{"id":1339,"date":"2007-09-26T11:00:17","date_gmt":"2007-09-26T16:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1339"},"modified":"2008-08-16T10:18:46","modified_gmt":"2008-08-16T15:18:46","slug":"what-makes-a-great-rpg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1339","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a Great RPG?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Rampant Coyote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rampantgames.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/what-makes-great-rpg.html\">asks<\/a>: What makes a (computer) RPG great?<\/p>\n<p>This is a favorite subject of mine.  I started to write a response last night, and it quickly turned into a long, rambling post that was all over the place.  I&#8217;ve never been particularly into the whole brevity thing, but this post was quickly becoming an egregious <a href=\"?p=1190\">wall of text<\/a> so I had to abandon it.<\/p>\n<p>I was trying to talk about character development, gameplay mechanics, presentation, immersion, and about a dozen other factors all at once.  I don&#8217;t even know if I can give a sensible answer in a single post.  Looking back, I think the big problem is that the term &#8220;RPG&#8221; is so hopelessly broad that it means almost nothing.  Diablo, Jade Empire, Nethack, and Oblivion are all RPGs. How is Jade Empire an RPG but not Bully or GTA: San Andreas?  How can Diablo be an RPG, when you don&#8217;t actually do any roleplaying?  More importantly, how does one talk about what makes these games great, since they don&#8217;t really have anything meaningful in common?  <\/p>\n<p>It might be easier to come at this from the other direction and list the ways you can hinder or ruin an RPG.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to go back to the drawing board with that abandoned post, but in the meantime I&#8217;ll just sort of throw this out there for the less obsessive types to tackle: What makes &#8220;an RPG&#8221; great?<\/p>\n<p>LATER: Don&#8217;t miss <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cineris.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/26\/of-rpgs-and-programming\/\">this excellent response over at Augury<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Rampant Coyote asks: What makes a (computer) RPG great? This is a favorite subject of mine. I started to write a response last night, and it quickly turned into a long, rambling post that was all over the place. I&#8217;ve never been particularly into the whole brevity thing, but this post was quickly becoming [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}