What if Mass Effect Andromeda had a silent protagonist?

How people use the term can change the term, but not the thing being described.

If we all call apples oranges, eventually the word orange will come to mean apple and the word apple will disappear. But the nature of the thing being described, which used to be called an apple and now is called an orange, doesn’t change.

What I'm trying to do is isolate the thing independently from the words used to describe it.

A label that doesn't effectively tell you about the thing it's a label for is pretty useless as a label. That's why I say that FPS is pretty useless as a label because honestly, telling me that it's a shooter in first person tells me so little about the game. Just that we can use a literal definition of the words "First Person Shooter" means we can use it as a basic identifier. RPG doesn't enjoy that luxury though, because the literal definition would include virtually every game ever.

In a RPG the goal would be to roleplay your character. The fact that a manual tells me there isn't a win condition seems like more of a suggestion than anything else. I could make one if I were so inclined to.

Though it also begs the question: Is a game only a game if it has an actual win state? Would say, Beyond Two Souls, not actually be a game because you can't get a game over screen? If winning in that game means getting the desired outcome, could one "win" a RPG by effectively roleplaying their character to the best of their abilities?

As I said in a thread on BSN Prime roleplaying is just a skill that somebody can be better or worse at, meaning we can judge how well somebody is doing at playing a RPG even if we assume the only goal of the player is to RP their character.

Of course people also play them for different reasons. I've known people to play pen and paper games to simply "beat" the campaign and defeat the end boss. That was their self defined goal for playing the RPG, and you can't claim that it was a "character goal" because this was before the character even knew who the end boss even was.



It's going to be subjective because any objective definition is going to be useless as an identifier on account of including way too many things.

I can play most games entirely in-character. Hell, there's actually a let's play on YouTube called Freeman's Mind which does exactly that for Half-Life. Since your definition lacks the condition that it has to be a character of my own design, that means I get a convenient way around the idea of "What if I'm bad at shooters but want to play an expert marksman?" because you're not playing your own character.

About the only thing I can think of that actively stops me from RPing a game entirely in-character that I'm 100% determined to do that for would be the game taking control away from me. So are we just going to effectively consider RPGs to be "games in which control is never taken away from the player"?

If that's what we're going with, does a game become not a RPG because it takes control away from your character for 3 seconds at one point to make them run somewhere? If Baldur's Gate did that and it ceased being a RPG, what would it be?

Now we're getting somewhere.

I'm not going to presume to know exactly where to draw that line, but I would absolutely think that's a relevant characteristic. And even if we don't know where to draw that line, we should be able to identify different games' relative positions along that continuum.

I would think that a game that repeatedly takes control of the player's characters would have a serious problem qualifying as an RPG. Perpaps the appropriate standard would be the amount of control relative to total content, or the narrative importance of the moments where control is stolen.

I know I've complained in BioWare's games about how the position of the party members follwing cutscenes doesn't match their position prior to cutscenes (thus ruining any tactical pre-planning).

Mass Effect's entire dialogue system relies on this loss of control. Since we don't get to choose the line or the tone (because both are hidden from us until after a selection has been made), the player loses control repeatedly in every conversation.

And yes, your example from BG is a good one. In an ideal RPG, the player would never lose control. But a requiring an RPG to meet that ideal standard in order to count as an RPG would be absurd.

All that being said, however, this still isn't a sufficient condition. We'd still need some standard of world coherence to allow in-character decision-making while maintaining the coherence of the character.

Regarding some other specific points you mentioned, I don't think a lack of losing conditions precludes the existence of winning conditions. Also, that we're not playing a character of our own design doesn't solve the marksmanship problem if the pre-gen character has a level of marksmanship skill that is relevant. If the character is an experienced soldier, it's hard to reconcile that with poor marksmanship.

I think we're making real progress here.

Perhaps, but the use of the labels gives us context for their meaning.

Action RPG for example can mean a game like Mass Effect, or Secret of Mana. Combat is instantaneous, less crunchy, more focused on being immediately gratifying over careful planning, or without frills or need to over-worry about stat gains and level ups.

An Isometric RPG is not only perspective/style of the game in terms of graphics, but also implies certain traits- pause and play combat, silent protagonist, dialogue heavy systems, and so forth.

What I have noticed is that many labels tend to follow it based on combat mechanics first, because combat mechanics were the major focus of a lot of early RPGs due to the lack of complex storytelling. That began to change when we saw the Ultima series, but even today a lot of games get their sort of sub-genre label based on the style of mechanics or graphical interface. A Turn-Based RPG has a specific style to it that people expect. If you suddenly do a turn-based system in a first person perspective, it becomes a Dungeon Crawl almost.

RPG alone can mean a lot of things, the added subgenre is like pinpointing it exactly to what it is. That is the part that gives the phrase RPG it's meaning. 

What a silly idea. Seriously, SofaJockey - the voice acting is one of their major selling points.

More relative to what? If you say other RPGs, you need a definition of RPG.

If any given action game isn't an Action RPG, why isn't it? What makes an action game an Action RPG or not?

Those are remarkably period-sensitive implications. Ultima 6, 7, 7.5, and both Worlds of Ultima games were isometric, and had turn-based combat.

I wish more people had played Wizardry 8.

Also, what do we do with games like ME or DAI which offer more than one combat mode? ME is widely considered an Action RPG, but the action is wholly optional.

You haven't made any progress at all toward explaining what that meaning is.

I was just about to post the same thing, but you beat me to it.

Based on your description, it has no meaning at all regardless of context.

A lot of the old school FPS games will check those boxes likely, because they were so focused on gameplay which demanded that the player be in control at all times.

If I remember right in Diablo, the dungeons don't regenerate in a single player game for a single character(in multi-player however, they'll regenerate every time to load that character into a new game). I think if we're going to make claims that Alistair isn't always the same person we can claim that the catacombs beneath Tristram aren't always the same layout is also a fine idea. Since in SP it's on a per character basis, it's not a constantly shifting dungeon each time you load the game but rather for each playthrough.

With BioWare there's now a conflict between their want to tell an in-depth story and the capacity to roleplay one's own character. Even in Dragon Age Inquisition the pre-set origins, minimal as they may be, have conflicts with a few of my reoccurring characters I often use in RPGs so I now have to either change who that character is or use a different one.

For RP you want to leave a lot of things ambiguous but in story telling you don't always want to do that, so they're often in conflict. These days BioWare wants to tell big cinematic stories, though.

The vast majority of people never give the concepts of meaning or knowledge even a moment's thought. I will not defer to their opinions on those topics.