What is your favorite RPG and why?
My Favorite RPG (and game) is Morrowind because in my honest opinion it offers the definite RPG experience, it allows you to live in an interesting world populated by interesting people (I'm not talking about every single NPC, I'm talking about each races and their lore as a whole). I think it is one of the best game ever to role-play because of all of the possibilities the game offer. I also like it because it is really one of the rare modern games in which your personal skills have no say in the outcomes of your diverse actions because everything is decided by a dice-roll, from hitting a rat with a sword to casting a spell successfully (unless you abuse the AI bad pathfinding and stuff). It makes me pretty sad that modern RPGs seem to be scrapping the Role-play part completely, personally a RPG does not simply mean a game in which you take the role of a character, it is a game in which you take the role of a character that is entirely your creation. Let's take a game like Mass Effect, I really love this game but in my opinion it is not a RPG, it is a Third Person Shooter with RPG elements because see, you don't have that much to say in the game, for instance at the beginning (spoiler I guess) you have to save Tali from whatever I can't remember, it's good and all but it missed a crucial option : The option to not do **** about it and let her die. ME really prevents you from playing a bad guy, you can be either a good guy or a dick. Sure you can role-play and say you don't give a **** about saving the universe but you can't actually do it. The game is still good, but not as a RPG and it makes me really sad to see that this seem to become the standard for modern RPGs. Let's go back to Morrowind, the game doesn't have a quest-line for people who would want to join the bad guy and not care about the Nerevarine Prophecies, but you totally can role-play it. For instance you could go and kill Caius Cosades, the major quest giver for the main quest, breaking the questline in the process. Morrowind is well made though, and even if you kill all of the main-quest quest givers you can still finish the game because there is a back path, and even this back path isn't necessary, you can finish the game using nothing but sheer power. So yeah, Morrowind is my favorite game for the extreme freedom it gives you, while still having an interesting world.
What subgenre is your favorite and why?
FPS-RPG, the genre is extremely small (Stalker and Borderlands are the only games that come to mind) but I love it.
Does "RPG" do enough to describe a game in the genre?
Yes, numerous games branded RPGs do not deserved to be named so though.
If you had to chance, would you change the name to something else?
I wouldn't.
Would creating more defined subgenres help or hurt the appeal?
No idea !
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Best LPer ever, Gix ! : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt5YKmP7ecY