It's not so surprising that genres today have become blended, with aspects of older genres becoming infused in modern games. Especially concerning RPG.
Words and terms should still mean something though..

While we go towards a system defining games by tags (probably camera perspective, story depth, pacing, aim, etc), there's still confusion when trying to put a game in a certain category.
Never more so than within the RPG genre.
ARPG is the latest lazy term to be applied indiscriminately. When games such as Diablo 2, Devil May Cry, Dark Souls, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Borderlands, CrossCode, Children of Morta and Vampire the Masquerade all are called that, then what meaning does it have?
They are demonstrably entirely different games! All of them.
It may be rationalized away as an originating genre (sub-genre of CRPG, under RPG), but that doesn't mean one shouldn't utilize the correct sub-sub-genre.

It may take some arguing on how to define and place them where they belong, but that beats mixing them up and confusing people looking for similar games.
I admit, this all stem from my long search of Diablo-clones, and how they often used to get lumped in with Spectacle Fighters.

Diablo 2 is a H'n'S (Hack and Slash) game.
Devil May Cry is a Spectacle Fighter.

Semi-incoherent rant over.
Please call my observation wrong, my assumption misplaced, and my musings stupid, as long as you can do so with a modicum of rational logic and "proof".
For my own proof. Just take a look at the Wiki/Steam/GOG pages of said games and google/duckduckgo list of H'n'S games. ,)

For me ARPG is "click to kill, loot and level". Diablo, Torchlight, Sacred...

Borderlands is (from what I've seen) a borderline case, since it has very similar mechanics, but also incorporates shooter gameplay.

Games combining traditional RPG elements (story, stats and growth) with action elements (shooting, melee) like Mass Effect or Witcher are IMO not ARPGs.

I've long given up even looking at genre labels. Aside from it meaning different things to different people, they aren't even consistent between the same game sold on different stores (eg, Terminator Resistance is an "RPG" on Steam but an "Adventure" game on GOG). So clearly the Steam version plays like Baldur's Gate whilst the GOG version like Day of the Tentacle, right?...

I'm not sure GOG is concerned with accurate classification if their store categories are anything to go by.

Gothic is RPG, Risen is Action
Deus Ex GOTY is RPG, Deus Ex 2 is Action. (Apparently not shooter)
Adventures of Shuggy is Action, Hollow Knight is adventure
Wing Commander is shooter, Strike Commander and Freespace 2 are Simulation
Jill of the Jungle and Secret Agent are action, Jazz Jackrabbit is Adventure
Epic Pinball is Action, Another 7 pinball games are simulation.


To be honest, even if ARPG was defined so that it only covered games that obviously are ARPGs, people would soon invent the term pseudo-ARPG to handle everything that was left out.

Diagreements over the exact definition of ARPG might then increase the prominence of pseudo-ARPGs until proper ARPGs are seen as a subgenre to pseudo-ARPGs.


I'm being somewhat facetious, but a strict definition without resorting to "No True Scotsman" may be a challenge.

Damn... I was hoping for a first person shooter... I think GOG staff dice-rolls the genres they assign. It's the only explanation that makes sense.

Well, everything in gaming is an RPG these days it seems. Genres have lost their meaning so now I just play a computer game or a video game and leave it at that.

For me, the category of RPG, or CRPG, does not include the type of game that is commonly called ARPG.

To me, adding RPG elements to an action game does not make it an RPG; hence, games like Crystalis, Ys Origin, Kingdom Hearts, Diablo, and anything similar, are not RPGs at all. The only game of this sort I might consider calling an RPG of some sort is Magic of Scheherezade, whicn includes turn-based RPG-style combat, but even then there are no turn-based battles in that game. Also maybe Hybrid Heaven (ever heard of that game?). As I said, I don't consider what are commonly called ARPGs to be a sub-genre of RPGs in the first place.

With that said, I should point out that every video game RPG is a CRPG, including JRPGs (which, I feel, are often ignored by CRPG historians). The only RPGs that are not CRPGs are those played without a computer or other device, such as Dungeons & Dragons (*not* the CRPGs based around the ruleset) and related games. The "A" in the term indicates action, and has nothing to do with loot. Consider a game like Crystalis, which is an action game with RPG elements (as I like to call it), but is not focused on that sort of growth. Also, consider a game like Tangledeep, which feels a lot like "click to kill, loot and level", but is clearly not an action game by any sense. Or, if one wnats an example that isn't a roguelike, we can look no further than the original Wizardry. Elminage Gothic, according to GOG, is "Role-playing - Action - Fantasy"; having played the game, it is in no way an action game. The only thing resembling action elements is the time limit while underwater, which is only present in a couple locations, neither of which is needed to complete the main story (and for the point in the postgame when it's necessary, you can be so over-leveled that you can just auto-battle everything without having to heal).

(By the way, if you like the early Wizardry games, I do recommend Elminage Gothic.)

"Action" as in constant fighting (to loot and level...). Not "action" as in twitch skills (shooter or melee mechanics). Diablo is the template for ARPG, it's about killing, looting, levelling. Should be in real time, true, I didn't mention that.

Genre descriptions are often misleading, see "adventure" which even means something different on PCs and other home computers (point&click, or text-adventure) than on consoles (where action games with story and/or exploration were called "adventure", like Pitfall 2).

Since ARPG is so widely used, I'm going to assume you mean H'n'S games in this case..?
You could argue the case that H'n'S games like Diablo is a shallower but more action-packed version of WRPG's like Baldur's Gate. They are similar, but distinct enough to get their own (sub-)genre.

If one were to describe them using the tags I mentioned previously;

Camera Perspective: Isometric | Story Depth: Not complex | Pacing: | Real-time | Aim: Loot & Level
Camera Perspective: Isometric | Story Depth: Complex | Pacing: | Turn-Based | Aim: Loot & Level

Anything that I'm missing here? Feels like it..
Lets do Borderlands;

Camera Perspective: First Person | Story Depth: Not complex | Pacing: | Real-time | Aim: Loot & Level
Maybe it's the Loot & Level thing..or not.

"Action", as I've understood it as a game genre, has always been action as in twitch skills.

Yes. But ARPG != "Action game". Diablo is not an action game. Witcher 3 is indeed more of an action game, and also more of an RPG than Diablo.
I don't know who came up with the term Action RPG for games like Diablo and co, but it simply stuck.

Adventure games are (on PC) defined by solving puzzles to progress the story. One could argue that RPGs and action games often have more "adventure" (excitement!) in them than the classic adventure.

Except that a google serch for "Final Fantasy Adventure genre" (without the quotes) lists it as "action role-playing game"> which is ARPG.

Seems like on Wikipedia the definition of "Action role-playing game" is pretty broad... They then categorize into further sub-genres like "First-person dungeon crawl" (Dungeon Master, Ultima Underworld) or "Point and click" (Diablo).

Makes sense, but, as they write about Diablo: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game)

So essentially this is where all the confusion comes from - it used to be the term for any RPG-ish game with focus on real-time combat and direct control, but Diablo's impact made its point-and-click sub genre synonymous for the whole thing.

This should answer the OPs question: All those games are ARPGs in the broader sense, not all of them are ARPGs in the Diablo-sense (what I also had in mind).

Makes sense, but so many people say ARPG and mean Diablo-like that it's probably better to check back what they mean.

As for Rogue-like... and Rogue-light and what not - seems this got a bit muddy too, with different people meaning different things and some very hard core and "trve" (and vocal) complaining the concept is watered down...