this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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I'm not sure I agree.
Claiming that Skyrim is not a Computer Role Playing Game requires some supporting reasoning.
Something like the Berlin Interpretation might help but as it is we don't know which features you use feel qualify/disqualify a title for inclusion.
A CRPG is the video game sister-genre of the table top role playing game.
“Computer Role Playing Game” doesn’t mean “A Role Playing Game that’s on the Computer”, the word computer is used here specifically to distinguish it from tabletop, meaning it’s intrinsically tied to tabletop RPGs.
So if a game plays with very similar mechanics to a tabletop rpg (Turn based, tile or distance based movement, top down or isometric views, unique player-created characters, plus the other hallmarks of the greater RPG genre), then you can call it a CRPG. Games like XCom are closer to being CRPGs than the likes of Skyrim, though it wouldn’t itself qualify because it’s not an RPG.
Games like Skyrim are well established in the “Action RPG” genre which is intentionally distinct from the CRPG genre so the burden of supportive evidence and reasoning would really be on you to try and make the claim that Skyrim is a CRPG.
Wikipedias list of video game genres has a brief distinction explanation. The most important being turn-based vs real time combat.
Thanks for presenting your rational, its well reasoned within the definitions you give.
However the definitions might not be as universality accepted as we might like, for example this presents CRPG as synonymous with "role-playing video game" with ARPGs, TRPGs, MMORPGs, etc as subgenres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game
The distinction is very much universally accepted. The reason CRPG is used synonymously with RPG in that article title is because CRPGs were at the time of their inception what an RPG was. You can tell by reading the introductory description and the characteristics section that what is being described and named are tabletop-like CRPGs specifically.
You’ll notice that in the section that defines ARPGs that they’re referred to as a hybrid genre. They are related to CRPGs which is why they’re on the page, as they borrow elements from CRPGs but they are their own genre that by that hybridization are distinct from the traditional CRPG.
This is reinforced by the Wiki link I sent you which is a more cut and dried succinct list of game genres, where it lists ARPGs and CRPGs as two distinct genres.