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Originally posted by TheDarkDragon:
**I seem to have missed something...
An RPG is, by definition, a Role Playing Game. Therefore it is a game in which you play as someone else. Traditionally, RPGs have statistics (D&D; come to mind) as to how accurately you hit and how much damage you do. No where do I see a rule that says it has to be either turnbased or realtime. So what I have missed (and I always have, no matter which webboard I go to) is how Diablo isn't an RPG. I'm not saying it is per say. I am simply saying that it is by no means absolutely not an RPG. See what I'm saying?
As for Realtime/Turnbased, It all depends on the graphics, 2-d is generally better for turnbased (think Cythera, M:tG, and Chess) and (fake) 3-d is generally better for real time (think diablo).
My dollar and 2˘.
**
If you take RPG in a literal sense and say that any game where you take the role of a person, you could say that games like Dead or Alive and Streetfighter are RPGs. In my opinion, what really makes an RPG is the depth of the storyline, and a sense of character development. And I don't mean gaining experience and upping your stats development, I mean emotional development.
What it really boiled down to for me in saying that Diablo isn't an RPG is that the whole premise of the game from the very start was: "There's a demon down in that church. Here's your sword/staff/bow/etc, go kill it. slash,slash,slash, end of game. Not terribly deep. And your character didn't do too much development apart from sticking a big ol' gem in his/her head and becoming demonic.
True, there have been plenty of crappy RPGs out there that had far worse plot than Diablo which still get the moniker of RPG slapped on them. These things happen.
But as far as whether or not real time/turn based combat systems have anything to do with whether or not a game is an RPG is somewhat silly. Combat is something of a neccesity in a good RPG, but how it's done doesn't really matter.
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"Angels banished from Heaven have no choice but to become Demons."
-Vicious