I agree with
Infinitron 's quoted wall of text from InternetPerson even though 75% of quoted text is almost farcically wrong simply because the person
Infinitron is quoting, this James Patton person, obviously hasn't played many real RPGs.
i've said it many times before and I'll say it again: I consider dungoen crawlers, specifically Wizardry 1, to be the purest representation of core RPG mechanics. Wizardry 1 is 30 years old and features more advanced and innovative game design than almost every single RPG game released since.
The main reasons for this is that Wizardry 1 features an almost perfectly balanced implementation of truly cohesive and matured gameplay systems that are simultaneously: 1) copmletely capable of engaging the player on their own, and; 2) each system completes every other system, not just "another one". all Wizardry gameplay mechanics are a piece of an organic whole and there is no waste.
(game-wide resource management from spells to hit points to character classes; unbeaten-to-this-day implementation of skinner-boxes elegantly integrated into each system; a hard focus on emergent exploration that is achieved via the combination of ALL of the game's systems such as the encounters, the battles, the "loot", the character classes, and the nigh-perfect blobber abstraction of tactical combat; ETC).
i am not against having narrative prose and complex and layered story telling in an RPG I just don't consider that a core aspect of RPG games. This is something that is NOW considered a core aspect of RPG games but it's something that was borrowed from other genres, and all genres do this now not just RPGs. I used to think the complete opposite of what i just wrote back when I had never played a dungeon crawler and it was specifically because I considered dungeon crawlers to be non-RPG's because they didn't focus on storytelling or on literary characterizations.
then I played wizardry and my mind was blown. i saw behind the veil and realized that THIS was the purest experience I'd ever had in an RPG game, or in ANY game for that matter, and I realized that storytelling in an RPG and a focus on puzzle-solving or "questing" in the modern sense is a crutch developers use because they don't know any better. However if a game were to have Wizardry-level mechanics AND on top of that art/story/music like, say, Fallout 1, then of course it would be an amazing game. Something that is _good_ is _good_. End of story.
And, btw, the reason(s) FO1 is such a good RPG is not because of its storytelling at all it is because of it's cracking good system design. Yes the writing, the quests, all that stuff makes it good but if you stripped it all away FO1 would still be better than 90% of modern RPGs.