In the world of gaming, it is often when i hear the word RPG thrown around like it's some kind of common feature. What it usually means is, "A character who gains experience and a couple of stat upgrades so that it becomes stronger and makes your life a whole lot easier when trying to own noobs on the internet".

Now there's nothing wrong with that, but role playing games had much more then experience and stats. To help me explain my point, lets travel back in time to the point where the term role playing game was invented.

It all started when Mr. Gygax came up with a game called dungeons and dragons. A game where you could create a character and act him out in a fantasy world filled with dangers and treasure. The main focus of the game was so that a player could actually feel like he was the protagonist of his very own story, where he could team up with various adventurers and create his very own hero within the in game world.



Ah! D&D How it all started


Throughout his adventures, the player's character would face various decisions which would then lead to consequences upon that character. Depending on how the player would want that character to behave, he would choose and the character would act it out. Defining him socially and mentally (not only physically like the stats are used to represent). This not only gave an enormous amount of freedom to the player, but also tickled his brain creatively.

Another great feature was the detail that went into these worlds. Other than a map there was very little to represent the locations and dungeons physically, but the flood of descriptions sufficed to create a very detailed and believable world in the mind of the player. Not only that but encouraged the player to use his environment to his favor from time to time.

It was just a matter of time, until this idea would be put into a game where we could all finally visualize our character and see the world not just outside our imaginations but interact with it directly. Though this came at a cost which was limiting the player's freedom for his character's actions within the game.



Planescape Torment was always filled with text and decriptions


Now even though it was limiting, developers tried to counter this by issuing the player's with an abundant amount of dialog options, which would help shape the player's character into the image he wanted. This not only kept the feeling that you were in fact molding your character not only physically through statistics but also mentally and socially.

Another feature they absolutely wanted was environment descriptions, what I mean is even though there were visual aids that pretty much gave you the idea of your surroundings a player could absolutely ignore it and move on without ever giving it a second thought. What about that eerie feeling of a Dungeon Master describing a crippled statue or a pit filled with guts and bones, things that couldn't be passed on visually through sprites or even in full beautiful 3d graphics in my opinion. The simple and great details that went into describing most of the objects in your environment for players to read and enjoy and so it was adapted into most CRPG's.

These are but two of the great features I believe that are being lost in most computer role playing games today. Whence at one time we had fat amounts of texts and vast amounts of dialog options accompanied with some of the best writing that I had ever read for a game are completely being lost. The visual side just keeps on evolving and evolving while the writing and the depth are getting lost and will probably be reduced to something that just isn't meaningful anymore.



Fallout a classic CRPG


Whats the point in playing an RPG if you can't mold or shape your character the way you want to. Your restricted to simplistic dialog options where you can only play extremes like good and evil or badass motherf*cker and pussy foot (I'm looking at you Mass Effect) or even worse no options at all (Cough *Oblivion* Cough) and the game world even though visually appealing at first, just wears thin and drifts into blandness.

RPG's aren't just stat checks, experience and loot!
Remember why their called Role Playing Games! The name isn't just a mere coincidence, it's the REASON why they were created and the whole was what gave birth to a genre!


Note - Sorry if the images are somewhat misaligned and what not, I'm trying to get used to this editor.