What is a TRUE rpg?

[DarkRogueHaseo]

What is a true rpg? Personally I find it to be games like Final Fantasy 6,Lufia and Breath of Fire. TRUE rpgs. "Hack and slash rpgs" are not true rpgs. Games like Secret of Mana and Secret of Evermore are action rpgs,those are acceptable but a lot of people say games like Borderlands,Left 4 Dead and even Call of Duty are RPGs. I disagree and I'm sure a lot of people agree with me.

[WereCatf]

Originally posted by DarkRogueHaseo:

Personally I find it to be games like Final Fantasy 6,Lufia and Breath of Fire. TRUE rpgs.

Pff, hardly. Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale and so on; those are more like what proper cRPGs are. Then there is the whole category of non-computer-based RPGs, most famously D&D, for example.

[Stoowox]

A real RPG for me is simply where you have to act as a character in a very not defined storyline. Interactivity with other characters is essential.

[DJToasterWaffle]

hi everybody!

[Zaltys]

While it's one of the harder genres to define, it can't be fully subjective. Otherwise the genre would be too useless to exist.

There are some general features that make CRPGs different from other genres: character development, inventory, NPC interaction, freedom of movement, and choice of actions.

Many games have some RPG-elements, but having some elements isn't same as belonging in that genre. There are many games where you can drive a vehicle, but not all of those are driving games...

Part of the problem on Steam is that some devs list their games under every genre just to get more views.

[DarkRogueHaseo]

I believe that's the problem. Too many people call even that's aren't TRUE rpgs true rpgs. A Steam gamer buddy of mine for example actually said that all of the old school rpgs suck because most of them have slow songs and aren't fast paced. I'm not trying to hate on anyone but I personally love a lot of the older games. Take a game like Lunar Silver Star Story for the PS1. Even for a PS1 game I still believe it looks better than a majority of rpgs these days. The other problem is that a lot of gamers who diss older games haven't even played that. I always say play the game before you hate on it.

[Awakened Gamer]

I have to disagree, people like to hide behind the idea of subjectivity to justify there opinions, im not saying anyone here is doing that but an rpg by definition is a game where you can choose things as you progress like stats and new abilities, and of course storyline, for example an rpg cannot be an pure adventure game if it does not have rpg elements, it can however have adventure and rpg elements and be called an adventure rpg and so on.

[Ruffle]

RPG is such a broad term. The way I differentiate them is:

Console RPG (JRPG or turn based RPG) - FF, DQ
Action RPG - SOM, SOE, Alundra
Computer RPG (turn based strategy) - Baldurs gate, Divinity: Original Sin
First Person RPG - Elder Scrolls
Hack n slash RPG - Diablo, Path of Exile, Baldurs gate (PS 2)

These are a bit irrelevant if you started gaming in the last 5 -10 years though. I only had consoles when growing up (Mega Drive, SNES, PS 1 and 2), so just played the few RPGs that actually made it to Australia before PS 2 era.

[Hawkstein]

Torchlight is another example of Hack n' Slash RPG.

Final Fantasy is a pure RPG. Now...

Originally posted by DarkRogueHaseo:

those are acceptable but a lot of people say games like Borderlands,Left 4 Dead and even Call of Duty are RPGs.

These kids are twisted. If Call of Duty is a RPG, then Sonic is a Strategy game and Street Fighter is a Racing game.

[Khorium]

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, awesome game!

[wekateka]

Borderlands has RPG elements (Character leveling, skilltrees, what equipment to use) but isn't really an RPG in my opinion.

[Sleazy]

Pillars of Eternity, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate I and II, Icewind Dale, Bard's Tale I to IV (upcoming), Torment: Tides of Numenera (upcoming), Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, Sword Coast Legends, Divinity Original Sin, Wasteland and Wasteland 2, Ultima series, Wizardry series, Ancient Evil, Tales of Trolls and Treasures, Return to Krondor, The Temple of Elemental Evil... XD

These are true rpgs, imho. Today we have a lot of ACTION/rpgs, which is totally different.
I don't know who could call l4d2 an rpg... no leveling, no story, no branching dialogues, no classes, wtf? Ah, what a sad world :C

[Gus the Crocodile]

I'd like to thank SickBoy for the "it's subjective and that's okay!" points. I completely agree. Subjectivity doesn't prevent understanding of terms, it just makes the terms kind of fuzzy - their overall meaning could be thought of as a sort of statistical central tendency of everyone's meaning, an average. We each get a sense of that tendency in our lives, and we use it to communicate, but we neither have nor need a complete picture of that average in order to do that. This isn't just how genre works, it's how the vast majority of words work.

Personally, off the top of my head, RPGs are all about taking control of a character and making meaningful and lasting choices that define (and change, if you like) who you are, and likely affect the world around you as your choices do in real life. That's a really broad definition, but that's kind of the point.

I don't really consider things like old-style SNES-era JRPGs to have a whole lot of "RPG-ness". In something like Final Fantasy 6, the narrative is very close to completely locked down; the choices you make mostly come down to stuff that's only relevant in battle: who you have in your party, and how you develop their abilities. Which is basically the same as how "action RPGs" or "hack and slash RPGs" work as members of the genre: they abstract out "character development" to mean the development of that character's powers, rather than the development of their whole person.

Secret of Mana is an interesting case for me personally because it was one of the earliest games I owned that was classed as an RPG by anyone. That was the genre it would be listed under when game magazines spoke about it, back when I read game magazines, and so it was what I always called it too. But these days I'm hard pressed to call it an RPG for any reason other than nostalgia. It's an action game where you have a very small amount of choice in how your characters develop in that you can decide which magic and weapon skills you level first. But some were basically better than others, which steers your gameplay toward homogeneity, and back when I played through it with my brother and friends, we generally wanted to level weapons evenly in case the next weapon upgrade had a cool special ability, so the amount of actual differentiation in the way you play ends up being pretty small, in my experience. There is far less meaningful choice here than in even something like Diablo 2.

It's kind of like how people commonly always called Tetris a puzzle game and so I followed. But I don't really consider it a puzzle game anymore because it's so heavily based on high-intensity pattern-recognition loops, and I don't really see that as much more puzzly than aiming your gun at the enemy's head before they shoot you in an FPS.

[supertrooper225]

A game with a leveling system, a focus on story, story decisions, dialogue choices, deep character progression, equipment and loot and/or character customization can all be said to be RPG's. Action RPG's are a sub-genre, which means they are still, quite literally, RPG's.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Some people feel that character and ability customization is a core part of the RPG genre's essence. Others disagree and prioritize a strong sense of story, and for those they also disagree on whether story linearity is an issue. Then there is the question of "RPG elements" --basically a level of abstraction by which one's character can increase in ability without oneself increasing in ability in gameplay.