What videogames are you playing in 2026?

[Ruin Explorer]

Every role playing game with a weak story would be better as a game if the story were improved.

Before anyone tries to um actually at me, improved does not mean "increased in amount of game time dedicated to it" or anything else like that.

The best dungeon crawler would still be better if it's minimal story were somehow executed better, built a world more effectively, implied motivation more convincingly, etc.

This applies to literally any game which has any kind of story - and by "story" you mean "implied setting" even, so that's basically any game less abstract than Tetris.

You are again expanding my statement beyond its scope.

Only true if you zoom out more broadly than RPGs, which was the discussion.

RPGs are their story, just like novels.

The reason people are confused is because of your second statement here - RPGs are no more their story than most games are.

If anything, the exception is a small minority of highly abstract games where the story either doesn't exist or is irrelevant, like Tetris. But those have been a smaller and smaller % of games since forever. Even vertical-scrolling shooters often have compelling stories, RPG mechanics, and so on, these days!

I don't think RPGs "are their story" any more than most games. I don't think they're exceptional or unusual in that. You can have RPGs with almost no story, where it's "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" like Double Dragon. Or you can have incredibly elaborate and complex stories with real themes and affecting characters and ideas.

But the same is true of action-adventure games, say. Indeed it's equally true.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don’t think it is. Does it have some of the elements of an RPG, absolutely! But it doesn’t make the cut for me.

I’m not no-true Scotsmaning - I just don’t think it fits the criteria in my book. But arguing about the criteria will get us nowhere fast, so I won’t (well, I’ll try my hardest).

You are 100% effectively no-true Scotsmaning, whether you mean to or not.

Caves of Qud, say, is not only an RPG, it's a better RPG by almost any measurement (even visual design!) than, for example, Fallout 4. The same is true of most or all true Rogue-likes. They all have implied settings (often quite distinctive ones), as well the trappings of an RPG, and you can absolutely role-play within them, and further, people tend to.

In fact, it's easier in a lot of ways to make a case that say, a JRPG isn't an RPG than a traditional Rogue-like isn't an RPG. And that's a suicide mission on par with the end of Mass Effect 2 right there!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Ortjoganal not in terms of a game cannot do story...but much like features like maps or rad cover art on novels...the medium does not require it. The "stroy" of Donkey Kong Banana is negligible at best. Still fun.

The medium might technically not, but movies don't "require" sound or colour - or a story, actually (Koyaanisqatsi etc.). The reality though is that virtually every game, even ones which wouldn't have 40 years ago (UGH TIME PAIN WHY MUST IT BE 40 NOT 20), does have a story of some kind, even if it's mostly implied, and hell it's now often one of the major factors people judge a game on.

 

[Gradine]

Fallout 4 is still the only Fallout game I've played. I've played through it three times - Minutemen, Railroad, and BoS. Don't think I could ever side with the Institute. I've tried and failed to play it without engaging with the settlement mini-game. Building settlements is so much fun - and being able to access your resources from just about anywhere is so convenient.

I came this close to deciding to try Survival mode this time around but I didn't go for it simply because of the lack of manual saves; that's a deal-breaker for me. I really like it conceptually and how it really makes the settlement management more or less mandatory in order to get safely traverse the world anywhere.

 

[Gradine]

In fact, it's easier in a lot of ways to make a case that say, a JRPG isn't an RPG than a traditional Rogue-like isn't an RPG. And that's a suicide mission on par with the end of Mass Effect 2 right there!

This reminds me that I have absolutely seen people try to make the argument that JRPGs by and large aren't RPGs because you play a pre-defined character and make few if any choices in the story, and the massive futility of arguing with somebody the definitions of words that are deeply personally held (to say nothing of the headaches!)

 

[Parmandur]

but movies don't "require" sound or colour

Exactly.

 

[Parmandur]

In fact, it's easier in a lot of ways to make a case that say, a JRPG isn't an RPG than a traditional Rogue-like isn't an RPG. And that's a suicide mission on par with the end of Mass Effect 2 right there!

This reminds me that I have absolutely seen people try to make the argument that JRPGs by and large aren't RPGs because you play a pre-defined character and make few if any choices in the story, and the massive futility of arguing with somebody the definitions of words that are deeply personally held (to say nothing of the headaches!)

The real make or break question: is the Mystery Dungeon series made up of RPGs, or just Sparkling Anime Rogue-likes because they don't come from the RPG region of France...?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This reminds me that I have absolutely seen people try to make the argument that JRPGs by and large aren't RPGs because you play a pre-defined character and make few if any choices in the story, and the massive futility of arguing with somebody the definitions of words that are deeply personally held (to say nothing of the headaches!)

Yeah, it used to be a pretty common opinion, not one I personally held, but I think for a long time there was a pretty clear distinction between Western RPGs, which could be, as you correctly identify, boiled down to:

• WRPGs typically let you create at least one character (even if they had some pre-determined stuff like their role in the setting), sometimes the entire party. JRPGs typically did not let you create any characters at all.
• WRPGs usually gave you some choices in the story, and those choices became increasingly meaningful ones over the 1990s. JRPGs typically did not offer any choices or those offered were false/circular choices.

The double-whammy of "no character creation" and "no story choices" was thus seem as disqualifying JRPGs from being "an RPG" in the same sense western ones were. But neither was universally true - there were (rare) exceptions in both directions, and by 2001 we had stuff like Anachronox, which was very well-regarded and seen as a "Western JRPG" (just like Expedition 33 today), and there were always JRPGs where you could customize the main character just about as much as you could customize, say, The Avatar from Ultima, or The Nameless One from PS:T.

And that's only become more common over time. The term JRPG was also flung at a lot of games which really were more similar to Western RPGs than JRPGs, like King's Field (1994) (which had more in common with Ultima Underworld (1992) than Final Fantasy). King's Field was even developed as a PC game, only becoming a PSX game because the PSX was wildly more powerful than most Japanese PCs at the time. Hell, there were games like Sorcerian (1987, also on PC) which, whilst kind of a mess, where extremely interesting in that they had full character creation and complex (and really annoying) advancement, and were not turn-based or the like, but almost more like a side-scroller or platformer. Dungeon Master was a big hit in Japan and had some Japan-only sequels too. And JRPGs often had huge mechanical development customization - often more than most WRPGs.

In general as story has become more important in RPGs, they've become more like JRPGs in that you typically don't from-scratch create any character but the main one (at most a game might have some token nonsense where you can hire "mercenaries" with no personality if you really want a terrible experience and to miss out on a ton of character/story/quest stuff), and even the main one will have some clear story associated with them and/or role in the setting.

I came this close to deciding to try Survival mode this time around but I didn't go for it simply because of the lack of manual saves; that's a deal-breaker for me. I really like it conceptually and how it really makes the settlement management more or less mandatory in order to get safely traverse the world anywhere.

I just can't play games as buggy as even patched and patch-mod'd FO3/4/NV without the ability to save and reload myself. It's just too likely you're going to get hit by some truly ridiculous bug, like getting stuck on a rock and reloading doesn't fix it.