Pac-Man is an RPG because you're pretending to be a Pac-Man!
I'm well aware that "RPG" in terms of video games is watered down to a point where any sort of character mechanics progression makes it a "RPG" these days. So I don't really need to have that debate. I was amused by the phrase "100% RPG" though since I guess now ANY character development/interaction beyond "Go to NPC, click on them and get next mission" is superfluous to the idea of a role-playing game.
So a game has to have mountains of text to be an RPG? Because I can think of a million other games with weaker, sparser stories and dialogue than Borderlands that have turn based combat and are considering purely RPGs with no other sub-genres. Since Borderlands 2 has FPS combat, it's different? That doesn't really make sense.
Just about nothing is a true "100% RPG" besides tabletop RPGs that spawned the RPG gaming genre. The closest possible games would be stuff like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, simply because they made you create a character from scratch, create the "role" and play it, and because they tried their best to follow the mechanics of the tabletop game.
I just fail to see how a different combat style makes people scoff at someone calling it an RPG as well. Maybe "100%" is exaggerating, but it is 100% an RPG in the sense that it's just as much an RPG than almost every other RPG video game in recent history. I dislike the "purist" attitude where one format and one format only is the "true" version of something.
Yeah, there's tons of games that have those types of things and you can't just call them all RPGs... because they are not.
See above. Honestly, I think that's nonsense. The only thing that is not an RPG about Borderlands is the combat style, and really, combat styles vary between RPGs too, so that's a pointless thought. It has just as much story, dialogue, etc than many other games that people would easily consider RPGs (simply for the turn based classic RPG combat styles), or perhaps that doesn't count either because it's a silly, non-medieval story?
The mechanics are 100% RPG, and I consider the mechanics of a game to tell you what type of game it is. I've played RPGs with turn based, active time, turn based strategy, real time strategy, puzzle, and many more combat styles, and I consider all of them RPGs if the mechanics of the games are still RPGs. I see no difference with an FPS combat style.
Also, see below.
FTFY.
Excellent point. Borderlands is an ARPG.
Back to the naysayers, are ARPGs not "true" RPGs? If that's a nitpick going on, I guess I have nothing more to say. Just because a game falls under a sub-genre doesn't make it something completely different.
I feel like this whole thing is a bunch of old people saying "In MY day our RPGs were made of paper and didn't have laser guns and murderous little girls named Tina in them!", to which I'll just say you're all wrong and should feel bad.
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