Are you kidding? Baldurs gate was a huge deal and F1 and F2 are works of art. I've never played a game as well written as F2 restoration project.

Sure FO4 is a RPG. It has most of the elements we use to define that genre in my book anyways. The quality of it, is a different matter, and highly subjective.

Why? I mean, the world doesn't stand still, and things evolve, devolve etc. What todays generations call RPG's are just as legit, to what us in the older generation is calling RPG. Sure, we may view them as more of this or that, but every generation have something to hang their hat on. Just like people wanted Rock'N'Roll not to be "real" music.

I like to think of it as like a checklist of criteria. Is leveling and improving our character's stats a core part of the game? Upgrading or finding better equipment? Some amount of control in the direction of the story? Some amount of control in the direction of how we play? Emphasis on the narrative? And so on, but not all of these questions need a "yes" for it to be an RPG. Wizardry, Dungeons and Dragons, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Chrono Trigger, the World Ends With You, Undertale, people even argue over whether the Legend of Zelda games qualify as RPGs. I'm anxious for Dishonored 2 to come out so that I can make the case that it's an RPG.

You should read the manual of Daggerfall, it should be packaged as a PDF in your install. It really reinforces the "Yes, and" philosophy of improvisational/collaborative storytelling that Bethesda excels at. I'll see if I can't find a text of it I can copypasta.

I remember this exact discussion when Skyrim was still young and new after release. Honestly, I can see both sides when saying Fallout 4/Skyrim is more of an action game with RPG elements than an RPG while the other side says you can Role Play any character you want in the Game. Hell, there are even neutral points of just calling it an "action-RPG".

Personally to me, an RPG is nothing set in stone in terms. I look for adventure, story, leveling up, strategic methods, looting, etc. in a game. I know there are probably some non-RPGs like that that I do not know about but I like RPGs mostly for that.

I think a true RPG involves other human players. and no I don't mean mmorpg's in particular, more like D & D old school with paper and dice. Any computer based game will never have the intelligence, adaptability, randomness, emotion and imagination that human brains can have!

as long as you have freedom to do whatever you want and can feel like the characters you interact with have actual emotions that affect your decisions, then it is pretty close to a true RPG to me!

An rpg for me needs to hit a few points that Fallout 4 doesn't, like branching quest paths or meaningful choice and consequences. My rpg definition may differ from yours but for me Bethesda games have always been action games with rpg elements, which sadly have been dwindling on the rpg side of things with each game.

Well, the "good" part of it is something that I think comes down to personal opinion. Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I think I agree with you on the Pokemon thing. You're making sense there. Pokemon is really RPG mechanics in a linear game with few story choices to be made. It walks a different boarder to the definition than Fallout 4 does (if that makes any sense). But for many gamers, it is an RPG.

Interesting point. And I really like your point there about 80% of an RPG being about how the player can bring their own imagination into the gameplay. Open world games tend to put the emphasis on the story onto the player.

Take ARK for example. It's an RPG mechanically (leveling, customization of character, etc...) but there's ZERO story there and it's a shooter. It's on the player to create a story for their character and to role-play that experience. But then something like Minecraft opens up the same self directed role-play oppertunities as ARK, but I absolutely know that there are a lot of people out there who would hotly debate if Minecraft should be considered an RPG because of it's lack of story or leveling/customization mechanics. Or, on the other hand, a game like Infamous, which has RPG mechanics but is very linear and the player has little choice in how obstacles are beaten. I would not personally consider Infamous to be an RPG because the story does not lend players much opportunity to role-play within the game itself, the RPG mechanics are limited.

I love all those games, and I'm replaying Baldur's Gate right now, but even those games streamlined many aspects of the RPG genre. I've met quite a few RPG enthusiasts who think RPGs died with Ultima 7 lol.

I'm saying we should have an appreciation for the form. Games are unique in that the technology changes, graphics become better, and game-design becomes more complex, but the gameplay, I don't think, always changes as fast. The more things change, the more things stay the same, and much of the RPG genre has stayed the same for close to over 30 years -- complete quest, receive reward and experience, on to the next quest, level up, for example.

Every medium appreciates it's own history. It's why any top 100 list of best movies ever made has Citizen Kane on there. Or why every good top 100 books list has Brother's Karamazov.

With video-games, it's hard to see past the graphics. With RPGs in particular, there is quite a lot of good material in those games that aren't being implemented in newer titles, and game journalists and marketers have a habit of saying so-and-so is innovative and revolutionary when it was done over 20 years ago, for example radiant AI.

I didn't realize the Daggerfall manual would have such goodies in it, but a quick google search later I am now reading a .pdf I got off of Bethesda's site. I keep forgetting that the farther back you go in gaming the more complicated the manuals get. I remember those 300 or so pages that the Empire Earth manual had on all sorts of history and future sci fi, I could probably trace back my love of history to that thing.

Categories like this don't really have a clear cut boundary at which a game is an RPG on one side and is no longer an RPG on the other side. It can be hard to categorize some games. But despite this, there is not a doubt in my mind that Fallout 4 is indeed an RPG. It lacks some of the RPG elements in previous Fallout games, but that doesn't preclude it from being an RPG in the first place.

I certainly consider it to be an RPG, though I do think it leans heavily towards being an action-adventure game. Bethesda games in general have been going on this track for years now and I do feel like many RPG characteristics are being gutted with every new release. It seems they have a mentality that if a feature needs much work at all it is completely removed instead. The loss of karma, weapon degradation, simplified dialogue and few skill or special checks really make this game feel like less of an RPG to me than previous iterations of the series.

Glad you found it, but just for posterity in this thread:

"During the years between the release of Arena and the publication of Daggerfall, we've danced around the answer to the question, "What's the story of Daggerfall?" We've said we haven't the time to go into it, that we don't want the competition to find out, that we're still ironing out some details, that it might have something to do with this or maybe with that. The truth is simply this: we don't know yet.

When players ask what the story to Daggerfall is, I imagine Macbeth asking what the story to Macbeth is before the play begins. You are the protagonist, the hero of the game - the story is what you decide to make it. There are going to be foils to your character; people who will try to stop some of your more grandiose goals, and people who are there to help if it serves them. But it is your aims and ambitions that frame the story. After all, role-playing games are plays in which the stars are members of the audience. Given a large, well-appointed stage, a supporting cast of improvisationalists, and an alert backstage crew, they are capable of anything. And the best thing we game designers and programmers can do is give you what you want, and get out of your way."

Let's try something. I'm probably full of crap with this, but who cares:

"During the years between the release of Fallout 3 and the publication of Fallout 4, we've danced around the answer to the question, "What's the story of Fallout 4?" We've said we haven't the time to go into it, that we don't want the competition to find out, that we're still ironing out some details, that it might have something to do with this or maybe with that. The truth is simply this: we don't know yet.

When players ask what the story to Fallout 4 is, I imagine Macbeth asking what the story to Macbeth is before the play begins. You are the protagonist, the hero of the game - the story is what you decide to make it. There are going to be foils to your character; people who will try to stop some of your more grandiose goals, and people who are there to help if it serves them. But it is your aims and ambitions that frame the story. After all, role-playing games are plays in which the stars are members of the audience. Given a large, well-appointed stage, a supporting cast of improvisationalists, and an alert backstage crew, they are capable of anything. And the best thing we game designers and programmers can do is give you what you want, and get out of your way."

I like it! Well said.

True. But I think the point was that they were a radical departure from the games that came before them. Note the style of many classic RPG's that came before them. There was a time when video game RPG meant a first-person dungeon crawl that was turn based, slow, and methodical. Compared to those games, Baldur's Gate and Fallout 1 were as radical a departure as Fallout 4 was from Fallout 2.

For example, check out a video of Daggerfall, Arena, or even Betrayal in Antara. Or if you want to get even more nostalgic, Darklands or the original Pool of Radiance. It's interesting how the genre has evolved over the years.

Exactly. I remember when Oblivion came out, I was decrying the lack of RPG elements and all the streamlining. Fast forward a couple years, and I decided to play some old-school classics just for fun mind you. Unexpectedly, I got svcked in -- Might & Magic remains one of my favorite RPGs to date, and I realized something. Might and Magic lacks a lot of RPG elements that I use to think were integral to the genre.

It doesn't have sprawling dialog trees or tons of endings, but it is one of the most solid RPGs I've played. Of course, it is more apt to compare Fallout 4 to the previous Fallout titles, and they did have those, and Fallout 4 does lack those things. I don't think the lack is a sign that is less of an RPG, but rather a change in design, which is inevitable when you have a different group of designers working on it.

I can't really speak from nostalgia because I went back and played Darklands and Pool of Radiance a couple years ago -- I didn't play those games when I was younger, and I will say that they do offer elements that I would like to see in newer RPGs, especially the tactical combat and the superb character development. RPGs may have evolved in many ways, but I think it had more to do with design decisions than technology. Ultima 7 offered much of what we consider to be integral to modern RPGs -- radiant AI, deep quests, free-roam exploration, ect, and that game was a contemporary to Pools of Darkness.

As for whether Bethesda's games have gotten less RPGy as time goes by: Fallout 4 shows a marked improvement in branching storylines and expressive dialog, maybe not compared to RPGs renowned for that stuff (including the original Fallouts), but within Bethesda's own body of work. Certain mechanics have gotten streamlined on paper, but after all of the improvements to the "feel" of the gameplay and specific playstyles, and the addition of new features and ways to interact with the world, each game still comes out ahead as more complex than the last, even if one feature taken on its own is simpler.

Skyrim doesn't get enough credit for actually making leveling fun in Elder Scrolls - the way you advance your skills is more intelligent (before they advanced based on how many attacks, spellcasts, etc you did, with no regard to the power of those actions), and choosing a perk at level-up is more fun and less counter-intuitive than the weird attribute multipliers in Morrowind and Oblivion, and gives you clear and tangible goals to build for.

Similarly, Fallout 4 dumped skills and so now you can't be a master at lockpicking or energy weapons by level 5 - but the perk chart completely opens up the moment you start the game, and aside from level requirements (which are pretty acceptable in an RPG) it's completely nonlinear. In any other Fallout game, your choice of perks at the start of the game is extremely limited - in this one, you can pick literally any of the perks at the start of the game depending on how you set up your SPECIAL. It pretty much solves every problem I had with Fallout's character system.

Myself, "RPG" is a giant umbrella term that encompasses a variety of game types.

I mean, X-Com is a Strategy game. I'd also call Crusader Kings 2 and StarCraft Strategy games. But X-Com and CK2 don't really share a whole lot of mechanics or concepts - does that need to mean that one of those games cannot possibly be a Strategy title?

StarCraft really isn't my kind of Strategy game, just not my cup of tea. But I'm not going to argue that it's not a "true" Strategy game, or that it needs to include squad-level turn-based tactics before I'd be interested in it. They're just different approaches to the same genre. Same with movie genres - I would expect to find Jaws in the Horror section of a store. Just because I would likely find Leprechaun 3 and Saw on the same shelf doesn't mean that all 3 can't just be different types of Horror movies.

I usually think of Bethesda games as... (I don't know, I don't usually focus on pigeonholing these things so much) Dungeon Crawling RPGs. The dungeons (by which I mean any of the many, many instanced areas in the game where you run around in a building, ruin, cave, whatever; kill things, loot their bodies, and move on to the next one) are by and large Bethesda's focus. If their games remind me of anything, it's something like Ultima Underworld or the old Rogue games.

Other RPGs simply have other focuses. Different subsets of the genre. Other RPGs may focus more on branching paths and customizable stories, but I can't think of any of those games that have better level design and visual narrative than Bethesda; even if Beth's games may lack in other areas compared to their contemporaries. Each company is going to have strengths and weaknesses after all.

Pretty sure Fallout came with a paper and pen version of wasteland in one of the special edition.

I agree. Fallout 4 has brought a lot of changes, some of which are good and some of which are bad. The lacking RPG elements that people tend to discuss most though really just come down to the writing. Personally, I think Fallout 4 is the best Fallout game of the series, but it does pale in comparison to previous titles in some aspects. The writing is the foremost example of this. I think this is in large part due to Bethesda really putting a lot of focus on perfecting the combat mechanics and world design though. Now that they've gotten some of these things ironed out, I think we're going to see these huge improvements along with the quality writing from previous Fallout games.

Beyond the writing quality and the depth of conversations, my only real complaint about the game when compared to previous games is the removal of Skills and a level cap. I don't particularly miss Karma, but I could go either way on it. It has pros and cons. The removal of skills and the lack of a level cap makes it a little harder to create a unique character. Obviously we can just choose to not get certain perks, but this isn't really the path that the game 'encourages' so to speak. With a level cap and skill points we had to think ahead. We had to decide how we wanted to allocate our limited number of skill points and perk points. This meant that in a general sense, everyone had a unique character at the end game. In FO4 we can keep leveling up and get every perk in the game. This requires reaching level 264 or something like that, so clearly most people aren't actually going to reach this point, but we aren't limited in building our character. We can all get every single perk in the game if we want, which means that we're all ending with basically the same character. At first I thought that not having a level cap would be cool. But after spending a lot of time with the game and getting two characters over level 120, I realized that both characters were basically the same character once I reached that point. It didn't matter how I distributed points initially. I still got maxed out SPECIAL (11 for all SPECIAL traits with my second character), maxed out Rifleman, Lockpick, Hacker, Science, Gun Nut, Armorer, etc. In FO3 and NV every character I built was unique when compared to my other characters. There's nothing preventing me from imposing restrictions on myself for my character build and avoiding certain perks, but like I said earlier, this isn't really what the game encourages.

I prefer the perk system in FO4 to the perk system in previous games, but I'd like to see skills brought back in some form. Perks in FO4 aren't as restrictive. I didn't like the fact that I was limited to just a few perks early in the game. In FO4 we can get basically any perk we want right away in the game, if we create an initial build that will allow us to get that perk right away.

I'd like to see the FO4 perk system revamped and integrated with the return of skills. Take away the lockpick and hacker perks and make them skill oriented again. Change the charisma dependency of speech checks back into a speech skill, and other various changes along those lines. In my own opinion, this would be ideal.

I think yes, Fallout 4 is an RPG. I am on my 3rd character, and while the last two have had the same initial specs, each has approached the game a little different. My first went straight up shoot to kill and find my son. The second was a little more diplomatic and took his time finding Shawn. I felt like this second character was overwhelmed by what he saw, and it took him time to accept it. My third has similar skills to the second, but bypassed home, and Preston and is only looking for supplies and a safe place to regroup. He stays at Red Rocket because of the good sight lines, and picks in Concorde and keeps a low profile.

Slight variations all, but still allows me to play a role as I see fit.

This is how I see it. Bethesda simply makes their own style of RPG. The Fallout they make is of a different style than the originals with different design choices and goals. That doesn't mean we can't ask them to take more inspiration from the original Fallouts. I, for one, would like to see more branching dialog and endings just as Fallout 1 & 2 had. But even without these things, it doesn't mean their games aren't RPGs. Many of the greatest RPGs had nothing of the sort.

I can see your point about Minecraft. People create their own worlds and basically live in them. I think it's up to each individual player to determine which element they like about a given game. For some, it's a creative outlet and the building element comes first, for others the build might just be a tool, so your character can live in an imaginative world and play a certain role.

For me though, I want a world that has already been created, that has weather effects and day and night cycles, as well as details that make it seem almost real.

I remember when Morrowind was first announced. It was my first really open world game, where you could go anywhere you wanted and pick up quests, follow a wonderful story and just be part of this amazing world. I do remember that a lot of people complained about Oblivion. Yet, for me, I loved that game as much, if not more, than Morrowind. True, the story about the Nerevarine was so fantastic, it's tough to top that. But Cyrodiil, with it's Alyeid ruins and Oblivion gates, amazing oceans and beautiful landscapes, made up for it, at least for me.

Setting, NPCs and the overall world design play as much a role for me, as does the story. I play open world games to experience strange, new worlds. It's a visualization of fantastic settings, which in the past, you could only see in your mind, when reading a good book. And so, I am grateful to the gaming industry to provide such amazing outlets (yes, yes, I belong to a generation where nobody had a PC at home when I was a teenager. If you wanted to play a video game, you had to go to an arcade and play Donkey Kong or Space Invaders lol Now those are definitely NOT RPGs hahahaha)

It depends on who you ask.

I don't care what fenre it falls under. Only question important yo me is, is it a good game period? The answer to me is a solid 'Yes, very much so.'

Oh, absolutely, the limits of technology significantly steered the development of the genre. Though I'd also suggest keeping in mind where those games came from as well. Early RPG's were largely an attempt to recreate the table-top RPG experiences of games like Dungeons and Dragons. However, table-top RPG's have changed significantly over the years as well. Early on, table-top games really focused on dungeon crawls. Most of the role-playing opportunities came in via people's interactions with each other as they played. So an old school dungeon crawl video game RPG, was not too bad an simulation of how some people were playing their table-top RPGs at that time as well.

It gets really interesting if you compare the evolution of table-top RPGs alongside the evolution of video game RPGs. You can almost see how they influenced one another at the time. Trends towards and then away from extensive skill lists, the rise of cinematic gameplay, the shift away from just running dungeon crawls.