The Self-made Irrelevance of the RPG
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In light of the history I've articulated (mind you, an incomplete and highly simplified one), I think it's safe to say that the question of relevance on Greg's mind comes either from a misunderstanding or change in perception of what an RPG actually is, or from a desire to no longer make RPGs. BioWare have, for many years, been at the forefront of delivering cinematic and story-driven videogame experiences to players... considering the ease at which many of these games can be divorced from their mechanical underpinnings, and their narratives told in a way unhindered by statistics, it becomes questionable whether BioWare are, or even have been for the last eight or so years, in the practice of creating RPGs at all. RPGs have traditionally been about universal rulesets, and even the best narratively-charged CRPGs have governed those narrative qualities via mechanics - Planescape: Torment, Fallout, and even more recently Alpha Protocol, have all built their stories around the fundamental notion that it is the player's choices in statistically developing a character or a party, rather than around the idea that the player's decision-making be conceptualised as a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That Chris Avellone has been involved with many of these CRPGs may or may not be a coincidence.
Of course, I do not mean, in any way, to suggest that BioWare's games are bad, because, for what they are, they are categorically of a very high quality standard. Yet close analysis demands that we consider very carefully the kinds of games that BioWare claim they've been making this last decade... under scrutiny, I don't think that they hold up particularly well as RPGs, at least when we think of RPGs in the more traditional sense I've defined above. The conclusion that I'm forced to draw through all of this is, simply put, that if BioWare feel RPGs are no longer relevant, part of the answer is that they have made them irrelevant.
