The 26 Best RPGs according to Gamepro

[Comrade Tovya]

bouzane said:

Comrade Tovya said:

bouzane said:
Role playing involves making decisions pertaining to allegiance, dialog, character development, approaches to various situations, etc... Zelda has very little, if any, actual role playing. The Zelda series is the very definition of action adventure, it fits into no other genre. Deus Ex on the other hand allows you to choose your skills and augmentations and what dialog Denton says. Also, in Deus Ex, you can take a stealthy or combat-oriented approach to different situations and exploit skills such as lock picking and computer hacking to aid you. These decisions define role playing because they allow you to play the role as you see fit, kind of like D&D which is actual role playing. I hope that provides some clarification.

 

I suppose I understand your thinking, but trust me when I say that in another 10-15 years when you'll literally find yourself In the game in a virtual fashion, we'll have this conversation again and say that a real RPG game is one where you actually are the character.

Long story short, every genre that we tag today will be laughed at to be called such in the next generation or two.  The game industry and games therein are constantly evolving.

With you definition, the old NES "RPGs" could hardly be called such by today's gaming standard.  The decisions made then were VERY limited at best.

If you ask me, the first true RPG will be when you literally can walk into ANY building, walk coast-to-coast in a game (without first unlocking it, or being restricted by a wall of trees or whatever) and can literally have your character look and act anyway you wish... not simply a few dozen pre-selected dialogs.

Example... your character walks into a room.  The wizard asks you to take on a quest for him...

The game then asks you to choose between, "Yes, I want to help you fine wizard" or "No, do it yourself".

That's not RPGing in the D&D fashion either really.  At least with those games you could literally have your character say anything... maybe you tell the wizard yes, but only if he pays for your services and gives his daughter over to you as your slave.

I know that's beyond the realm of possibility in todays games (because of system and disc space limitations), but someday it WILL be the norm and we'll laugh at all the games that claim to be RPGs today.

I always thought that the term RPG was being misused when it was applied to JRPGs. I never uderstood how they were labeled as such considering the almost complete lack of any similarities to D&D. Only WRPGs have any real amount of role playing in them and I agree that it is limited when compared to the real thing. However, I disagree that the industry will automatically move towards true role playing. The only way that would happen is if WRPGs incorporate more of the elements of real role playing and become increasingly popular and I doubt that this will happen considering what has happened to Deus Ex, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, etc...

Yeah who really knows...

I think it will happen at some point.  As long as one genre gets more realistic than another, they'll keep improving each one.  Secondly, as long as Nintendo, Sony, and MS duke it out, each one will try to do that new "incredible" thing to beat each other in the console war.  It's still probablly a few generations away, but no one would have thought back in the 80s that a game could look & feel so realistic as they do today... and no doubt later on we'll look back and say the same thing about this generation's so-called-RPGs.