Role play means different things to different people.

In any case, the fan base is not homogeneous. Look at that recent thread about spell target help. Spell aiming being less skille base would actually be more RPG-like in my opinion and you see a ton of people in there complaining about "dumbing down the game" when it comes to adding an option to reduce twitch action game elements. Others think it's a good idea. You'll see in that thread people have very different ideas about what's important in an RPG. Some care about the stats the most. Some care about the freedom the most. Some care about the story most. Some care about the game not feeling too action oriented. Et cetera.

I'm pretty easy to please so I'm not particularly worried about it.

Thought the third question was pretty funny since you yourself seem to be confusing role play with flexibility in choosing roles. "Dovahkiin dragon riding hero" does not contradict role playing, only gives your character a particular agenda and unique trait and power(s) - that your character will likely be able to ignore/abandon to some extent anyway, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be extremely restrictive.

Where did you get "Dragon riding" hero from?

I've read topics like this before. i personally wouldn't say im a RPG fan if you could label them as rpg's then my list contains Too human mass effect 1&2 fable 1&2 castlevania LOS and thats pretty much it. but it depends on what you class as an RPG. does a game need to have near limitless classes or can it still be an RPG with only 2 class's. does it need to have hundreds of side quests or can it get away with only a handful? i love oblivion it is the only game i have played through seven times. each one doing and experiencing different things and even if BETHS limited me to being one of three races and scaled back the PERKS system as long as it gives me a world that feels loved, lived in and full i will be more then happy hell i'd be happy with a oblivon 2.0 but thats just me im easily pleased lol

I kinda disagree with the OP definition of "RPG". I do not think stat spreadsheets or classes make an RPG an RPG. Theyre quite old and limiting ways of defining a character IMO.

First of all can I just say this is a very well thought out post. However, to many people roleplaying means many things and has many different levels of depth. For me roleplaying means fighting monsters learning about lore and finding treasure and generally being an all round hero. It does not have to include having six with ficticious charcters and having children. I also think there are some people who feel that without the children/marriage/housebuying option that it isn't an RPG. For me it is primarily a video game and should be overly treated as such. Having said this, the thing that bothers me the most is that people are treating it the way they did with the Fallout series, where they claim its a FPS with RPG elements and this is simply not the case.

It does worry me as I have stated in other posts, that they seem to be moving away from the RPG element by stripping down the amount of text and talking so you can get on with the adventure, which is fine but at least give me the choice by putting a skip button in there. Like I have mentioned before why if people do not have the time or the patience to talk to NPC's, do they bother buying these games since that is one of the core elements and shouldn't be altered or "toned down".

If Bethesda's developers create the game that THEY would want to play, then I really can't fault them if it's not exactly to my tastes. If, on the other hand, they produce something that some marketing agent has promised will sell a gazillion copies, and it turns out to be complete garbage, then I hold them totally responsible for putting out something that they knew at heart wasn't good.

I consider myself a "fairly recent" convert to RPGs (actually, since I first played MW), having formerly been almost exclusively a strategy gamer. To me, an RPG is all about "if this were me, or I were them, what would I do under these circumstances". Any game mechanic that allows you to choose a course that makes sense for the character, to me, is RP-friendly. Anytime my "twitch" skills or player knowledge interfere with the character doing what they would do, knowing what they know, it's contrary to RP'ing. Not having any choices isn't RP, and having choices without consequences is merely the "illusion" of an RPG. Sadly, that's what 90% of the more recent so-called RPGs have been offering, while labelling their products as RPGs. Obviously, there's a market for RPGs out there, otherwise everyone wouldn't be trying to pass their product off as one.

Immersion is another element which is important in a RPG, in order to be able to grasp the viewpoint of the character and ignore your own outside knowledge and views. Anything that's blatantly out of place, or reminds you that you're playing a game, breaks immersion. In cases such as "close relationships" and "marriage" in a videogame, uless they're done fantastically well, they're likely to be more immersion-wrecking than beneficial, so I don't want them included as a badly done "token element". I do want to see more "normal interactions" in the game, where one develops a measure of trust or respect over time between the player character and some of the NPCs (or distrust and disdain, depending on your choices), and the dialog reflects that.

Specific game mechanics like FT can be included without breaking immersion, IF there's a reasonable in-game alternative. When there are no hirable wagons or carriages, no way to pay for passage aboard a boat, and no other decent way for the majority of the travellers in the world to get from one place to another except on foot, or by "clicking the magic map", then the total lack of "believable" transportation is immersion breaking. If I'm trying to RP, I can ignore an optional menu item that allows the character to go anywhere, but when I go to a major town and there are no wagons, no caravans, no travellers, and no other ways to get between there and the next town, it's hard to just "imagine that they're there". Morrowind's "always there waiting for you" travel options were somewhat less immersion-breaking than OB's "blatantly missing" ones, but still not perfect by a long shot.

Perks can be implemented either in a RP-friendly manner, or as an "arcade" mechanism. In OB, "perks" were automatic. Your character got them at a certain skill level regardless of whether they fit the character's "idea" or not. Some of them were drastic, where you suddenly gained a huge bonus (such as: armor became weightless) for no apparent reason. These are "arcade" perks, about a small step up in believability from "powerups" in an arcade shooter. Hopefully, Skyrim will NOT use perks in the same manner, but from the both of the recent examples (OB and FO3), I'm not liking Bethesda's track record with them so far.

Stat's don't make a game an rpg. The Rpg game industery is not dying, its evolving to survive. Do you blame it? I dont. To me, an rpg is a game where you can come up with your own role, and play through the game without the game forcing you down a set path, or if that set path at least lets me play a good, bad, or greyish version of that path.

Rpg is changing, not dying. Evolving. It means different things to different people. The gaming industry has an insainly broad definition of the term, while other people feel that rpgs are only spread sheety turn based games. Neither side is wrong, that's their opinion.

Everyone sees stats and other numbers going down, while the action side is going up. Some people don't like that, not me though. I'm all for real in game representations of skills, to be honest. Why use numbers when you can see it instead? Skills are a number representation of what a character can and can not do. The numbers can play a big part of a roleplay, but they do not make the role itself. Hercules became a hero because of his strength. But when his strength was suddenly taken away, he still tried to be a hero. He was the hero, not his stats. Stats are important, but not everything to roleplaying games, because roles are not made by the stats.

Like I keep saying, rpgs are evolving. The healthbar, to me, is an old generation thing that needs to go away. The health bar represents how many more hits an enemy can take, or how many you can take. The reason it came into being was because games needed a way to show that you were dealing damage, and it needed away to know when something should die. In my opinion, it should become invisible now. Games now adays have the ability to show damage delt, instead of having a bar go down. In real life, if you hit someone with a mace, a bar doesn't pop up above their head showing how many more hits it will take to kill them, you see people bleeding and reacting to both the hit and the damage taken. We don't need old things like a health bar, because there is a more realistic way to show it in game.

Rpgs should continue to grow and change. If they stayed the same, we would have beautiful looking monsters that stand there, mindlessly attacking us while we stand there as well, mindlessly swinging back. Why not take action oriented ideas and implant them into rpgs, making something new, realistic, and fun? Its still an rpg in my mind, because we can still choose our role, but the combat involves more than just my numbers vs your numbers.

I don't like the the poll puts words into my mouth and don't feel like voting on the option that I really would have chosen in the first part...

I'd be disapointed greatly and would probably just continue playing Oblivion after I finish Skyrim. I blame shooters like Call of Duty for the lack good RPGs and games in general, every company is trying to attract the COD crowd. EA and DICE did it with Battlefield Bad Company 2 and now that game is so noob infested that veteran players like myself do not find it appealing.

"I would be dissapointed on a level where I′d not even feel like playing."
"I would be dissappointed but I would understand the financial reasons for changes."

I'm somewhere between those two.
I would be very disappointed, would not understand the reasons, but still play it.

I'll blame Bethesda if Skyrim is not what I expected, I see no reason not to.
So far it looks like they are expanding on the roleplaying, so I don't think TES will disappoint.

I do have to agree that RPG's as a game or traditional western RPG's (those that have depth and possibly a learning curve) are breed that is quickly becoming dead. That is very much thanks to folks wanting to "mainstream" a game to sell to the mindless mass of people. T. Howard is right to want to innovate otherwise you are playing the same game year after year. The downside of "streamlining" the TES series is that so far it feels like nothing of value has been added to the gameplay mechanics to replace what was merged or moved. Will Skyrim be that way? Guess we will all find out in November. They have good ideas but I can argue the downside of those additions if done improperly.

Just take a look at Bioware. The consistent "mainstreaming" and "streamlining" of their games has ruined the Developer from a gameplay standpoint. Do they weave a good story? absolutely. Mass effect series has a great story, but it is NOT an RPG.

This has already long since happened; I'd say that its been this way for nearly 10 years. :shrug:

Technology has always been good enough to create vast and detailed worlds (even before the advent of computers); but sticking to computer RPG's it wasn't so much technology as it was financial expense and/or profitability. A first class RPG with all the roleplaying potential of ... (pick yer favorite RPG :shrug:), could be made using TRS-80 and enough floppies to hold the data.

Truly roleplaying is not related to visuals, its related to ideas and communication; (Computer Graphics being only just one means of it, and not always the most intense, memorable, or disturbing means either). On today's hardware, a team could create an entirely (or primarily) text based game that focused on massive and even epic descriptions of the various environments with virtually no limit whatsoever as to what could potentially happen. If they wanted whole mountains destroyed by wizard duel, they could have it; If they wanted meteors from space to tear apart the continent, they could have it ~they could do it in real time too. The game could make use of a text parsing chat bot for all NPC's. One that used various dialects and accents to characterize the various personalities; and be as real (or almost), as chatting with folks on IM (or a forum). Imagine the designers had one programmer one visionary and 55 writers to handle the main and various side quests, characters, and descriptions of the lands and locations throughout the game world. ~If they wanted this game could be multiplayer and feature realtime combat or turn based; be stat based, or action/hack. :shrug:

I think such a game done well would become legendary... and be entirely ignored by the majority of modern gamers, because roleplaying is not what they want.

If YOU look at the options in the poll of "six, children, and marrige" thread, you will see the following phrase "yes like fable 3".
I personally never vote on polls that put words in my mouth, and I don't know how Fable 3 did any of the things in that poll, and the OP didn't explain how Fable 3 did those things.

Roleplaying to me means you get to come up with your own role. I agree that has absolutely nothing to do with graffics. That's why I don't see how improving combat means that its going to be less of an rpg game. They still could make it so that we can get deep, real quests and it almost feels as if we're talking to people. Why does rpg combat have to be my numbers vs your numbers with a dice role in between? It would take a lot of manpower, but a game with fun combat can easily still be an rpg with lots of talking and the world reacting to our role. I think that game would be even more legendary than a pure roleplaying dicewars game.

All of you say a bunch of [censored] now, but they'll get the paper from your wallet on 11.11.11.

Witcher 2
Mass Effect 3
Dragon Age 2
Diablo III
Dungeon Siege 3
Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I think the main reason I play and rate ElderScrolls games above and beyond any other RPG would be the fact that the Character choice is completly yours. You start with all the skills available to you and you level the ones that you use.

This allows you to play any character you want, and if you feel the need you can change this at any stage in the game,

This allows me to create a story for my character. For example in Oblivion I had a Barbarian Nord that was essentially good Using Heavy armor and Blunt weapons, he was locked away after being framed by a village elder for his love of magic. When shipped to the imperial Prison and escaping, finding that he was not scorned by people for this he joined the mages guild and practised all the schools of magic. After a certain point in the MG quests he felt the need to start the main quest as a close friend and guild mate was killed by the deadra. Once the MQ got to the Deadric artifact stage the character felt the draw of the dark side and became an assassain and joined the dark brotherhood to finance his travels to collect all the artifacts changing skills again to sneak and knives.

Without the option to use any skill at anytime, this story would have taken 3-4 different characters in any other game.

I think the next step for Bethesda would be to have the choices of completing quests, for example: my passifist Monk Character would be able to sweet talk or Bribing other characters to complete certain quests that could also be completed violently if needed.

"Improved" is a slippery term. I try not to use it in this context as what one person sees as an improvement, might be seen as ruination to somebody else. It really depends on the 'for what'... Improved for what; towards what, enabling what...

Why do you consider it improved (exactly)? I'm just curious for the description, I'm not opposed or saying you're wrong about something.

If that's the primary reason... Why Elder Scrolls over the many many other RPG's that offer the same?

My peeve with this method is that not only does it encourages hopping, it implies that my PC was an idiot. He started in Jail with no significant skill in anything. If I'm playing a thief, I don't want to have to have played the first 18 years of their life for them to be a decently skilled thief. The reason I prefer global improvement or applied skill points upon leveling, is because I get to shape their development towards their ideal... without the grind of baby-stepping them through locks that they should already be good enough to pick on their own. :shrug:

A lot of people seem to be mistaking the things I said for me saying that I think stats make a game an RPG, I′ve not been saying that. I even bantered at games for calling themselves RPG's just because they have stats, and I just mentioned I liked where the perks were going since while I don′t think stats make an RPG it is still going in the right direction with giving you more choice and customization. There is nothing wrong with action based combat, heck it doesn′t really matter much how the combat is except you have to fight according to how your choices have been made (a warrior is not going to suddenly throw lighting out of his hand with no training and a mage is not suddenly gonna be an expert sneak and a thief will not smash his enemies down with a hammer larger than himself and so on and so on).

One person mentioned that if I considered TES to be good RPG′s then I was myself not really an RPG fan, well I′m aware that TES is lacking in elements that make up an RPG but I think TES has the potential to be the greatest RPG series out there, just imagine if they took it further, things we could possibly have seen in for example Oblivion would perhaps be...

We could have not saved the world, the game would most likely assign a different hero then after a certain point, be it after a specific amount of time or after you refuse a quest related to saving the world, but then you could perhaps kill that hero and bring doom upon the world.

We could have snitched out on the Gray Fox on the first meeting with him going to meet him with guards to bring him in.

We could have killed the night mother instead of saving her at the end of the dark brotherhood.

We could have done impure acts in the knight of the nine so that the gods would not accept you as their crusader and we could have killed the other crusader allowing Umaril his invasion.

We could have just been a merchant in Anvil or a bard in Skingrad.

But if we look at all the new things they would need to add, like they would have to make the Oblivion invasion full scale, the Umaril invasion is pretty big too, they would need to make NPC′s go around and buy stuff from merchants, there would have been a need for new quests with turning in the Gray Fox and some scenario after killing the night mother... were they ready with the technology to do things like people buying from you as a merchant and did they have time to make two huge invasions and a whole new plot twist on two guilds before the release of Oblivion ? That is what I′m talking about with the technology thing, but I should have mentioned time restraints too, but I don′t care too much for graphics. However if they want to sell well they need graphics, it′s just a fact of... wait a moment I′m forgetting minecraft am I not ? But TES is a whole another genre, not sure if it would sell with Minecraft like graphics.

Oh and for those that don′t like this poll I made at least one option that works as "other" for each question. Then there is always writing your opinion.

Anyway I′m gonna wait with anxiety for Skyrim and it will most likely blow my mind, and if it adds to RP elements then I will look at it as a good sign of things to come, because the single player RPG genre really need a good game series to carry its torch through the coming years I think.

Edit:



Ofc! I don′t look at discussing such things as expressing spite but rather concern, for a series they love. Few things would keep me from buying Skyrim since as it is I′d be too blind of TES fanaticism to even notice if they made the game about cats with rifles shooting down flying mudcrabs, it′s the disappointment that would come after playing that would keep me from the series, but I will always give a new TES game a chance.

just Please continue, my good sir. all ready this game is going to be amazing

I don't see how RPG's can be dying, at least from the stuff in the OP (btw thanks for that post. It's obvious you put good thought into it). Computer RPG's never offered as much freedom as a PnP rpg with a DM would. It's only natural since what really sets apart the P&P is all the player actions that the DM didn't expect, that make him advance the story in ways that may be even better than the original plan. In contrast, anything that a developer doesn't expect usually results in a bug or a broken mechanic :biggrin:

I also want to say something about the example given in the OP. D&D was referenced as the pure RPG, which I won't disagree with, since that game practically created the genre. Now it's been a while since I looked at D&D's DM's guide, and certainly haven't read all the books there are, but from what I remember I don't think it had set rules for creating a family either. i.e. I don't remember something like e.g. make a diplomacy check, DC whatever, and she's in love with you, you spend the night together, roll a D100 from 80-100 you have a baby. D&D, through its books, had rules for all sorts of niche things, so a rule like that may even exist in one of its 100's of books, but it wasn't in any I remember. The reason they didn't have that is that it's not an important enough element to the stories the RPG is supposed to tell, and whoever wants it can add it anyway extending the existing rules to the situation. Until we have A.I. DM's or something, a game like the Elder scrolls is the only kind of computer game that can replicate that. And it can do it through mods. Mods are the closest thing CRPG's have to that DM freedom if you ask me, bringing CRPG's closer to their PnP counterparts than ever before.

this times a lot. I guess I can't blame people for liking certain types of roleplaying, but if I want to play a game, it isn't to repeat my regular life. I really don't get what people play fantasy to play a regular smith with a 9-5. I understand some people might like that, but i would rather Beth focus on making the elements of the game well done, rather than creating the most possibilities possible. I don't really care if relationships aren't there, because I think they wouldn't be good unless they were heavily scripted, and then it wouldn't be free anymore. Unless you can get an element implemented properly, why include it and ruin the atmosphere? Having the most choices is not the measure of how good of an RPG something is. The implementation of choices and possibilities are just as important in my view. You can say this is just subjective (obviously true), but Bethesda's job isn't to focus on EVERYTHING to an equal (and undeveloped) extent. They have to prioritize, and frankly I would much rather have the interesting elements (the fantasy) focused on, rather than things I find in my own life everyday.

First I was "Ah! A stupid rant thread! Start disagreeing with OP, ASAP!", but then I thought about it.... I really want to play as the great über hero Dovahkiin, but if that means less roleplaying as playing different roles I would be really dissapointed.

Yeah... But I don't think I need simulated family to roleplay, either. The kinds of things that would limit my roleplay in favor of the Dovahkiin story would be a set background for my character, and too specific choices that have already been done for me.

EDIT: My spelling started to svck, thus I move silently to my rest.

The download-able contents thing is a very good point, after all the developers can′t do everything but that does not mean that they should not try slowly, just think of it this way, if they can add 10 options in the first game, and another 10 in the 2nd and another 10 in the 3rd... then by the time the 5th one hits there would be 5 times as many options as originally, and with enough money and resources perhaps start adding 15 new things... by the 7th game there would be 8 times more than in the first game, start out small and end big, that′s how it is for most any thing in this world.

RP elements should ofc not mean less immersion for others, when I say I want new options I want them without it getting in the way of others, those that want to just be a hero should have that option and family life should never get in their way, in the same way someone who wants to be a farmer with a wife and 3 kids and a pet cat called Sofpaws should be able to do that without the life of a hero ever getting in the way.

I think one of the problems is that some people want to "finish" the game and some would want to just do a bit of it and then play it again in a different way, I am the 2nd type of person, I′d want to try being a hero, and then a merchant, and then a farmer or something like that. Another person would want to finish the whole game without having to take part in the things that would add to RP, that′s where we have some tension going on, and eventually there has to be a decision about if a game should just be an adventure game where you can finish the game 100% as a hero, or if it should be a good RPG where you have many choices and options, yes you can still play the role of the Dovahkiin but it′s very limited to be stuck to a role from the start.

Oh and the whole "dragon riding Dovahkiin hero" thing is just me hinting at how a lot of people want to play the game, a lot of people just want an adventure game where they don′t care about any kind of lore if they just get to ride a dragon and kick some butts, and I respect that. Nothing wrong with having different opinions. But I still have my own opinion and I do try to get it across, I want TES to progress towards being an awesome RPG series