Okay, so in those games there is character development, at least. Makes sense. I get it. There are also more profound consequences, as I understand. Every decision must be weighed. The endgame is always going to be different.

I have sometimes struggled with that very question though: what is an RPG? What constitutes the decision for some to say "well this game is not an RPG, but this one is?" And for me, it all started back in the old forums. Some people were saying "Oblivion is not a role-playing game", which sort of hurt my feelings because I'd put so much love into that game! I certainly thought I was playing some roles with my myriad assortment of characters. How dare they!

But it also made me think. Why would they come to this conclusion?

For a lot of Morrowinders especially, the answer is "there is more of a separation between player and character skill." A lot of features (such as repairing items, unlocking stuff, and even casting spells) are based on character skill, not the player's ability to be quick enough with those joysticks, or that mouse. To them, the definition seems to lie somewhere in this greater separation of toon versus player.

Well my definition is simpler: an RPG is a game in which the focus is playing a role in a game. Not the action. Not the quests. Not the adventures. Not even the dice-rolls. Or the classes. Or any of the numbers. All of those are incidental. Although I do consider all of those features to be essential toward making a good RPG, what exactly does this term boil down to?

It is game which allows us to play a role, in which the focus is playing a role (rather than THE role).

In other words, let's say the only thing we could do in any Elder Scrolls game (or Fallout) are the Main Quests. We can't explore. We can't make potions. No side quests. No guilds. No factions. Only the good guy or gal (which we play), the enemies, and occasional NPCs who help us further the Main Quests. We can't gaze at awesome sunsets. We can't strip our characters down and go for a swim. If this is all Bethesda allowed, without even the character progression noted in Bioshock or Dragon Age (I assume), well that to me would make Bethesda's games into Action/Adventures.

"Well, Tomb Raider does that. We play a role when we are with Lara Croft. Therefore by your definition, Tomb Raider is an RPG."

And to this I say, no, Tomb Raider is not an RPG. Not to me, anyway. And not to its devs, who mostly classify these games as action-adventures.

In any Elder Scrolls game, any table-game, and in some of the MMOs I've played, I was able to create my own character, but I was also able to do whatever I want with this character. Because doing what I want (or better yet, doing what the character wants) is the actual focus of the game. See? Not the quests, not the adventures.

I can make a character who goes picking flowers for instance (and I have!). All she does is pick flowers all day, that is what she wants to do, and best of all, the game supports this. Picking flowers, in this case, IS playing the game. Playing the game means playing a role. Role Playing Game. This character might someday do quests, but then again, she might not. She might get into fights and go on adventures, or she might not. Because to play the game does not mean to go an adventures, or b34t the g4m3. All of that is merely there, just in case somebody gets interested in doing them.

With Tomb Raider, sure, Lara Croft can go around looking at flowers and maybe go for a swim, however this is not what playing the game is really about. To play the game means to do the adventures. Solve the puzzles. Find the secrets. Otherwise, all there is left is standing around, crouching, shooting into thin air. Doing flips in mid-air.

But then there are JRPGs, in which most of them are considered roleplaying games by the general gaming public, yet their stories are very fixated and often linear. Though there are also some which offer lots of choices along the way, too. But I can't remember playing a JRPG in which I was allowed to create whomever I wanted. I really don't know. I will leave that one open. I've played some Final Fantasy, some Legends of Dragoon, etc. but I haven't really thought much about why they'd be considered RPGs, or not.


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Gosh, I apologize for writing that novel. You all are talking about memes and quick-posting. I had to get that out of my system, I guess.

I vaguely remember The Fantasy Trip. I never played it though. I did have the Melee microgame it started from however.

Back in the day when I started gaming we did D&D, but like you guys, a heavily customized version. The entire magic system was overhauled into a mana point one, where you had a total mana or karma (for cleric spells), that was your level x Int (or Wis for Clerics). Each spell cost mana, and only when you were out of mana could you no longer cast spells. Pretty standard stuff in video games these days. But way beyond standard D&D.

I can see where you are going with your definition of an RPG. I agree with most of it. I think it is a murky subject at best though, and something subjective to every gamer.

I think a lot of people consider an RPG to be a game where you have skills or talents or powers, or whatever, that you have to choose from as you level up. Typically there are too many for one character to take them all. Where pure action games like Doom never bother with any of that. You just have stuff like guns or armor or powerups you pick up. A lot of times when people say a game has "RPG Elements" they mean it has a level system and multiple ways of building a character. A lot of action games tend to add in RPG-lite stuff like this. And a lot of RPG games tend to go more for the action, and a first person viewpoint. So the line between the two can be really blurry. I remember the old school RPG games were typically 3rd person isometric, often with an entire party, like the Baldur's Gate games. Or Kotor.

I would love to try a World of Darkness tabletop game. It’s not really my current social circle’s “thing” though, as they are nuts for D&D.

I really do apologize for that lengthy set of opinions yesterday. I had some time to kill. And it really did feel good to share that.

I've lambasted the "ObLiViOn/SkYrIm Is NoT aN rPg DURR!" people plenty in the past, and you all have probably heard my spiel before, so I won't go hard into it this time (or at least, I'll try not to). But I find that most people--at least the really vocal ones--that go out of their way to declare something as a "true" or "not a real" RPG just have dumb, absurdly arbitrary definitions of what an RPG is. It's their way of denigrating a game that somehow offends their existence because their identity is solely wrapped up in their video game tastes. And we should remember that (in the case of TES), their supposed golden standard of what a "true" RPG is, Morrowind, was also trashed as a "fake" RPG by some Daggerfall fans. It's just a bunch of nonsense.

Now, if you want to say, "This game does RPG mechanics poorly," or "This is not what I want in an RPG," or something along those lines, there's an actual discussion to be had there. But they are RPGs. Granted, sometimes things do get a bit murky, but pretty much every single time that cabal of people come out of the woodwork to declare something as "not a real RPG"...it actually is an RPG.

Khajiit Character Dump

Orcs and Half Orcs

Very well written.

I’m not a huge fan of Orcs and Orckin, but these are really cool!

I think WoW really made Orcs mainstream. Though Warhammer certainly had a hand in it as well. I have liked Orcs since Shadowrun. I had an Ork rigger named Butch. His dog was Sundance.

Orcs first became interesting to me with TES. I can't help thinking of their nature as that of Star Trek Klingons. Generally driven by honor and their own unique code.

Awwww that’s adorable!

Butch was a fun character to play. He was a total inexperienced newbie at Shadowrunning. He literally froze up after the first time he shot someone, and had to be dragged away by the others. Another character - an experienced merc named Johnny - took him under his wing and mentored him.

One of the funniest things that ever happened with him was he came home and found a bomb in his house. So he called up Johnny and said:

"I think there's a bomb in my house! What do I do?"

so Johnny says:

"Well, get out!"

D&D Female Character Dump (love the dwarf 2nd down, and the samurai woman later)

Did Butch get called “Chummer”?

Those D&D ladies are really neat! My GF’s main character is a female Dwarven Barbarian. Big ol’ beard. That’s not her or my artwork, just a close approximation of what she looks like.

Everyone gets called a chummer is Shadowrun, chummer. Usually right after being told to slot and run...

Dwarven women with beards! Even as much of a feminist as I am, I can't get on board with that one.

Lol, she loves it! Supposedly one of the newer source books has an NPC Dwarven lady sporting a beard.

I guess this is the best place to put this. There was an interesting interview someone did with Todd Howard about general Bethesda stuff. They only slightly touched on Starfield and TESVI, but there was some very interesting discussion about The Todd's time with Bethesda. Some of it I had heard before but there was a lot of new stuff to me.

But perhaps what stood out to me most were some of The Todd's pretty candid responses about things like Fallout 76's rough launch (and analogizes it somewhat to that of ESO's) and other stuff in Bethesda games that didn't work as well as was hoped, if at all. It's just over an hour long, but I recommend watching the whole thing.

Link to: Going Nuclear: The Story of Todd Howard & Bethesda | Develop:Brighton Digital 2020

Cool, thanks for posting. I'll check it out when I have time (as well as Chapter 9).

Interviewer (paraphrased): You've done your first MMO with 76. Will you be going any more?

Todd (paraphrased): Well, never say never. Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI are both going to be single-player ...

Renee:

I see that Horizon Zero Dawn has been out for PC for a few months now. But it is Windows 10 only. That might be enough to convince me to upgrade my gaming PC to 10. But I am not sure. I will have to look at some gameplay videos to get a better feel of what the game is really like.

Supposedly, the game is some kind of masterpiece. Obviously opinions may vary from person to person, but the general consensus is that it’s a truly great game.

I heard a lot of great things about Assassin's Creed Odyssey. But after I played it, I was felt it was just meh. I did not like the feel of the controls at all.

Yeah the controls for all of the AC games are a might wonky, lol. Takes some getting accustomed to.

SubRosa, if you do try Horizon Zero Dawn on PC, would love to hear your thoughts.

I did update my gaming PC to Windows 10. So I might try Horizon. Gog will probably have a sale a week or two.

Oh gosh, was this a harrowing experience? Maybe not. Maybe by now you know all the pitfalls. I've heard all kinds of horror stories.

I found it quite easy.

I've been running W10 for quite some time. I don't remember when I went to it but it's been at least a year or more - pretty soon after it came out. No problems, no complaints.

Okay good. Was just curious.

It wasn't that bad. I have been using Windows 10 on my laptop for a couple of years, so I got all the surprises out of my system. The update itself was simple. Afterward I had to go through all the usual things of creating new file associations, setting desktop colors, wallpapers, and the like. The same as any time you install Windows. Thankfully it has been out long enough for people to create programs to fix the largest things I dislike, like the inability to customize the start menu, the removal of the recent items list, and putting the file properties window on the side rather than the bottom. I had to reinstall several games to get them to work. But they did eventually work.

Well, there ya go! With Total War Amazon done, might it be time for you to be our guinea pig for Horizon Zero Dawn on PC?

Not yet. It was on sale over the holidays, but not by enough for me to want to buy it. Maybe in the future it will come down more, and I will give it a chance.

I started playing Sword Coast Legends again last night. It has been a long time since I tried playing it. I actually finished the tutorial for the first time, and am in the beginning of it. The game got lambasted, but it is ok. I would not say it is great however. But is is far from bad.

The voice acting is good. Lots of different accents. So far the characters are interesting too.

You can save anywhere at anytime. But there seems to be only a single save game. As you cannot go to a Load screen and choose to load a specific one. You click on Load and it just starts up from the last time you saved. So that is asking for your game to be ruined by save file corruption.

There are no console commands, or save game editors. Which disappoints me, because I like to use them to customize my characters, and do things outside of class structures. Like give January some kind of lightning bolt attack. I did find some Trainers, which among other things will give you lots of points to spend on attributes and perks. So maybe I will experiment with that.

The camera will not let you zoom in much to see your character, and there seems to be no way of using custom portraits. The graphics are good though.

It is very heavily team-focused. You start with a group of 3 NPCs with you, and seems to be how it goes through the game. I don't think you can create your own custom NPCs like you could in Pillars of Eternity. But they do start you with a Fighter, a Rogue, and a Cleric. A Wizard/Necromancer joins soon after. So far you can only have 4 total characters in your party. But that might change later.

I find the combat to be really fast, and hard to keep track of everything everyone is doing. It is also brutal. I had to lower the difficulty from Medium to Easy. I also had to spend a lot of time micromanaging the cleric to keep dishing out healing during the battles.

The rule system seems to be based on D&D. But it is very video-gamey. I have not played table top D&D since version 3.5, so I cannot be sure if 5.0 is like this or not. uses. Like a lot of crpgs it gives you branching trees of perks to buy, all based on your class. Said perks all have a cooldown time between. So it feels a lot like say Dragon Age that way. But the various races and classes are all straight D&D at least.

Jan and company fight a Mimic, which was pretending to be a treasure chest

Hate those Mimics.

Yah me too. I added Mimics into Oblivion via Maskar's and they're just annoying. Well, they're supposed to be, that's their whole point! But I eventually removed them because they just feel like they're coming from outside the Elder Scrolls universe / aren't supported by lore books at all. Thank goodness MOO makes it easy to remove anything we don't want, while keeping stuff we do want.

Sword Coast Legends looks rather Baldur's-y but only because it's isometric. Looks as though it's not turn-based, is what I mean to say. More action-y.

Doncha love it when everybody's saying some game is bad, then you try it and lo, it doesn't seem as horrible? I assume by 'lambasting' you are talking about critical game reviewers, not so much gamers themselves, but still. Maybe bad ratings can cause some sort of a launching pad within our minds. We read it's bad, expect that it'll be bad, and so on,

Then again, when I discovered Oblivion it was due to a game review in which the guy gave it A+, and to this day I feel like that reviewer nailed it pretty good. Not so much the rating, but the way he described it as 'do anything / go anywhere', which is exactly what I love. I still feel the same way about that game as I did in 2008.

Sorry. Rambling. Maybe I should start gaming.

I played some more Sword Coast Legends. I think the multiplayer parts of it no longer work, since the developer went out of business and Steam delisted the game (you still need Steam to play however). But in addition to the two single player campaigns there is a mode to play a random dungeon. You say how many levels you want it to be, what kind of monsters, etc... and the game generates the dungeon for you and off you go. You can go alone, or bring up to 3 NPC compaions from the single player campaign. I tried that a bit, and leveled up some of my companions.

It also has support for user-created dungeons. I have not looked to see if any are out there however.

Tamriel: Zero Dawn

Aloy!

Three types

Ugh. Exactly what happened to my playthrough of Shining in the Darkness for the Genesis/MegaDrive. Had made some good progress, levelled up my crew nicely and alluvasudden BOOM! Save file was no longer loadable

I have a plain old office chair.

Same. That being said, if I had more time to game I might would get a fancy chair.

Elden Ring looks pretty cool.

Thanks. I checked Elden Ring out. Release Jan 2022. Looks like it could have potential. Single player Medieval fantasy open world rpg with character customization, mounted combat.

I haven't really been playing attention to Elden Root until today. And I have to say, I am intrigued. Here is an interesting video that attempts to predict what Elden Root may be like, based on Miyazaki's past work:
Elden Ring Classes, Races & Stats Theory: Character Creation and Progression Gameplay Discussion

I'll have to give that a lookie-loo on my lunch break. I, too, am wholly unfamiliar of the game outside of the E3 trailer they released yesterday.

Edit: website is up now and is more descriptive. https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/elden-ring/elden-ring

I just finished watching the original Alien movies. Watching Resurrection made me yearn for a Alien RPG. It would be squad-based, isometric, tactical style game, like the Baldur's Gate games, or the Pillars of Eternity ones. You would have your main character, plus up to 5 companions. They might be NPCs you meet with their own backstories and quests, or generic adventurer's you can create yourself (like in the Pillars games), or a mix of both.

The story might be that you are on a world infested with Xenomorphs. The goal, survive and escape. You work your way through the game world, meeting people and recruiting them, or fighting them. You pick up weapons along the way, maybe find gunsmiths where you can upgrade them at certain points, etc... Plus all the usual leveling up with skills.

Your team ought to be a variety of types or "classes". Mercenaries, pirates, scientists, engineers, doctors, thieves, and so on. Each ought to have something they can add, and offer different ways to resolve problems. An engineer might be able to hotwire a door, a soldier might be able to blow it open, etc...

Yes! Alien and Alien 2 my two favorite sci fi movies. There's so many background themes in those movies... it's not just humans versus monsters. I can still remember the looks on Paul Reiser's face after he tries to lock them all in, but then he's the one who gets eaten.

I am surprised there isn't already some sort of Alien game. Oh I see, a game which is isometric, like Baldur's. Yeah that would be kick ass.

Alien: Isolation is supposedly a fantastic game if you like a tinge of horror in your game life.

Anyone see the SW: KOTOR news? I never played the original, so I'll probably grab the remake for sure.

I had no idea what you were talking about, so I looked it up. This is interesting. Aperion was a group that previously worked on a fan-made update of Kotor 1 using the old and open-sourced Unreal engine. They got a lot done before Disney shut them down with legal threats. Maybe someone got it through their thick skulls that being good capitalists and selling people what they want is a better more than being litigious?

Now Sony is onboard. I wonder what that will mean as far as what engine the game will use. Is that a sign that it will run on something owned by Sony?