You messed up here. You can't be chimpanzee and human at the same time. Mammal is just a higher group/concept, a higher "genre". This goes on and on until you hit the group called "everything". If you go up the list far enough, you can compare bananas and school buses, but at the same time you wouldn't be able to say anything relevant about either. Likewise you can eventually reach a level where Baldur's Gate and Demon's Souls can be compared completely, but you would reach a point where you are ignoring that they are completely different type of games. Genres exist for critical analysis. To judge things logically you need a base to work off of. You compare Quake to Doom, Halo 2 to Halo.
I am kind of lost regarding what you are even talking about here. Of course I can compare a bus and a banana. Of course I can compare Demon's Souls to fucking Super Mario Bros. They all have at least something in common, but when they have specific things in common, enough of them, they are considered a
genre. Now I'll jump to something you say at the end of your post here:
Also RPG isn't a meaningless classification. It is a poorly used classification, and a classification that isn't genre(just like "games where you aim" isn't a genre).
It is absolutely a genre, because the
definition of a genre is:
A kind; a stylistic category or sort, especially of literature or other artworks.
Genres are defined purely by consensus, convention and common usage. And RPG is a
very commonly used genre, I'm sure you'll agree. In fact, being used so frequently is apparently one of the things bothering you the most about this. Of course there is no science here, no hard and fast rules for what is allowed to constitute a genre and what isn't. Games where you aim could be a genre if people used it, it's just that they don't.
Movie genres(that is beyond "Comedy", "Drama", "Documentary", etc) look like a mess to me, but I don't particularly see how they are involved since they function completely on aesthetics(setting, themes) while videogames are broken down by their mechanics. If you can find an counter-argument here go ahead, but you are talking about a medium which scholars consider "genre movie" a negative term.
Just like movies have somewhat hierarchical classifications (again, a film being labelled "SciFi" in the video store even though it's an action/adventure as well), when you have mixes of genres in videogames (It's an RPG... and an action game... and a dating sim...) some genres take precedence over others. A game is only called a first person shooter if it's not also something else - in the case of Deus Ex it's also a stealth game, but we consider it an Action RPG.
Mass Effect contains a third person cover shooter, extensive conversations, and maybe even some elements of "adventure" gaming. But, since Action RPG is broader than all of these, and can encompass all of the stuff that goes on, that's what we consider it. Something we were discussing earlier was the inclusion of minor puzzles in ME1. ME2 includes simple pattern matching games. Are the mass effect games also then puzzle games?
You seem too focused on the flavor of the coating. It is very inconsistent, especially since you were referencing pen and paper RPGs where "quests" and "campaigns" are totally flux, if not even nonexistent at times(stuff happens, only looks like a quest or story if you look backwards). Quests in WoW might be organized in the quest tab, but for DnD and many videogames quests are just objectives which may be made up of sub-objectives and apart of a larger narrative. Maybe they are called missions, since quests is a fantasy-friendly term(knights go on quests, space marines go on missions), but what they are is objectives.
Gears of War and Call of Duty don't have NPCs you talk to to get those missions. They don't have hub worlds to find the NPCs in. You don't get side quests. They are linear point to point goals, the completion of which is the purpose of the game. There is no "metagame", so to speak, the whole thing is what you would consider to be a single questline in an RPG (specifically the "main quest"). The questing model is quite obviously distinct from what goes on in, say, Halo. Don't act like you don't understand the difference here.
Does your Call of Duty example fall apart if you happen to get an achievement upon hitting that checkpoint? What if you got a rank-up for it? Are quests in videogames not quests if they don't give you gold/exp/equipment as a reward? Really hard to take this seriously.
You remember when everybody was talking about RPG elements being inserted into CoD before 4 came out? Well this is what happens as a result. Is CoD an RPG, or do the RPG elements no-longer get considered to be something belonging to the RPG?
Experience Points? Why not dollars or zenies?
Demon's Souls uses it's currency to control your character attributes, so you absolutely can use dollars and zenies. Deus Ex 3 lets you earn Praxis points (what you use to level up) either through experience or through money.
How about "score"(which can lead to a 1up or ship upgrades)?
If your score going up leads to stat increases then you can consider that leveling. Extra lives via 1up mushrooms is not leveling, even if you collected them by gathering score or zenies or blowjobs
or experience points.
You can call Devil May Cry a RPG, but what does that accomplish other than make the category too non-specific to make comparisons?
I reiterate: a category that is defined by having multiple things is not invalidated by the possibility of a single one of those things being possessed by something not of that category. All X's have Y, but not all Y's are X, you follow? If you think this categorization is confusing you should try to argue about whether 28 days later was a zombie film or not.
The point here is that your RPG list has nothing to do with genre. At most they are mechanical themes, which like literary themes, can be applied to any videogame genre.
Already discussed the "genre" thing above.
That's hardly a "problem". The fact that RPGs can take so many forms is why there are so many and varied sub-genres (of which Action RPG is the one ME/2 belong to, as discussed). The "problem" only appears when people insist that because it's not part of their pet sub-genre then it's not part of the broader genre (Wah ME2 is not an rpg because it doesn't have an inventory!).
Perhaps most concerning is that your flawed definition doesn't even contain "role-playing": allowing the player to act within the story, making it malleable with his actions.
My flawed definition? I didn't come up with this definition. This is how it's used by the majority of people, whether they know it or not. It's also the definition given to us in a first year games elective I took last year (
best subject ever, btw).
And to answer more directly, it's that way because the fact that we're calling this an "RPG" is because of the genres origins in totally non-interactive stories that simply featured mechanical conversions from D&D or related games. There wasn't an RPG that actually featured "role playing" in a traditional sense for years after the genre's inception. The notion that it has to feature "Role playing" because that's what RP stands for is just a misnomer.
Here is another thing to consider: There pen and paper RPGs without classes, levels, "clear progression", or even character stat increases. (Just like there are RPGs without "quests" and RPGs which don't look like "Chainmail" if you strip the roleplaying.)
If you made a video game based on it, it wouldn't satisfy criteria. That's a strange thing to think about, but the classification is here to stay regardless.
Huh? I brought it up because someone asked something along the lines of "What is a RPG?" If you don't want clarity, you don't listen to answers.
If you'd followed ME threads you'd know damn well why that was brought up in the first place. I answered with the generally agreed upon industry definition for what an RPG is, then you got into this argument with me.
ME2 has worse strategy elements. Suddenly, clarity. But feel free to keep on using "RPG elements", I'm not the boss.
Worse strategy elements = no strategy elements / not an RPG? Because that's what comes out of these threads 90% of the time: "Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG, because X element was shallower". If they had any brains they'd just be saying that - that ME2's RPG mechanics
shallower than the prior entry.
