JadeShepard wrote...
spirosz wrote...
Question, when did "choices" and "consequences" define RPG as a genre?
They didn't, and even if they ever did, COD Black Ops II broke that illusion.
I'm not sure I'd say that: after all, why can't COD Black Ops II also be called an RPG? Perhaps not a good one, but- well, who said it was a good one?
RPG definitions vary from person to person, but there are those who think it derives from certain gameplay mechanics (typically revolving around inventory, character customization, character progression with level-up customization, and dice-roll mechanics derived from D&D), and there are those who think it learns more towards story progression mechanics (choosing character dialogue, or story choices that shape the narrative and progression.
Personally, I fall far more into the second camp. My first experiences with D&D never involved much in the way of combat, and I'm from a family with a history of drama, and by drama I mean plays and theatre. The idea of role-playing to me has never been bound to the mechanics of how: I've seen actors with elaborate costumes, plays with virtually no costumes or set, finger puppets, audio dramas, hand puppets, finger puppets... all these different mediums can tell the same story but in different ways, and with different personalities. To me, that's the epitome of roleplaying: item management is a playstyle that is associated due to history, but there's nothing particularly necessary about loot or even XP to playing your role.
At the inverse, rule complexity (once the trademark of the RPG genre) has long since ceased to be a monopoly of them alone. Levels and stats and item customization blossomed like wildfire even across games with no player input in the story narrative: once it used to be thought of as just the JRPG genre, but now even Call of Duty multiplayer can support a character progression system to unlock better abilities and capabilities. These are games I certainly wouldn't consider an RPG due to their lack of story influence, but they can certainly boast the gameplay mechanics. Call it the strike two against game mechanics being a necessity of RPGs for me.
It's not a particularly impressive standard, but in my view perhaps one of the 'purest' examples of the RPG genre, role-playing at its most distilled, is the Japanese dating sim. These games begin by having the character adopt a role as a tabula rose character in a new setting. That might be something familiar (high-school dating sims), more fantastical/sci-fi, whatever, but the character is introduced to a cast to ease them into the environment of the world and then given a narrative push to get the ball rolling. Things roll from there, as who you talk to and how you talk to them (in essence, what sort of role you choose to takes) ends up leading to differing and increasingly mutually exclusive paths. By the end of the game, you end up with your chosen one because of the choices you made, and the differences in relationships and interaction are significant. And, of course, there's the whole deal about emotional investment with fiction characters. Totally unfamiliar to anyone on BSN.
(And if that wasn't one of the geekiest admissions of understanding nerd culture, I don't know what is. Kind of like Twilight: you don't even have to have read it to understand about it.)
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