No Time To Play

What is it with people waking up in 2011 to declare they know what CRPGs (computer role-playing games for the acronym challenged) are, better than anyone else? It’s doubly annoying, as the genre is rich and diverse on the one hand, and solidly anchored in a tradition of pen&paper games on the other hand.

The latest to try and squeeze countless games into a narrow definition (and complain about it) is this write-up from an online magazine I hadn’t heard about before. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, that’s okay, because the tl;dr version is right there at the beginning.

None of these games (ed: DA, Fable, Final Fantasy) are role-playing games. They are, in fact, nothing more than story-driven strategy games.

At that point, I almost stopped reading, because the author is criticizing a bunch of very different CRPG franchises for… capturing the essence of Dungeons and Dragons itself.

Yes, my dear readers, in case you forgot (or you’re too young to know) the first roleplaying game ever was nothing more than a glorified strategy game at the foundation. So was the first computer RPG, Rogue — which the article does mention — and Baldur’s Gate II, which the article omits, despite the fact that it’s considered by many to be the best CRPG ever. Nor does it mention Fallout 1&2, the favorites of another sizeable chunk of gamers, and which if anything require even more strategy than the Infinity Engine titles. That didn’t prevent either franchise from having highly praised stories as well. If Mr. Coffey is trying to suggest that story and strategy can’t have equal importance in CRPGs (it’s hard to tell what exactly he’s suggesting), there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. But even if they couldn’t, a “Stuff Quest” is what the original roleplaying game started as, and while the definition of the genre has greatly expanded over the years, a game that only has that side is still undeniably an RPG.

By the way, despite being a real-time action game, Diablo still follows the traditional D&D recipe: take a quest -> delve into dungeon -> kill and loot -> grow stronger -> kill big baddie. And yes, it requires plenty of strategy; no mindless mouse-clicking there!

Now, people are into gaming for various reasons, and roleplaying is no exception. If you’re in it for the drama and tough moral choices, fair enough; look for games focusing on that. But don’t be grouchy if the current fashion temporarily swings in a different direction. And definitely don’t tell me what you think RPGs are supposed to be.

(Off-topic: dear webmasters at The Game Effect, what’s with the AJAX-dependent pagination? Haven’t you heard of progressive enhancement?)

What exactly is an RPG? by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.