Any hope for RPGs? I don't know OP, but for me the last 3 years ago have been really really great for RPGs and it has been a period of substantial flourishing.
Let me break it down as I see it.
There are basically three types of RPGs. These three types aim for different things, focus on different gameplay elements, and draw on different traditions. When a game straddles these types, purists will curse it for being a hybrid. What's more, when an RPG straddles the line between it's 'type' and another genre altogether, everyone gets outraged except for the millions of people actually playing the game and loving it.
The three types:
1) Hack and slash level grinders. The central aim of these games is to get you to play it as much as possible, over and over. The gameplay focus is leveling up and getting more loot, making your character/avatar progressively better. The obvious example here is Diablo, but while its spiritual successors have deviated greatly in form, they haven't changed in substance. World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs are the direct successor of Diablo 2, and have improved the hack and slash experience by adding social aspects to the games. Other deviations have included Borderlands, Hellgate: London, and the freeware Diablo clones that pop-up every now and then.
2) Story and character based games. The pedigree of these games is a little bit mixed. Clearly, they draw a lot from adventure games given their relative linearity and focus on telling a good narrative. At the same time, they also focus on character development. For Western RPGs, that usually means D&D inspired development, whereas for JRPGs (which I'm less familiar with) it seems to be mostly development through narrative. Either way, the element of choice in these RPGs is usually confined to your influence on the main character(s) and there is less freedom of what to do next or where to go. Leveling is functional, its purpose is to drive character personalization, not to kill more bad guys. The classic examples would be the Bioware games, lots of JRPGs, and independent gems like VtMB and the Witcher. The overlap with adventure games has *always* been strong. I simply fail to understand the criticism that ME2 is a dumbing down of ME, because Bioware games have always been half RPG, half adventure game.
3) Exploration based games. These games are mainly focused on discovery of new locations, vicarious thrills related to exploring a believable functioning world, and gradually achieving mastery over that world. Usually, these games are open-world. The paradigmatic example would be the Bethesda games, but I would also include GTA (and its clones) and Red Dead Redemption in here, even though they're not usually considered RPGs. The spiritual precursors of these sorts of games would be space exploration games and possibly even 4x strategy games. Story usually suffers because pacing is looser and there is little linearity. There is a lot more freedom to choose what to do next, which adds immersion. But these games are also more ambitious and therefore likely to result in developer overreach. Technical problems also abound, see the horrendous PC port of Saint's Row 2 for the best example.
I think these three archetypes have been around for pretty much a decade now. Certainly it was solidified by the time we had Morrowind, Knights of the Old Republic, and Diablo 2 as the three hottest contemporaneous RPGs. Since then, the idea of a unified RPG genre has been more or less an empty shell since these three types of game pull in different thematic directions. So it certainly shouldn't be surprising when every new release attracts a tonne of critics. Being an 'RPG fan' can be a big part of a person's identity. But because the idea of an RPG is so paper thin now, it's easy to stir up meaningless debate about what is and what isn't true to the term.
