The Myth of the Modern Role-playing Game
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The fact is that the colloquial meaning of (role-playing game) has been slowly drifting from its origins since its inception. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it's one that has gone largely unnoticed by the genre's fanbase. Whereas the strategy and simulation genres split with the full knowledge of the fans involved, the role-playing genre has mutated in to something entirely unlike its original incarnation and has done so several times over.While I agree with some of what the author has to say, he or she is ignoring one modern source of traditional RPGs: independent developers. I'd never write off Knights of the Chalice, Spiderweb's catalogue, or the Eschalon series as "story-driven strategy games".
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After Diablo, the genre was inundated with action-based games rather than story-based titles. One notable evolution in this post-Diablo period is BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, an action-based interpretation of the Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 tabletop role-playing game ruleset. Neverwinter Nights provided role-playing video game fans with a robust title and an editor utility vastly more powerful than anything like it in the past. BioWare's Aurora toolset allowed players to develop their own modules and adventures to be used online with other players. While this was a useful tool to those who wanted to replicate the D&D experience in digital form, it ended up being used more for high-powered, high-adrenaline player versus player kill frenzies that exploited the various weaknesses of the engine and ruleset, cruelly mirroring the nature of (power gamers) in the tabletop role-playing game world.
Post-Diablo role-playing video games often feature developed storylines, but unfortunately for fans of the role-playing genre, these storylines are often more like scripts. Characterization of the player character is often marginalized, compartmentalized into black and white choices or simple branching trees of dialogue, many of which deceptively lead to the same result. In what seems to this writer like a cruel irony, a role-player can often find more customization and characterization for his avatar in the game's mechanics than in the framework stories that provide them with a feeble reason to kill and loot the next group of enemies.
