"Watches Skyrim"

Oh gosh

it is a Adventure Game now??

I can see it now

Fallout 4

A Post Apocalyptic COD


:sick: :sick: :sick:





this,
Sadly

Its

Pure

Truth

Say no more, no more please don't make me cry.

Nostalgia is the crystal meth of the masses.



If Oblivion isn't an RPG then my name is Jiminy Cricket.

Mass Effect 2 was more an RPG than Mass Effect could ever hope to be.

Discuss.

Not every game with customizable stats and levels are RPGs

Quite right.

In Oblvion, I could play the role of a kleptomaniac xenophobe with a messiah complex. Alternately, I could play the role of a property-is-theft egalitarian with a persecution compex.

Stats are a means to an end.

(An "RPG" is but a means to an end.)

I guess that would depend on whether you're playing the role they give you, or you create a character to perform the quests of the game. Either way, I though NV gave a number of different paths to an eventual goal (haven't reached it yet, but...) While some of the quests are a bit too in your face for me () but you still get to pick different paths. I'm not sure what more you want from an RPG? You want to eat every day, be able to do just about anything? There are limitations and breaks in immersion in order to facilitate gameplay, but for the most part I would consider Beth's (and Obsidian) efforts here to be the mark against which other RPG's are measured. Are they perfect? Of course not, but they're pretty close. Some of the other RPG's have less individuality which allows for better storytelling (Krondor perhaps), but what has come out recently that makes for a better RPG in your opinion?

And the game won't ever acknowledge that or reflect your character. You're just playing pretend like the people on the Oblivion wiki who write about how to "roleplay" a guard. It doesn't matter how hard you try to dress up and act like a guard: You still aren't a guard. People won't ever acknowledge you as a guard. The fact that you are a "guard" won't ever have an impact on the game.

That is not a hallmark of a good role playing game. RPGs should reflect the character's abilities and the choices the character makes or there's no point in having characters, which last I checked, are indisputably integral to the concept of an RPG.

Morrowind was the last good game that Bethesda made

Oblivion is just a RPG with dumbed down mechanic

You cant make a difference within a Mage or a Warrior in that game

In the end

You are a demigod character who can do everything

Heck

Even Bioware is victim of this

Look Mass Effect 2

Its pure shooter and less Roleplaying

:fallout:
that ain't gonna happen, take an example from obsdian? are you kidding, new vegas didn't have one random encounter, all the enemy spawns were static, there wasn't any big buildings or dungeons to explore, the map world wasn't very dynamic at all with 99% of it totally boring to cruise around on, new vegas only is rated at 7.5 and bethesda games are all like 9.0 or better so its really the other way around, obsidian has no idea how to make a vibrant dynamic open world.

Again with the reviews. :facepalm:

Even though the game lacked random encounters, pretty much everything else beat Fallout 3.

Comparative scoring is irrelevant. Please drop it. Kthanx.

I bet he has like a huge poster on his wall behind the monitor that says "Fallout New Vegas - 7.5 : Fallout 3 - 9.0"
He also most likely has a pillow and a carpet and a wallet that says the same thing.

Funny that he never replies either after that. When someone makes a counter-argument about ratings not being a bible. :shifty:

Anyone playing any roleplaying game, whether pen-and-paper, live-action or computer, is playing pretend.



But my abilities and choices are "reflected": my kleptomaniac xenophobe has a shack so full of shiny things that the floor's no longer visible, and a mace arm steeled on the skulls of Cyrodil's beastfolk. My good-hearted little idealist has emptied the wine cellars of the province's mansions and distributed the contents to beggars' food baskets and the larders of the poor, learning in the process the art of moving unseen and unheard. Sure, being a C-RPG means there's limits to how much of this is recognised, but this will always be the case without the luxury of a flesh-and-blood DM.

Anyway: if Oblivion isn't an RPG then I no longer know what that word even means anymore, its descriptive value has been reduced to naught.

(RPG, sandbox game, first-person adventure, whatever, it's just semantics, and has absoloutely no bearing on the quality of the game in question, which is, as with all Beth's stuff, utterly consistent with their straightforward design goal "live another life in another world".)

Which is not what a RPG is. That's fantastical escapism.

(Oh Ho ho ho ho, if you think an RPG is what FO, FO2, and NV is about, you ain't seen nothing yet, and i am not the one to show you my closed eyed friend. dikeybird is closer to the truth than you think.....)

That sounds like as good as any a two-word definition to me, I couldn't have been any more concise myself. After all, is D&D (surely the starting point in any such discussion) not "fantastical escapism"?

Morrowind and Oblivion were both created according the "live another life..." design philosophy. How one could be classified as an RPG and the other not baffles me; either both are (correct) or neither are (in which case the word has come to mean something very narrow and singular indeed).

Ok. Every game there is, is a role playing game. Because you can imagine whatever you want about your characters and whatnot, isn't that RPG? The Sims is totally RPG. Need for Speed is totally RPG.

No, quite obviously Need For Speed's a racing game. Sims is...whatever, a Will Wright game I guess. Or a God game, I suppose. God of the suburbs, anyway.

But Oblivion? Fantasy-world-based, levelling-up-and-going-on-quests-in-pursuit-of-fame-and-fortune-focused Oblivion? A game in which elves and orcs rub shoulders talking about "the amulet of kings" or "the wrath of the Nine" with a straight face, a game with guilds and magic and a whole host of character classes with names like "Bard" or "Witchunter" or "Acrobat"? A game which is fundamentally about character-and-player growth and developement?

Definitely an RPG.

(This is not a question of quality. If you don't like Oblivion, fine, fair enough, but to deny that it's an RPG is just lunacy. It might be a bad RPG, or a shallow RPG, or whatever your opinion on it may be, but it is still an RPG. It is not a platform game or a SHMUP or a puzzle game.)

I don't really see that. If you imagined you were in the world or you were the character, both of which I personally find quite odd, you would be playing pretend. Or if you were the only one playing a P&P module I imagine you would be playing pretend but that's again quite odd. Otherwise you're just rolling a character in a fictional setting. How am I playing pretend in Fallout 1 for instance? I'm not the Vault Dweller and I don't imagine I'm actually in the wasteland. Nor am I making up the gameworld. However if I went around insisting that the character I just rolled was a vampire and acted like this was the case it wouldn't be a hallmark of a good RPG because my character cannot be a vampire, the gameworld will never acknowledge that my character is a vampire, and nothing I can do will ever truly reflect how a vampire might act. It would be playing pretend rather than playing the game.



Then the role is meaningless. Can I pretend my character is a vampire in Fallout 1? Sure. Will that ever matter? Nope. Can I imagine my character is an eloquent pacifist? Yep. Will that ever matter? Yep because the game will allow my character to more or less express as an eloquent pacifist would by avoiding combat and talking his way out of situations. The trouble with Oblivion is your kleptomaniac xenophobe and idealist are going to end up acting mostly the same way throughout most of Oblivion because there is very little in the way of meaningful choices or different ways to resolve quests while it's painfully easy for most characters to end up more or less the same. The only differences are pretend objectives you make up that the gameworld doesn't really care about.



I would say here is where we clearly diverge then because "living another life in another world" is not necessarily the sign of a good RPG. Think how many games this could be applied to. Think how many great RPG games don't allow you to "live another life." They were designed to allow a variety of characters to go on a grand quest or adventure not to run around pretending he's a guard.

Please, Oblivion is as much as a RPG as the Legend of Zelda is.

Sandbox games allow for roleplaying, but are not sold as RPGs. Then again, famous RPG's such as Final Fantasy offer, at best, linear character development and no true character creation, with XI and XIV as exceptions. So RPG is a sort of nebulous tag these days. Most RPGs don't function on a d20 or similar system anyway, while Fallout and Fallout 2 did, so I can understand trying to keep with traditional roleplaying dynamics in the series, but I feel those days are gone and am fine with that development.

So what is it then?

Is it a beat-'em-up? Oh! Or perhaps it's a rythym-action game!

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

Do you, when driving a car that you deem below-par, decide to label it as a bike instead?

[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20081103005828/candh/images/3/30/C%26H_Phasing.jpg[/img]

Okie: I should perhaps clarify, I wan't positing the "live another life..." design philosphy as being a defining characteristic of the RPG.



It would seem so. I can still spot one at ten paces though, whether it's Dragon Age or Nier.

Oh I know I'm just saying the "live another life" design goal is a huge part of why it fails as an RPG.

As for whether it is or isn't an RPG: I think because it was part of the Elder Scrolls series it was marketed as an RPG and tends to automatically get classified as one but honestly it always struck me as more of an action-adventure game with a heavy focus on exploration and sandboxy "do anything you like" gameplay with a very light dusting of RPG elements. If it is an RPG however it's an extremely poor one.

Also based on that Wikipedia link Dark Forces II is an RPG.

Agreed, but some people prefer a more refined view and won't accept the evolution of the genre. And that's their right, but why cling to the boundaries of a genre? [censored] genres, they just fence in gaming experiences. To Bethesda's credit, they developed Fallout 3 as a sandbox game with shooter traits that could be played as RPG, FPS or action adventure. And that's a pretty cool combination of possibilities if you ask me. But it can be played as a strict RPG.