I still consider Deus Ex one of the best role playing games I've ever played. Picking a role for your character and playing it was really the only way to really enjoy the game without abusing things like the "save as you walk into a trip laser", "open the menu as you pick a lock/tamper with electronics" , or the "hey, I know how to carry every item in the DE world twice" inventory bugs.

If you're building a bruiser, through stats and equipment, that can go to toe with milbots and smirk like the terminator on a holiday, you probably have too many large weapons in your inventory to pick up too much of the other in-game stuff. Instead of picking locks, you use lams. Instead of bypassing tripwires or stacking crates to hop around on, you either stroll right through and take your lumps, or you...use a lam.

If you're building a complete spy/agent type, you've got a couple of quiet weapons, maybe some emp grenades, a couple thermoptic camos, a stack or two of lockpicks and electronic tools. You probably also have a can of soda or two to throw out and make noise to draw enemies off their patrol routes. Congratulations, you are the Michael Westen of 20XX.

Trying to be a jack of all trades meant you probably had to use more lockpicks and e-tools for each intrusion, and you were just above mediocre in all weapons types instead of standout in one or two.

To me, both DE games did a great job of putting the player into the mind of the main character, letting them decide how to tackle the environments and obstacles before them. When I realized you could detonate onscreen munitions, even through locked cases, in DE2, my game world opened up with new trap opportunities that made me smile. (For an easy kill on JC Denton that is required for one of the DE2 endings, I placed a bunch of ordinance around the target and detonated it with a remote missile.)

Morrowind tried, but you had to cross train heavily by the last third of the game to avoid a few really annoying experiences.

Fallout 2 was great about role-playing, as someone mentioned above. I remember the first time I talked my way through Navarro without a single shot being fired.

I was discussing rpgs with a friend of mine a couple years back. I said "Anymore the only games I really buy are RPGs, because they take longer to beat." and his retort was that "Every video game is a role playing game."

I hadn't really thought of it that way, for some reason, but it is true. In Super Mario, you play the role of a dumpy plumber who has to jump on things, dress up in costumes, saddle baby dinosaurs, and consume mushrooms that are sometimes larger then his entire body. Calling every game ever made a role playing game is just as true as it is an exercise in semantics.

When I play rpgs (taken here to mean the genre that the term is usually applied to instead of the whole of all video games) I usually find myself trying to max out what my characters can do. I'm not thinking "Gee, that meteor could fall out of the sky at any minute, I'd better hurry to the North Crater!", I'm thinking "Hmm, if I limit break eight more times, I can use omni-slash! Lets fight."

I like seeing "rpg elements" working into other "non-rpg" games. I like the idea of customizing the character I play so that it fits my style, but it seems to be an easy out for developers. They can't really make a character that feels distinct enough to warrant a unique play style, so they pass the buck onto the player. In the end, it isn't really about customization, but mainstreaming: grind to the level cap and have all the best stuff - just like everyone else.

I tried a free MMORPG recently, mainly to prepare myself in-case The Old Republic will somehow run on the computer I have when it comes out. In the online setting, role playing is a bit more viable. There are set challenges, and you can link up with other people who specialize however they see fit, to tackle them. Unless you grind endlessly, you won't have the ability to max everything as you go along, so you pick a role/job/class and go with it. In terms of story, you aren't really playing a role (everybody I partied with kept telling me to esc out of the cutscenes when they played), but you are in terms of gameplay.

Also, stats have to have a greater impact on gameplay than player skill

Personally, I think there are a few exceptions to this, but it mostly applies to the Action-RPG genre. Using Jade Empire as an example, there's no point having your stats absolutely shed high when your bad at the combat system, otherwise you will get murdered.

Theres also an element of 'player skill is better than stats' in the Mario and Luigi series of Mario games, you can get by with really crappy defense stats if you have good skill at learning and dodging the enemies attacks, you can get by no problem, taking minimal damage.


Personally I prefer playing Western RPGs for their story element, whereas I'll play J-RPGs mostly for the battle systems, as story seems to take a back-seat for it, and I pay little attention and skip it all. Only exception to that recently is probably Persona 4, where I rarely if ever skip the dialogue, as I find the character's likeable and easier to relate to than, for example, Vahn.

the only thing i really have to say about this is that the role-playing genre has a single major contribution to the rest of the gaming medium: in-depth stat-based customization.  i wouldn't be at all surprised if the rpg genre gave its gift and then died only to be overtaken by genres that are more action-based.

FF6  = all the characters have stats that restrict them to their role.

actually, if you look into ff6's programming you'll be amazed at how much the algorithms depend on the character's current level, so the immutable stats (i guess you could call them that) don't really matter as much