As I see it the Auction house is just opening the possible field of profit making in the real world to all parties who play the game (including Blizzard) as opposed to the slightly more closed market of the out of game transactions that already take place with titles like World of Warcraft.
It could actually be a positive move in helping to combat against fraud within that system provided that Blizzard implement it and police it in the right manner.

To be fair that's fairly typical for most hack and slash games. Certainly most don't unlock their "hell" or single life difficulty till you've completed the game at least once.

Thank you for a good and insightful reply.

Since you require character development in addition to choices and consequences in a computer game for it to be considered an RPG you will have to leave out a lot of games commonly considered CRPGs from your definition. My CRPG knowledge is not that vast but if I should guess I think that only something between 5 - 30 % of games commonly regarded as CRPGs would fit your definition.

At first thought such a definition would not be of much use, rather there to confuse but after reading the end of your post I can understand your way of thinking.

It is an interesting idea, to abandon the common genres and instead identify the game with the most important broader element of the game or a vision of what the game should be about. There would be more Tactics games than Strategy games but maybe some of the strategy games would be more strategic. We would need to use a larger vocabulary to pigeon hole games with like "Stat-based Dungeon Crawler" and "Story-based, point and click, puzzle solver"

More ambitious games could use names like "Space Exploration", "Time traveling burglary", "Gnostic Role-Playing in Ancient Rome", "Found a religion and make it prosper" or "Survive a thermonuclear war".

If we all could agree to ditch the old genres and use more descriptive names I'm all for it. It is a good cause. I would think that there would be a lot of confusion and quarreling before we got there though. With a genre name like FPS, at least we have taken a few steps in that direction. It is a much better description than Doom clone or Action Game.


Some nitpicking by me about the way you describe stats and dice:

While you are right that CRPGs based upon stats and random chance have their influences in what you call "limitations" in the original pen and paper games I think it is a little rough to call it limitations. If I recall correctly, the PnP RPGs was based upon the some strategy board games that used similar elements.While you could say that stats and dice were limitations compared to say having a small army of pre-programmed robots representing squads moving around on a board it was still a very good concept.
Maybe you could create a war-game with small robots on a board today but there is not much point since you can recreate war much better on a computer screen.

When many things are abstracted you use your imagination to fill in the blanks, and that is a good thing. PnP RPGs have been very popular throughout the years and their on screen descendants even more so. I think that this is more because of their "limitations" than in spite of them.

Also, many of us still do think that the direct descendant of stats and dice, turn-based combat with stats and an element of randomness offer many things that real-time combat can not.
For me turn-based combat in games like the Civilization and Age of Wonders series is several magnitudes more immersive and involving than combat in typical RTS games like Starcraft and Age of Empires. (typical) RTS games have a lot going for them too but turn-based combat is far from outdated. Maybe I'm rambling on a bit here since you were just talking about RPGs.

While I largely agree with you and I think that some really fantastic games in the spirit of (but free from most of the trappings of) RPGs will be made in the future, I think that there are many things that are really good about the old type of CRPGs too. When the graphics are limited, so that it is very clear that you are only seeing an abstracted version of what happens you use your imagination instead. Textual descriptions and statistics helps with that too. In many newer games where what you see is much more believable I think that people do use their imagination less.

Winner.

Yeah, that's about right, depending on how picky you want to be. Like I said, this way you're pushing games in a certain direction rather than letting them adhere to the safety of what went before.

You'll never truly get rid of genres. I'm not asking that people abandon them. But change the way they look at them. You mentioned Doom clones. This is a good example. Back then the term was quite accurate. Few games were interested in exploring what could be done with a shooter when viewed from first person. Instead they were mostly just easy cash-ins. Again, that's not something you're going to get rid of.

If people change the way they look at them then I think we will see more variety and games that are much closer to what they should be. For instance: when creating a stealth game, rather than thinking 'Thief' or 'Splinter Cell' think about what it actually means to be creating a game where your success and even your survival relies entirely on not being seen.

Precisely. There are plenty of numbers underneath the surface of any game. But that doesn't mean that the player needs to be aware of them. The experience could be a lot more natural than that.

One of my favourite mods, probably for anything ever, is the GCD mod for Morrowind. Instead of levelling up and assigning points, you didn't level up at all. Instead you were awarded points in skills depending on how much you used them. You could still train and get points that way. But there was no way of using brute force to kill things to then use the experience gained from that to boost your alchemy. You boosted your alchemy by actually making potions or getting trained to do so.

For me that was something of an epiphany in how RPGs should work in terms of stats and levelling.

Well that's the argument that has been used since TV started taking over from books and radio. I'm not saying it's wrong. But ultimately I suppose you just have to look at it as an increase in choice. Books and radio certainly haven't gone away and equally there are plenty of indies producing RPGs and rougelikes the old fashioned way.

I have always seen Rogue characterized as a CRPG. Regardless what the most common way to classify it is, the one that makes the most sense is to characterize it as an CRPG since it is an early computer adaptation of Pen and Paper RPGs.

So by your definition neither ADOM, NetHack or most\all of the other Rogue-likes are CRPGs?

By your definition, are there any CRPGs before Fallout except Darklands and the Ultimas?
The Choices and Consequences in the other CRPGs at this time were rather limited I believe?

Aha, I thought the Japanese RPGs like Dragon Warrior were mostly inspired by the Wizardry games. Either way, it makes JRPGs a subgenre of CRPGs, thus CRPGs.

As I see it the Pen and Paper RPGs are the foundation for all CRPGs, but there have been several different ways of interpreting it on the computer\console. Excluding some because they don't fall under a certain or several definitions seems rather artificial to me. These interpretations have not really been separate branches\sub-genres but rather interbreeding trends so excluding some based on a certain criteria is not an easy job. Some are 3D view\seen from above\abstract symbols, turnbased\real-time\phased real time, linear story based\an open world with linear story\almost no story mostly combat\story with choices and consequences\...

The video was really good, I just wish I didn't watch it. Even though I already assumed that from the other video. I would have preferred to see him in the actual game.

Yes, exactly. I wasn't implying that this old type of gaming was better than the new one. As it is when you gain something you usually lose something too, and that goes both ways. I will be prowling the nordlands of Skyrim with a smile on my face too, in a couple of years when I buy a new computer.

Maybe, but some people like to start playing on the highest difficulty on their first playthrough. I started playing SC2's campaign on Brutal immediately after installing the game, it was freaking amazing. Much more engaging than the other difficulties.

They're not so much higher difficulty levels as they are sessions tailored for higher experience levels, though.

I'm with you man, I don't get these really narrow interpretations of RPGs, especially since computer RPGs are basically taking from pen and paper and there's a much wider variety of that stuff. Check out something like Amber. Then compare it to AD&D 4th edition Dungeon Delves.

See what I mean? There's room for everyone in the pool.
There were several pnp games that didn't include die rolls. Amber was one.

Well, if I remember correctly from BlizzCon's D3 Q&A, each greater difficulty will give enemies more abilities (as well as stats) and better equipment, and will spawn more various enemies.

EDIT: Regardless of bonus experience, the above is enough for one to start playing on higher difficulties.

Fair point. But it's not those that PC RPGs are based on. Probably because it wasn't even out until the nineties. PC RPGs already had their foundation by then.

Right because old cRPGs were really good at combat heavy types of games. It was an obvious fit (after all a computer is better at rolling dice than telling a dynamically changing story, especially when you have about 1.5 MB of space for your game). But I think developers have experimented along the way, many things didn't "take" but the ARPG genre certainly did. I've seen D&D groups that literally played their campaigns like Diablo. But then you get stuff like Deus Ex HR that has speaking boss battles (yes, you have to out-converse your enemy, cool fucking idea). I'd love to see that deepened and integrated into more games and I think we will... because it's also role-playing.

Anyway, I'm taking a long ass time to basically repeat myself, there's room in the RPG world for all types of games and it makes no sense to me to exclude Diablo and the like from it anymore than it does to exclude Deus Ex HR.