The more and more I study here at college, the more and more I realize that I am a gamer most in this world. I view everything in the world as a game, and I am constantly trying to figure out the rules. 

I wanted to get that out of the way. As a gamer-by-nature, I can thus appreciate a good game. Unreal Tournament? Love it. Panzer General? Starcraft? Homeworld? Alpha Centauri? Loved them. The Sims? If anyone doesn't love it, they haven't played it long enough!

A great game is a great game; even narrow-minded I can see that. I want to say right away that I loved Diablo. It killed my GPA my junior fall in high school. I loved it.

Now, pushing that aside, how many of you readers would consider Quake or Unreal Tournament to be an RPG? How about Starcraft? I don't see many hands. That's because no one considers them RPGs. They're not RPGs. They're action and strategy games. Great games, to be sure. Diablo is much closer to those genres than it is anywhere near the title of Role Playing Game.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if every single person who saw these words has kicked that big, red mother's keester to Tristram to Hell and back as a pubescent rite of passage. I know I did. I recently reinstalled it and loved it again, despite the fact that I had to watch my roommate devour my accomplishments because he was a warrior, I was a sorceror, and the only way I had beaten the game before was as the rogue-- I'm a teenage boy; you figure it out. I loved it.

But Diablo is not a role-playing game.

To Diablo's credit, there is a well-contrived backstory in the manual, but unfortunately, the plot never enters gameplay. You get to name your character and choose the way that stats evolve, (to some extent) and people have one-sided chats with you, but this isn't what playing a role is about. I suppose this means I have a rather narrow minded definition of role-playing, doesn't it? 

I think a role-playing game is about building a character who is as close to flesh and blood as any system of mechanics can indicate. As Quake and my beloved UT indicate, simply rendering your character to look like a person doesn't count as the personification of a role. No. I think a role is indicated by some kind of individuality expressed by the decisions of a given character within the context of the gameworld. The tenor of this argument probably harkens back to my rant on power-gaming, but unfortunately, Diablo was billed as a role-playing game, reviewed as a role-playing game, and many people will go to the mat saying that Diablo is a better role-playing game than Fallout or Baldur's Gate. Was it more fun than either of them? I don't think so, but others might, and that's fine, but they shouldn't be comparing them to those particular games. Diablo has more in common with Zelda than it does with Fallout, but even Zelda is closer kin to an RPG than the almost pure action oriented gameplay of Diablo.

In Diablo, you kill stuff, get items, and repeat. There is never a breaking point in this sequence except for a few spare moments where you "talk" to someone and receive a quest, which may or may not have anything to do with your role in the story. In Baldur's Gate, your character could determine the results of the story. If you were evil acting, then the game treated you as such, and the same went for good characters. In Daggerfall, (the sequel to which, I have learned is in development) every action has a reaction, not just with the plot, but also with the characters with whom you interact in the game.  If you make a misstep, then you are going to have a harder time with the game, not because of monsters or whatever, but because of your foul relationship with the people in the game.

So there it is. Even if you assume the role of a military commander in Homeworld or Starcraft, or whether you are a marine in Quake or competitor in UT, I think a game can only be called a role playing game if there is some degree of visible interaction between the your character and the NPCs in the game-- in this case, shooting people in the head with arrows does not count as interaction. These interactions must have an effect on the overall arc of the story's progression. To boot, I think that in an RPG, the only way to achieve the highest success needs to be with this kind of thinking. 

Thus, whether you believe you are a competitor in the Liandri tournaments when you play UT, or whether you just think you are a dude sitting in your room with a mouse and keyboard at your fingertips, your success will depend on your skill with the FPS genre.

To support this notion, In Baldur's Gate if you tried to assemble a party based on combat values or what have you, then your party members might end up killing themselves. However, if you tried to match up alignments, then you would be blessed with a much more consistent party membership and higher levels in the end.

In System Shock II, by playing like your given character type,  by hyper-specializing, most people agree that you will have a much easier time in the higher levels of the game, as opposed to the death from above when you spread yourself too thin trying to learn everything in the game.

Now, look at Diablo. Does it matter what you do, with whom you interact, or how you advance your stats? In the end, you will end up with some very similar characters, no matter what class you play. The only time any stats matter is in the beginning.

But in the end I rant like this because I want harmony.

It upsets me that people try to say that Diablo is a better role playing game than Fallout or Baldur's Gate because it is such a different type of gaming experience. It is a different genre. Just because a game has sword, arrows, and not a single bullet does not mean that it's an RPG.

I think that when people stomp on any true RPG for the sake of the immensely popular Diablo, they are pushing other people to potentially deny themselves an engrossing and deep gaming experience, especially if they are coming from the PnP marketplace. If I were a pure PnP player, and someone tried to turn me onto CRPGs with Diablo, I would probably wretch.

So there it is.
Playing Diablo will make you wretch.
I hope someone understood.
I really hope someone agrees.

-N