What makes an RPG?

My last post got me thinking. Just what do I consider to be the inherent features of an RPG?


I'll start by stating my opening position - I'm not an RPG canon fanatic. There are those for whom any deviation from their favourte RPG is heretical. Mine is a broad RPG church. though I'd draw internal distinctions between the the western and Japanese RPG lineages and action RPGs versus narrative driven or dialogue-heavy. What sorts of features are normally present in games considered to be RPGs, and which of these are truly integral to the genre? For the first part of that question, consider some features commonly found in RPGs:

• Character creation and / or development.
• Dialogue choices.
• Moral choices.
• Inventory management.
• Levelling up or some kind of quantitative character improvement.
• Non-linearity.
• Fantastical or science-fiction setting (are there any real-world based RPGs? I can't think of any).
• Party management.

What's striking about this list is that it's easy to think of games that have most of these missing, yet are still unmistakenly RPGs. Equally, there are games where these mechanics feature, sometimes quite prominantly, yet they are not considered RPGs. As a genre, it has become quite difficult to define. Of the features in this list, it is incredibly difficult to identify those that produce a canonical, undeniable RPG.

Take a game like Darksiders. It has levelling up. It is non-linear. Yet it's not an RPG. Why not? For me, it's because there's no narrative choices for the player to make. There are tactical choices. Which upgrade, which weapon etc. But no choice that affects the story arc. And yet, if memory serves, many JRPGs do not feature such choices either. The Final Fantasy games do not allow players to dictate the direction of the narrative, only the pace at which it proceeds. Yet they are considered RPGs; they certainly contain many signature features - character levelling, party management, non-linearity.


Perhaps what makes an RPG is a critical mass of features from the grab bag of RPG mechanics - a compound key, rather than a primary one.

Fable 3: A Slight Tinge of Disappointment

Just finished Fable 3, and thought I'd jot down a few thoughts.

After Fable 2, Molyneux was well quoted as saying he felt he needed to improve the accessibility of the series; various statistics were bandied around about the proportion of players that were missing huge chunks of game content. It's pretty clear that Lionhead were determined to deal with this in Fable 3, and set out to strip away some of the more spurious functionality.

I think this stems from the Fable franchise's position as an 'almost great' in terms of sales. Each of the Fable games thus far has hit around 3m in sales, which puts it just outside the top echelon of franchises like Halo, CoD et al. The overriding feeling I got from playing Fable 3 is that Molyneux is experimenting, he is tinkering with the Fable formula in an attempt to break the franchise out amongst the wider Xbox community.
He's correct in many ways. RPGs are inaccessible to people who don't often play them. They're full of unfamiliar tropes and traditions, conventions that don't make sense to the uninitiated. I, as a non-racing gamer, can easily pick up the latest Forza and pretty much right away figure out what I'm meant to do, even if the mechanics themselves contain much subtlety - the RPG novice doesn't usually have this option. Lionhead are, much like Bioware are doing with Mass Effect, progressively stripping away many of the genre traditions in an attempt to streamline the experience and pare it back to its core.

I think these efforts are largely doomed to failure. I think what's holding the Fable franchise back from sales of 5m+ is not the subtlelties of its various mechanics, but simply that RPGs, even slimmed down, action-focused RPGs, do not sell in the numbers that shooters do. Here's approximate sales figures for the major console RPG releases on the 360, taken from VGChartz.

RPGs
Fable 2 - 3.97m

Fable 3 - 2.71m

Oblivion - 3.46m

Fallout 3 - 3.48m

Fallout: New Vegas - 2.26m

Mass Effect - 2.36m

Mass Effect 2 - 2.39m

Dragon Age - 1.94m

Contrast these figures with the big shooters:

Halo 3 - 11.34m

Halo Rach - 7.56m

Halo ODST - 5.80m

Gears of War - 6.12m

Gears of War 2 -  6.07m

CoD: Modern Warfare - 8.56

CoD: MW2 - 12.11

CoD: Black Ops - 10.19

Now, Molyneux will know this, so if he feels that it is at all achievable for an RPG to sell 5m+ units, then it follows there's a structural problem or impediment that could be fixed that would then allow the hallowed 5m to be reached. I don't think this is true. What's striking to me is that even those RPGs where the action is tailored as closely as possible to be shooter-like (whilst staying within the bounds of the genre), for example Mass Effect 2 or Fallout, that the sales figures never breach that seemingly inherant RPG cap. It's not that RPGs are not popular, they clearly are, as all the genre flag carriers sell multi-million units on a single platform (which isn't easy). It's that shooters are WILDLY popular. The problem with attempting to ape shooter-like sales by paring down certain features of your RPG is that it's simply tinkering around the edges. The very features that make an RPG an RPG are too inherant, too ingrained in the marrow of the genre to strip out. Taking out inventory management in Mass Effect 2 was quite widely seen as a good move - it streamlined a non-core aspect of the game, but it didn't improve sales much.

What this says to me is that, whilst increasing accessibility should always have a positive impact on sales, that there are inherant aspects of a genre that simply don't appeal to people who dislike the genre in general. Thinking of it from a more personal standpoint, there isn't a mechanic that racing games could add or remove that would make me like them - it just won't happen. I don't even follow racing game news or reviews, I am entirely resistant to any efforts to engage me in that genre. So it must be with people who dislike RPGs.

I am very interested to see if Fable 3 catches up and overtakes 2 as the king of RPG sales on the 360. It's averaging lower on metacritic (80 verus 88 I think), and I don't think it will catch up in sales either - I think Molyneux and Lionhead have lost something in their attempts to win wider appeal. A few of my criticisms:

• The close connection between the morale choices the player makes and the visual look of the character has been lessened, and this was always one of the pillars of Fable for me. 
• For a game that so clearly prizes accessiblity, each of the methods of upgrading the various legendary weapons are incredibly MMO-like and grindy. I never bothered.
• Some of the morphing features are too subtle, and lost on the player. I only found out later that the hero's weapons are granted random morphs that reflect the things he's fought - a bone handle if you've killed a lot of Hollow Men, for example. Totally lost on me, never pointed out clearlyin-game.
• The story was less amenable to uncontrived morale choices, in my opinion. Fable 2 allowed for the player to plausibly head in good or evil directions without contorting yourself as to why. In Fable 3, there's little narrative justification as to why your character would ever be evil.
• Forced importance of multiplayer. I can't be the only player that resents the locking off of certain content to cooperative play only. RPGs as a genre is full of single-player adherents!
• As others have mentioned, the dog is an assumed companion in Fable 3 - it was a long time since I'd played 2, and as such I had no real affinity towards it. It's also an incredibly annoying method of finding treasure, and while I'm at it, the dig animation is too long, and too irritating to trigger.
• Some minor annoyances include the hassle of managing a large property empire, and the removal of player choice in the expression and dialogue systems.

I would dearly love to see an RPG hit the heady heights of CoD-level sales, but sadly I just don't see it happening even with the removal of many non-core genre features.