yeah, it makes sense to me Wayward Son . Even under my own personal defintion of the easiest way to differentiate an RPG from other sub-genres i would struggle with a game like Fallout: New Vegas, which i would call an RPG and which is one of my all-time favorite video games of all time, even though it plays like a first-person shooter and not like an RPG.
as you say, the skills/abilities/"numbers" should be dominant but there can definitely be some leeway and "twitch reflexes" can play a part in the game it all depends on the specific game and how they go about it.
fallout: new vegas, even though it plays like an FPS more than RPG, is most definitely more an RPG than Dark Souls specifically because it has waaaaaaaaaaay more "numbers" driving the gameplay under the hood such as skill and stat checks during dialog, a much more involved character-generation process and stuff like perks and abilities and other stuff that shapes the gameplay to a much greater extent than in Dark Souls.
for example in dark souls you can find many videos of people boasting about beating X boss without "taking a hit" or whatever and that sort of stuff is always dependant almost exclusively on the player's ability to memorize the boss's movement patterns and the players real world reflexes and how l33t they are at dodge-rolling or in taking advantage of active frames and non-active animation frames. etc, etc.
does that sound like RPG gameplay? of course it does not. it sounds closer to fucking Street Fighter than to an RPG.
as you say, the skills/abilities/"numbers" should be dominant but there can definitely be some leeway and "twitch reflexes" can play a part in the game it all depends on the specific game and how they go about it.
fallout: new vegas, even though it plays like an FPS more than RPG, is most definitely more an RPG than Dark Souls specifically because it has waaaaaaaaaaay more "numbers" driving the gameplay under the hood such as skill and stat checks during dialog, a much more involved character-generation process and stuff like perks and abilities and other stuff that shapes the gameplay to a much greater extent than in Dark Souls.
for example in dark souls you can find many videos of people boasting about beating X boss without "taking a hit" or whatever and that sort of stuff is always dependant almost exclusively on the player's ability to memorize the boss's movement patterns and the players real world reflexes and how l33t they are at dodge-rolling or in taking advantage of active frames and non-active animation frames. etc, etc.
does that sound like RPG gameplay? of course it does not. it sounds closer to fucking Street Fighter than to an RPG.
