I want a game when I have infinite time to select what I want to do for each character, where I get my list of actions, and pick one, and then something happens, and then I pick the next.

I’m older now, I’m easily distracted, and often times I’m playing with one hand while the other is busy feeding a baby, or fending tiny hands away from my mouse. I want something that I can pace as I like, and doesn’t require any co-ordination. I’ve got TF2 when I’m ready to twitch.

And yeah, the existence of PnP games is really irrelevant to the cRPG – two totally different experiences, and commitments.

I can play Mass Effect for an hour after the kids are asleep, or while they’re napping at the same time once in a blue Saturday. I can’t go “Oh, hey, I’ve got an hour free – let’s get the guys together, break out the books, get everything organized, order pizza, and play the campaign!”

Anyway, since when did an over-arching story and lots of combat prevent something from being an RPG? Just as in a PnP RPG game, sometimes the GM will let you poke around and encourage you to write most of the story yourself and sometimes you’ll have a GM who tries to hold everyone more firmly to a central story. I can’t see where one is more or less roleplaying than the other.

Why would computer RPGs need stricter rules to be classified as such? In the end, the important questsion surely has to be; Am I enjoying this?

Mass Effect was a great game, certainly sported aspects of the RPG genre, but ultimately was more of an interactive movie with a third person shooter thrown in.

Simply put Mass Effect was too linear and too focused on action. A REAL cRPG is far more sandbox and presents you with far more complexity. Again, Mass Effect was a fine interactive movie, and a decent shooter, but if ME was an RPG than so was Deus Ex and Dark Messiah. I don’t blame Bioware. Producing a true cRPG with the production values everyone expects these days would be prohibitively expensive.

I was going to say more power to the likes of Vince D. Weller and Age of Decadence, but cut it because I ran out of time. I won’t play it, it doesn’t excite me, but so what so long as it’s someone’s idea of fun, and they can make a profit out of it. And the same to Jason.

KG

Though that might apply too, I’d guess.

KG

Then there’s the question if CRPGs are in any way the same animal as pnp rpgs. Haven’t CRPGs historically been dungeoncrawlers, making labels like action-rpgs a revisionist attempt at promoting a certain ideal?

I thought both Battle Realms and Dragonshard were great, though Battle Realms I find stupidly hard. I even hear Desperate Housewives (the game) is surprisingly decent for what it is.