Is the Role Playing really a genre?

[nofingershaha]

Infinity said:

nofingershaha said:

Infinity said:
The problem is that people apply the label RPG to games that are not RPGs. Games that I consider RPGs are Final Fantasy I, Dragon Quest I-VIII, Pool of Radiance, Wizardry, Ultima I-IV, Skies of Arcadia, Grandia I-III, Shining the Holy Ark, Shining in the Darkness, etc. I agree that games like Oblivion, Zelda, etc. are not RPGs at all, but Action/Adventure games.

Tell that to my Uncle Mark who spent his whole childhood in the basement with his friends playing D&D during the pen and paper days. They will tell you that RPGs today in general are not real RPGs at all. The problem is that characters in modern RPGs like Grandia and Final Fantasy has become too role specific and leaves no true "role-playing" experience that one would create through their own imagination. The games only borrow elements such as building skills which wasn't what was the most important aspect of Role-playing, but the fact players pretended to be the characters in the games they played.

I am not equivocating tabletop RPGs with video game RPGs. Obviously this is a video game forum. In the context of video game RPGs, what the OP is referring to, my list qualifies. Sure you could say that no video game that has ever been made is good enough to be worthy of the title of RPG, but that isn't what this discussion is about. The first major video game RPGs were Ultima and Wizardry, since the time of their publication the styles of gameplay found in these early games are to date catagorized as RPGs.

Ultima and Wizardry had one characteristic that can be called an rpg is that the character you played was generic enough that it left their background to your imagination. In a sense Oblivion was very much like so in that the character you play has no name, no background story, which is all left to the player. If you go to the tesnexus forums you will see that most people there have invested enough time into Oblivion to create a very unique character that fits them only.

If there is a true RPG today, I would say it is MMOs, since the characters you play are unique to each player.