One view I have on this, which I don't want to put forward with too much vigour, is that a given RPG played differently by different groups can well amount to different games. It's possible that is what you were encountering if speaking primarily of personal gaming preferences.
If this is true, then analysis of games is legitimately impossible. It would be like two different audiences changing whether a film is a documentary or a comedy.
Beyond normative statements (which you are not making, right?) I feel like there is no "objective" criticism of any mode of play.
Surely there must be some, though? Even if someone holds that you cannot ever objectively criticize a creative work (a position I
do not hold, to be clear), surely we can at least recognize more or less successful technique and implementation. Hence my focus, in all conversations of this type, on the goals or purposes to which a game is set and how effective the game is at achieving those purposes. I see this as equivalent to critiquing the grammar and diction of a written creative work, or critiquing the sound design and camera angles of a cinematic creative work, etc. People speak all the time of (for example) games getting better at making effective cutscenes, with improved camera work, better vocal delivery, more effective emotional impact, etc. Such statements are meaningless if we cannot ever speak of these techniques as improving. One need not like or value the message to recognize that it has been well-executed.
True "High Gygaxian" old-school D&D isn't for me. It's too combative, competitive, violent, lethal, amoral, and anti-narrative for my tastes. But I recognize that it contains some incredibly brilliant, and highly effective, game design decisions which support these intended purposes. Those purposes aren't ones
I value, but they are purposes that
people value, and the game's design is very good at supporting those purposes.
I think the similarity provides contrast, in that no RPG is solely pre-authored. Ongoing authorship is at the heart of all RPG. That's more a technical definition than value judgement.
While that is fair, we have an excellent example of the same thing in video gaming: MMORPGs. The RPG element is obviously related. But these games also run into the same situation, where the initial story writing never extends far enough to cover the whole lifetime of any game that lasts more than a couple expansions. And we have seen that this, too, can be executed well or poorly.
World of Warcraft fairly clearly had its original story arc from "vanilla" (base WoW) to the end of the second expansion,
Wrath of the Lich King. Things got rough from there on out, and there were several controversial expansions that clearly didn't land well and weren't well-executed, most notably the expansion before current,
Shadowlands, which proved the last straw for a large chunk of the playerbase.
Conversely,
Final Fantasy XIV has clearly been in a renaissance of sorts, despite having run out of initial written story material by the end of the relaunch's first expansion (numbered "3.X" because the original 1.X release was eliminated and replaced by the rebuilt 2.X version,
A Realm Reborn.) The authors managed to craft a solid, satisfying story and then, unusually for an MMO, actually gave that story a clean and definitive
ending. They're currently telling a shorter, more contained story, which will also conclude, then start a new story arc in the next expansion, 7.0 (which we don't know the name of yet.)
Again, I don't mean to import any "X game is good, Y game is bad" here. I played WoW for several years, I still miss some of it. I currently play FFXIV, and certainly love it. But we can look at the execution of both games and see important things. We can see how WoW slowly lost its way, how it became focused on the wrong things and neglecting the execution of critical elements (e.g., how the UX was neglected because the modding community existed.) We can see how FFXIV jumped in quality when they contracted with a radio-play voice acting group, how they have improved their cinematography through camera angles and sound cues and environmental storytelling, how they learned to do more with the expressions and motions of the charactera in order to make more effective emotional impact, etc. (I could give more specific examples but it would be massive spoilers!)
This is not to say that WoW does nothing right. It has deep lore that people care about deeply. Blizzard brings its A-game when it comes to major cutscenes and it
shows. Other games can't do that, and leveraging that difference is a big deal. My point is simply that we can look to the technique, to the
design, of games and critique it, even when we cannot critique the
creative content of games.
