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richardhutnik on 19 April 2011
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Booh! said:
richardhutnik said:

mantlepiecek said:

Mass effect 2 is not an RPG no matter how much you try to spin it.

What is the 90% of the thing you do in the game?

Yeah, shoot people and kill them gears of war style.

.... SNIP ...

It also has its own "biotic" powers like kinesis and another one whose name I forgot, but you can upgrade those with nodes as well. You can increase your HP with nodes, and the weapon upgrade is a LOT more upgradable in detail than anything in Mass effect 2.

Mass effect 2 is not an RPG. People thinking otherwise haven't played many RPGs or are just too loyal to Mass effect and think its an insult to think its not an RPG.

 

I am NOT going to just stand by here and have you SCREAM over and over how Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG, which then would cause a game like Borderlands to be LESS than not an RPG, because the creators of Borderlands look to create a fusion of RPG and FPS.  And yes, Borderlands fits that.  And if it does, then Mass Effect 2 is even more so an RPG.

First, outside of Tetris, about EVERY videogame is an RPG of sorts.  You PLAY A ROLE that is not you.  In Mass Effect 2, you played Commander Shepard, and it is your job to save the galaxy.  You also leveled up and gained proficiency in weapons.  The game was gun focused.  And you did other things also in the game besides shooting.

And there are character classes, three basic versions, and six overall that mixed the two.  And they impact things differently. 

Your hatred of Mass Effect 2 is blinding you to the reality it IS an RPG.  You may ended up hating it, and saying it stinks, which is fine.  You may also say it falled to deliver a real RPG experience, while succeeding in other areas.  This is fine.  But to say it isn't something, when it is, is flat out wrong.  It is an RPG.

By that standard the RPG genre should not exist since every game is an RPG.

So an RPG is a game where "playing a role" is central to the game mechanics: Mass Effect 2 is a game where shooting is central to the game mechanics, hence it is not an RPG. Not by any means.

You can be a complete douche when talking to the other characters and the only consequences are a somewhat different development of the story. Not even a different story. You can lose only when shooting, hence it's a shooter. Play Gothic and try to trash-talk some NPG, try out Planescape Torment or Arcanum or, even better, try to play a dating-sym (!!!) while trash-talking everyone. You'll find much more role playing in an average denigrated JRPG or JSRPG than in ME2.

My impression is that this game was labelled as an RPG just for commercial purposes.

Considering the sales of RPGs, compared to FPS, why would ANY company label something an RPG when FPS would be better suited for it?

In a videogame, in order to play a role, you have to do SOMETHING.  When it comes to traditionally on a videogame or computer game, where you usually get experience, is IN COMBAT, and that is normally where you die.  It happens to be that Mass Effect, uses guns and biotics as the main means of combat, so shooting is primarily means of fighting.  And what is the difference between range and melee attacks anyhow?  If Mass Effect 2 had more melee style play, would that make a difference? Diablo is considered an RPG also, and guess what, you end up dying in combat only.  Since when is the magic criterion for how you die the basis for whether or not something is an RPG?  Nethack is similar also.  It is a dungeon crawl, with leveling up stats, where you bear certain attributes that are improved through doing certain actions.  The goal is to improve your character.

And just because something has MORE of something, doesn't mean something that has less of it isn't in the same category.

Wikipedia on RPGs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game

 

Thing that is happening today is that the RPG genre is getting canibalized by other genres out there, so that the genre known as RPGs is being blurred.  Similar happened with adventure games.  Now the elements of the adventure genre have been assimilated by everything else.  This happened in Half-Life as one of the starting points.  The original Half-Life had feelings of an adventure game to it.  Now, leveling up has been absorbed by about every game genre out there.  And you have Bioware attempting to make things more accesible, so they bring a stronger shooter element into Mass Effect universe, in Mass Effect 2.