An RPG is a game experience where your choices are made in terms of your character's internal purposes and motivations. There isn't any other definition to it. Equipment, items, setting, and a surprising amount of story are all completely irrelevant to that specific term.
I believe most of the RPG games out there are not labeled as such because the makers are trying to correctly characterize their game, but because the marketers are trying to target the game to a specific market segment. Which of course is completely wrong, but how often are marketers actually held accountable for anything that can't be tied directly to sales numbers? Pretty much never, so that's where we get this kind of static.
Mass Effect, Diablo, Skyrim, and pretty much everything else in the "RPG" genre I would classify as "story-driven fantasy action games". In all of those the story exists simply to give your character a reason to do actiony stuff. Your guy or girl has no purpose or reason for existence otherwise, we just imagine they do because we're naturally imaginative people. Remove that forced story and you essentially have a sandbox where the character can run around and do stuff just because, which oddly, brings it closer to the pure RPG concept.
Give those sandboxes the content and mechanics to let the player shape the environment in accordance with their character's purposes and motivations, and lo - you have a real RPG. Which is fine, because unlike what all of those developers seem to think, the fact that you own the hardware and bought, installed and are playing the game means you don't really need to be forced to take action in order to take action. You're playing the game after all, so there's no way you're not going to take the initiative to make things happen
I believe most of the RPG games out there are not labeled as such because the makers are trying to correctly characterize their game, but because the marketers are trying to target the game to a specific market segment. Which of course is completely wrong, but how often are marketers actually held accountable for anything that can't be tied directly to sales numbers? Pretty much never, so that's where we get this kind of static.
Mass Effect, Diablo, Skyrim, and pretty much everything else in the "RPG" genre I would classify as "story-driven fantasy action games". In all of those the story exists simply to give your character a reason to do actiony stuff. Your guy or girl has no purpose or reason for existence otherwise, we just imagine they do because we're naturally imaginative people. Remove that forced story and you essentially have a sandbox where the character can run around and do stuff just because, which oddly, brings it closer to the pure RPG concept.
Give those sandboxes the content and mechanics to let the player shape the environment in accordance with their character's purposes and motivations, and lo - you have a real RPG. Which is fine, because unlike what all of those developers seem to think, the fact that you own the hardware and bought, installed and are playing the game means you don't really need to be forced to take action in order to take action. You're playing the game after all, so there's no way you're not going to take the initiative to make things happen
