game will be as realistic as possible.
Where you have said it is a subgenre of a million different genres can also be applied to the likes of RPGs.
RPG-Shooter
RPG-Fighter
RPG-Tactical
RPG-Sports
Under your definition, all these need to be 100% valid as an RPG is to have a dialogue conversation that changes an event or two in the story. Saying it is a subgenre of every other game genre simply because it can be a part of any game genre does not make a lot of sense.

I haven't played Starcraft (I don't like RTS nor do I PC game) but I'm sure it has a story. I played one of the Advanced Wars on the DS, it has a story to it as well. I see the major different between a Starcraft and a Final Fantasy as just the scale of the battles as in RPGs, you have a small party (or just yourself) vs the world whereas in Starcraft it's army vs army. A game with a small party lends itself to being more about the characters. Even in a normal JRPG like FF, you fight battles to level up and upgrade/reequip your characters for the next battle. I guess I'd call the standard JRPG like adventure wargaming, I'd say a FF game is firstly an adventure game, then it has it's combat system, that's really all the game is. I wouldn't call FF games dungeon crawlers just because there not straight-up dungeon crawlers like Dark Souls is, the game is just literally one massive dungeon. I reserve the dungeon crawler name for games that are basically just killing stuff, most JRPGs have towns with a bunch of people to talk to, plenty of sidequests, lots of cutscenes, and some grandiose story to tell. Just lots of adventure game elements to me. Valkyria Chronicles is actually a pretty perfect blend of between large scale battles and party based battling.

During the short campaign it has a story, though an incredibly generic one. The majority of the game, however, is played in online competitive matches with no story other than "You're all at war". The game's story is mostly a basic tutorial on different styles of fighting, whilst undergoing generic plot of space revenge with surprise character from the past #3. Playing a DS RTS, a lot of what you would do would be the campaign. In PC RTSs, the campaign is generally 1/50th of your time with the game - MAX (Unless you quit because you don't like the game).
There are many RTS, however, that don't have a story, as are there many 4X and such. They all end up playing quite differently to FF style battles.
In the older ones, FF was turn based combat, and walking on square tiles (Which weren't necessarily labelled, but you can tell that they walk across square tiles) to explore a dungeon/town/w.e whilst following a story of your group.
In RTS, the square tiles doesn't apply. Generally you will be moving across a grid, but allowed to stay in places between grid slots centres and such (Imagine walking in DA:O). Combat happens real time with micro and macro management taking a big role, as does resource gathering and base construction. Don't construct a good base, or don't have a good enough economy, and you end up with a lost match.
4Xs are more similar. Generally you will move across a square tiled grid, and combat happens in an auto decided turn based fashion, with the stats of each unit coming into play to automatically resolve a battle for you. Base building, however, and land management, are a large part of the game. You will improve the land around your cities, and improve your cities themselves, in order to gain an edge on your opponent.
In both game styles resource management and base building are large players in how things play out.
If you played FF with 60 units v 60 units (About how big most battles in Starcraft are, dependent on the player it may reach 100 v 100, but generally there are lower amounts), it would still play like FF. You would have no base building, no real resource management (Money don't count), and those older games would still be turn based. The newer, more real time ones might fit in better, but they still miss a large part of the point in RTS, 4X and strategy games in general. Your job isn't to explore around a world completing quests and continuing a story, your job is to command the units at your disposal to victory in one battle, before being told what happens on the way to the next one. Imagine FF as only its combat sequences. Now you have a strategy game.

How can LARP be a hybrid form of RPGs when it existed before pen and paper RPGs? It was perhaps the first RPG, yet it is somehow a hybrid?

Role Playing and LARP have existed in one form or other for a fair amount of time, they aren't simply recent events. Note how it is not called Live Role Playing. The action is added there for a reason. It is the fact that it is your actions that do things that count, and you are not just a place holder. If you dressed up as the characters from your RP, and talked IC and everything ect. whilst deciding what happens in the game based off RPG mechanics, that's not LARP. You may be role playing your character to the almost max, but you aren't carrying out any of their actions.

FFXII is has isn't an action RPG, it's just real-time, it's similar to Dragon Age in fact. If a turn-based system is so simple it can be done in real-time, then it shouldn't be turn-based. Turn-based battle systems are needed when the game is too strategic to be done in real-time especially if the battle system has a lot to do with positioning. You basically shouldn't have to go through menus if you don't need to.

Really, a lot of positioning stuff can also be done in real time. Most just don't bother with it as the effort for advanced positioning stuff is more than their budget is for. Menus are a choice, I personally don't like them, but there is a reason they are used; some people do like them. Some people enjoy going through menus, and having the ability to take their time with their plans and tactics instead of being rushed by a game being in real time.

My computer is 10 years old, it can't play Mass Effect. And, I really don't like PC gaming. I don't like sitting at my PC to play games and then having some minor issue crop up and spend an hour or so looking through forums post to find the guy who find the solution to some random problem. I also hate using the keyboard for movement, the mouse is better for aiming, but I so loathe the keyboard as a game control device. I'm very knowledgeable about the computers, I just don't want to deal with stupid PC issues when gaming.

Ich, ten years old and probably not a personally designed to last rig would probably have problems with ME in the end. Personally I can't stand control sticks for movement, and prefer the controls the keyboard grants, as well as all the buttons available for hotkeys to abilities and such over the few buttons a controller has. As you put it, you shouldn't have to go through menus if you don't have to, and the hotkeys eliminate the need for many menus. With a 10 year old PC you might experience issues, but unless you've done something horribly wrong there shouldn't be an issue with a computer that you have to deal with.
This really shouldn't turn into some kind of PC v Console thing like it has the potential to if I go on for much longer, but I personally prefer the PCs controls and capabilities, though I understand why others prefer consoles.

Almost everyone thinks the gameplay of ME2 is better, the shooting/combat is better, that is the majority sentiment I've seen pretty much everywhere; reviews, forums, and even here in these forums. What I see that people didn't like was the streamlining of other things like inventory and stuff. I was rarely hiding in cover in ME2, I was usually out in the open shooting most of the time. I played the game on whatever the Hard setting was called (like Veteran maybe) and I didn't feel like I was sitting behind cover waiting for the enemy to poke their heads out.

Well, maybe its different on a console, but ramp it up to the max difficulty. You cast an ability from behind cover, you can die whilst casting it, even when in almost full cover. It is rediculous. On Normal, Veteren, ect. up till that point, you technically can stay out of cover for a while, but without Vanguard or very quick disposal of enemies without being ambushed, you're in a bit of trouble. Thankfully ME has the Skyrim problem of being pathetically easy, except 2 on the highest difficulty.
The shooting was reported to be improved, and that is a personal choice (Apparently ME1 was clunky. Never felt that. Wasn't a smooth modern FPS shooting experience, but neither was it meant to be. I'm growing to hate modern 4 bullet death shooters.), but the vast majority still had major problems with it with having to stay in cover 90% of the game. Its why Bioware is adding in all the new features to make exiting cover actually a viable option in combat. In ME2, it was designed as a cover shooter for god knows what reason.
There was also an outcry at the basic removal of the inventory system (Streamlined is not strong enough a word. It went from inventory to less than a BF3 inventory), the removal of about 60-70% of all abilities, the replacement of weapon ammo components with abilities, the replacement of grenades with Squad Mate abilities, and the heavy weapons, the rather meandering and canonically almost insignificant story (Seriously, if you took out ME2, and the references to what happened in ME2, ME3s plot would likely still make perfect sense), the loss of the majority of the old squad, old love interests not paying any attention to you at all (One meeting, until LotSB with Liara, but the other Ashley and Kaidan still only have one meeting), the removal of 99% of the presidium, the only effect your choices from the previous game really having on this one being an email you get, the inclusion of ammo (IMO a better choice, but W/E) and a ton of other thins.

Doesn't the singularity power work on enemies with shields and armor? It seemed pretty cool in the Shadow Broker mission with Liara. I know the powers like throw don't work on enemies with defense, which is pretty lame.

"Singularity is a biotic power available exclusively to the Adept player class and Liara (in the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC pack). The power launches a dark energy sphere to create an intense mass effect field. The field creates a warp in the space-time continuum, creating a gravity well akin to a black hole. Unprotected enemies are drawn into the Singularity and held briefly helpless in orbit while protected enemies are held in place. The singularity will drain any shields, armor, or biotic barriers of enemies over time."
From the Mass Effect Wiki. So yes, it technically does effect armoured enemies, but in the same way it does unarmoured. Not sure how it will go on lower difficulty levels, but the Shield/Barrier/Armour drain ain't a rapid thing, and you still have to do something to kill them. Thankfully the duration is longer than the cooldown, so you can cast other spells with it up, but generally it is accepted that you are better off just using your other abilities, and shooting enemies, rather than propping them up with singularity and slowly killing them with your other abilities.