The difference between Action-Adventure and RPG

[Turbo Nozomix]

Bethesda doesn't do RPGs, they do Action-Adventure games with RPG elements:

Skyrim, Fallout 3 / 4...

All those games use quest-directives and quest-markers to tell a player precisely where to do, what to do, who to talk to, and the player just moves along the scripted quest nodes to make the game move forward, while bashing enemies along the way.

A Role-Playing Game depends upon the element of the player to play a role in what is going to happen, and how it is going to happen. An RPG presents a player with information that the player then works out inside of themselves, and decides what they're going to do with - and the game then recognizes the player's choices, and reacts.

In an RPG, there is no story without the element of the player's role, and without the player's own decisions. In an Action-Adventure, the decisions are pre-determined, and a player just obeys the quest-directives until they lead to the end of the game, and instead focuses on other things, like the combat.

An Action-Adventure game has the story part on automatic, so that the player can focus on combat and other things.

These are examples of Action-Adventure games:

Oblivion
Skyrim
Fallout 3
Fallout 4
Witcher 3
Assassin's Creed
Mass Effect 2
Mass Effect 3

These are examples of RPGs:

Gothic
Gothic 2
Morrowind
Dragon Age: Origins
Divinity 2: Original Sin

The RPG label has been abused by publishers and developers for a long time, because labelling a game an RPG makes it sound bigger and more sophisticated, and draws people in, and results in more sales. Ironically, many of the people who feel impressed with themselves for playing a game labelled as RPG don't really have much interest in playing a real RPG - they just want to bash everything in an expansive world, and collect look, while the game tells them everything they have to do.

Publishers like Bethesda know that, and they exploit those people by lying to them and telling them that they're successfully traversing an RPG, when they're actually playing Action-Adventure games, mislabelled as RPG for the sake of marketing propaganda.

I wish people would be more accurate with game labels, so that we don't have people with misguided expectations criticizing an RPG for being and RPG, instead of being an Action-Adventure game - and also so that we wouldn't have people praising an Action-Adventure game for being an RPG, when it isn't one.

RPGs have far greater potential to be deeper and more rewarding in their experiences than Action-Adventure games. I hope that players who are only familiar with Action-Adventure games will discover that by understanding that there are often trade-offs in RPGs, because their developers need to focus development resources on areas of the game that Action-Adventure games don't need to spend any money on - such as having better writing, having more player options, and having a game be prepared to respond to various expected and unexpected player choices and actions.

Action-Adventure games can go all out on their graphics budget (yet, for some reason [Bethesda's stinginess and greed] Fallout 4 still looks like crud) while not spending on story, and creating multiple paths for each quest. RPGs have to spend a lot more on their writing, character development, and other things.

[Incunabulum]

You're talking about something that has been hashed out completely by the community a year ago. The people who care about labels are already using them correctly and the people that don't aren't going to stop.

So it doesn't matter if you call FO4 'action-adventure', 'aRPG', or 'coddleslop' - the people who don't know what an RPG is will still continue to call this an RPG because it has 'levels' and they'll still continue to think that running to a quest pointer, killing everything, and then clicking on a clickie is what RPGs are all about.

That's what they like. Just let it go.

[Hobo Misanthropus]

The only Role Playing Game that has ever existed is Life.

[Xyzzy]

There are no clear lines between genres these days. Most have some of each.

[Daedalus]

FO4 is an rpg.

[Turbo Nozomix]

Originally posted by Daedalus:

FO4 is an rpg.

Sure it is. In the same sense that DOOM is an RPG.

[Horizonist]

Dragon Age is an RPG but Fallout 3 isn't? What?

[Turbo Nozomix]

Originally posted by Horizonist:

Dragon Age is an RPG but Fallout 3 isn't? What?

Dragon Age: Origins is an RPG. That's the first game in the series, which is an entirely different game, with different designers than Dragon Age 2 and 3.

[Flippy]

I think Fallout 4 is an RPG. Lots of role playing and choices and urivaled customization.

Can it be better? For sure.

[DouglasGrave]

Computer games include inherent limitations that make it more about the degree of roleplaying that a game allows than whether it allows any at all. It then becomes a matter of how much a roleplaying potential a particular individual considers necessary for a game to specifically be called a "roleplaying game".

For Fallout 4, you do have the option to make explicit decisions that reflect your character's reaction to particular quests or characters, and that is a certain measure of roleplaying. But roleplaying is also supported by the open nature of the world, which gives you a great degree of freedom to roleplay your activities in a more personal way.

For example, I could decide to play a character who is deeply attached to the first teddy bear he found after leaving the vault, but has a deathly fear of water, and the game allows me to play out appropriate traits for that character, taking cover whenever it rains, skirting around bodies of water, and playing around with that teddy bear while going about all my other business.

[Flippy]

Games are very tame now. Pigeon holed and limited.

So much is possible but the videogame industry has basically been shut down.

Fallout 4 is amazing in its scope and depth. Backward and soap opera like in some of its writing.

The are few other games coming close to what Fallout 4 has done, although there are some.

Bottom line its a sad day for the video game industry with few able or willing to compete, bombarded by trolls, negativity and market manipulation. Oh ya and thieves.

[Frosty]

Originally posted by Turbo Nozomix:

Originally posted by Horizonist:

Dragon Age is an RPG but Fallout 3 isn't? What?

Dragon Age: Origins is an RPG. That's the first game in the series, which is an entirely different game, with different designers than Dragon Age 2 and 3.

That has little to do with anything, all the Dragon Age games are RPGs; your dislike for the gameplay changes in the newer ones and some awkward writing does not change that.

Look I'm not saying I don't like your opinion on what an RPG is to you. But realistically it is and has been a broad term. The majority of people who hold your opnion often cite TTRPGs and games that as closely possible imitate a TTRPG if not allude to structures like that. It's not the only form of RPGs out there.

The reality is that RPGs in electronic media are more varied than their strictly excel spreadsheet, free form TTRPG counterparts.

You can have RPGs that are more heavily based on TTRPG mechanics or you can have games that tend to blur the lines between a few genres to heavily lean on RPG aspects in their story telling/character development. The Dragon Age & Mass Effect series are more modern examples of that variation where they tend to focus more on character development/narrative RPG elements and move towards a bit of a faster pace of combat with some RPG aspects thrown in to balance it a bit.

An RPG is not limited by it's game play mechanics, in fact in some cases it's gameplay mechanics are dictated by it's narrative and sometimes vice versa. It doesn't need to be turn-based nor dice-roll intensive, it can explore varying means of gameplay if it fits it's narrative style.

It's a very broad genre and has been for as long as RPGs have bled into electronic media. You won't see the freedom you see in most TTRPGs in the video game world simply because engines are just not complex enough to make that work. A lot of trickery and a lot of coding can make it seem like you do, but you don't. But that can work within those constraints fairly well depending on how the developer decides to structure their RPG.

People want to cry about how "well I can't be who I want to be!" well guess what? NO GAME out there lets you do that. You will ALWAYS play the role and the character that the writers and the developers have dictated. You can have freedom to make decisions and effect choices given to you by the developer/writer (Game Master if you will), but they will always been pre-chosen/pre-dictated. It will ALWAYS be a multiple-choice questionare modeled around the narrative that the developer/writer is trying to achieve. We're a long ways away from a game engine that can support true AI and adjust to player-inputed variables. Even games that a people like to espouse for having "deep character development and choice" are just illusions of such. Your choices are just better written and better fleshed out in those games and thus you feel better about them; that's a subjective experience and doesn't change the fact that ME3 still had multiple distinct endings (even if they were written rather horribly and did little to really tie up the series, they were still multiple options given to you as a player).

[Squirrle]

Originally posted by Turbo Nozomix:

People want to cry about how "well I can't be who I want to be!" well guess what? NO GAME out there lets you do that. You will ALWAYS play the role and the character that the writers and the developers have dictated. You can have freedom to make decisions and effect choices given to you by the developer/writer (Game Master if you will), but they will always been pre-chosen/pre-dictated. It will ALWAYS be a multiple-choice questionare modeled around the narrative that the developer/writer is trying to achieve.

Thats why fallout 4gets a bad rep from alot of players. You get choices but its basicly 2 when you boil it down to the bones. Help institute or destroy institute, thats okay but otherwise you realy dont have mutch of an choice what you can do. In fallout 3 you can roleplay since you have a somewhat vauge bacstory and a goal to find your dad (because you love/hate him and more) or in case of nv find the dude that shot you for some reason 'limited leveling so you have a sence "this is who i am" and then there is fallout 4. You get a solid backstory thats mentioned everytime you talk to someone important, a kid you have to save, dead husband to revenge, and the baby gets mentioned all the time ruining imertion for my character' for me a rpg is a game where you make a character with a bakstory of sorts with some loose "ties" to the game, and you can finish the game without that tie getting broken. For eksample. My character is a girl that have a bad reationship with my father but he is blodd. and im gonna track him down because he betrayed his own spawn. This story gives me a where im from where im going and wigle room to do stuff and its not set in stone

[MortVent]

nothing, they are both RPGs

Just use different styles of combat

[1984]

mfker u say witcher 3 is not an rpg? lol u idiot

[White Knight]

I agree with the basic premise, disagree with all of your arguments and find your list of what does and does not constitute an rpg to be ridiculous.

Yes, it is true that no computer game can legitimately call itself "an rpg" because the term "rpg" is (was?) a specific term for a specific genre of game. Central to this genre were things like socialization, creativity, problem solving, independent thinking, etc. Any game you play on a computer, by yourself, has to be something completely different.

For whatever reasons, young people insisted on co-opting the term and applying it to things it never should have been used for...like the Witcher series of games, as an excellent example.

The problem with this whole argument, in this case, is if you call Fallout "not an rpg" then you cannot call any video game "an rpg". These games are not only the golden standard as being the best thing going for crpgs, it was originally designed from the ground up, based upon GURPS. If you have to ask "What is GURPS?" then you should never participate in a conversation about what is or is not "an rpg".

Bethesda makes games that often appeal to people who have actually played table-top roleplaying games. Playing them takes time, a little bit of thinking, some creativity is encouraged, and exploration is rewarded. Games like Fallout and Skyrim are the next best thing as far as I'm concerned. I specifically like them for the same reasons I loved rpgs to begin with.