rocketpig said:
Wagram said:
Actually to me the game felt alot like Gears of War. |
It didn't feel that way to me at all. The auto-aim was far too prominent and the fighting was generally much easier than Gears on higher difficulty settings. Plus, the skill progression allowed the characters to fight very differently near the end. You didn't have to be a gun-based character if you didn't want to be one.
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I think the root of the problem is that many people have a difficulty seperating control scheme from game genre. A TPS is a complex title that describes both control scheme and gameplay genre. RPG is a type of game in which the player is given choice over the character's destiny and progression outside of the simple linear model. RPG does not indicate control scheme.
Other game titles are already appropriate. FPS describes both the control style and the type of game. You view from the first person and you shoot stuff. RPG has absolutely no gameplay description. People have assumed that it means that you have a character that has improvable stats and swappable equipment or abilities, but the same could be said of most strategy games where you are able to pick you troops and your strategy of attack. Yet, one is called RPG and the other strategy.
I think that the term Turn-Based Strategy needs to be broadened to include turn-based titles where the player has no real choice over the character's destiny, but has the ability to customize the character to meet challenges. In my opinion, ultra-linear traditionally termed JRPG (not all, just those that are that linear) titles should not be called RPGs as the player has no real choice, and should instead be relabled to reflect such. Perhaps storybook strategy or SBS or storybook turn based or real time strategy SBTBS or SBRTS.
Mass Effect 2 has a third person control scheme, regardless of how much the game assists you. However, the control scheme is not the defining characteristic of the game. Just labeling it a shooter does not sum up the gameplay elements. The game gives the player choice, albiet within a limited range, of the character's destiny. This is the defining characteristic of a RPG. To properly describe the game in terms of both interface and genre, the game could more accurately be termed a Third Person Role Playing Game, TPRPG. We do this for FPS, RTS, TBS, MMORPG, but when a game deviates from the standard WRPG or JRPG traditional control scheme molds, people start trying to assign the game to other genres just because a different control scheme was used.
As the gamer Darth Vader once told Governor Tarkin when refering to the nomenclature for video games, "Don't be too proud of this technilogical terror you've constructed. The ability of an industry to adopt genre titles for games is insignificant compared to the force of video game evolution." Games are going to continue to blend traditional genre labels and some new games are going to create new labels as well as force us to reexamine the lables we gave to old games.
I give this thread a 9.4. (thanks for reminding me)
