And not just WoW but quite a few other games have this genre attached to them, when they are clearly not, probably because of an earlier-on marketing ploy that stuck with a portion of the players. I’ll explain why.
Playing a role, as the RPG acronym implies, requires making choices through dialogue and engaging in in-game behavior that leads to different consequences or outcomes in the story. WoW is almost completely devoid of this, to the point that I can almost say it has no choices at all despite having tens of thousands of quests. The only instance that even remotely comes close to this idea, of choices with consequences, is if you decide to support Sylvanas or not and this essentially amounts to picking a “faction” or a side with no consequences. And reputation grinding with various factions - that always results in only having access to items and unlocking some 0.001% of the lore that would normally be found in the WoW novels, and again with no choice at all - is also not something that cannot be seen as playing a role.
Imagine how asinine it would be if someone told you Rainbow Six Siege is an RPG because you can pick sides and play very differently depending on the selected character. And yet many people do the exact same with WoW.
The best example of an RPG is Neverwinter Nights 2. The amount of dialogue options and decisions you can make that have clear and serious consequences lore-wise, and game-wise as well, is incredible. If you play as a paladin, you actually have to respect the law and be good to people otherwise you lose your moral alignment and can’t level up anymore. If you play as a cleric/priest and deviate from the behavior expected from your God, you lose your powers. And so on. Pillars of Eternity is an RPG. Knights of the Old Republic is an RPG.
WoW is essentially a 3rd person action explorer game, much in the same way Diablo 2 is not an RPG but a hack and slash dungeon-crawler styled game. And if someone wants to /e all over the place and rp-walk from point A to B, that doesn’t mean WoW is an RPG, you can do that with absolutely any game that has multiplayer. If Microsoft Minesweeper had multiplayer, you could start a Discord session with a willing someone and give personalities to the “minesweepers”, but that would not make the game an RPG.
Evidently this is not a serious issue, but it bothers me when companies and people do this, when they muddy the waters by slapping an RPG label on a product and then the players gradually become content with the deluge of generic schlock fetch/grind ““quests”” that have nothing to do with role-play and everything to do with the most watered down “lore”/“content” that’s behind a part time job styled massive grind-wall.
Console/PC RPG entails in some gameplay mechanics (leveling, gearing, stats, talents etc.) being built into the game, with a focus on story for advancement.
Wrong, gameplay mechanics is not an RPG factor. MS Freelancer, a game with spaceships fighting aliens, has levels, has many types of ships, has a story that progresses, but it isn’t labled as an RPG, because it isn’t. And there are many, many games like that.
Mechanics are mechanics and lore is lore. One is a tool for the other, and are not interchangeable.
What is wrong with you? Freelancer is just like EVE online but singleplayer. Is EVE Online a simulator too now? Do you even understand what the word simulator means?
By that logic Mario is an RPG. You role-play as an Italian plumber and go to save the princess…
I plays as Castle in Ranbow Six Siege, I guess RSS is an RPG shooter now.
I see that most people here come with the same “argument”. To paraphrase: “I play as X so it must be an RPG” when I already said that playing a class or spec is not role-play from a lore-wise perspective. You are not giving me a counter argument, you are giving me an example.
In the broadest sense, WoW most certainly is a role-playing game. Even if the route you take and the goals you meet are heavily scripted, you are still taking on the role of an orc warrior, elf hunter, undead mage, and so forth. You are literally pretending to be something that you, in real life, are not. It really is as simple as that.
WoW doesn’t have a preset adventure? I don’t know to explain it more clearly to you, but the “adventure” element in WoW is a linear as that of Half-life. And again, having mutiples classes/specs doesn’t amount to anything if they are not connected to the story or lore, and especially if they have no consequence. 99% of the quests are the exact same no matter what and how you play. Does that sounds like an RPG to you? Out of tens of thousands only a few a locked behind class. Mainly the class halls.
You play with dice. Hits, misses, crit, etc are all RNG.
You decide how you want to play. Whether to engage in combat or not. What spells to cast, which swords to use. Once you engage your fate is in the dice.
Exploration. Leveling. Collecting gear and abilities.
You can play while simultaneously chugging a Dr. Pepper.
By what you said, all games, are RPGs. If I play Half-life, by that simple difinition that you gave, it would be an RPG because I’d play as a PhD gunslinging graduate fighting aliens. And having multiple classes/specs, like in TF Classic, doesnt make it an RPG. This is exactly my point; that unless you have some level of interaction between your class or character and lore, then you are not playing role, LORE-wise. Lore is key here, because the term of RPG has been used way back in the past to describe games where you had choices some for of interaction with the lore. But over the years it has transformed, badly in my oppinion, into this new definition that I don’t agree with, that RPG means playing any class/character. By this standard all game fit this criteria.
WoW isn’t an RPG, it’s a roller coaster on rails. RPGs require that mutually exclusive decisions have different outcomes.
The closest they came to this was the Sylvanas choice, but it had no real effects on the game or changed the outcome of your story, so once again it is for show (like going past the “scary” zombie in the haunted house on rails at an amusement park).
what can I say the gods hate me.