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I think any other label that could be invented would be similarly limited in its usefulness. I also think the only way a new label would gain traction at this time would be if a game publisher decided they wanted one to help distinguish themselves from the competition and then aggressively marketed a (successful) game using that phrase. Calling a game an "RPG" is fine, but it's just a means to begin a more detailed discussion about what the game does.

You can look at the original D&D and see two major components: the storytelling and the stats/system. There are variations within D&D itself that stop you from clearly declaring one as dominant over the other. "D&D" can mean a long campaign played out over a number of sessions with a focus on roleplaying and the experience of an interactive, improvised story. "D&D" can mean a low-level OD&D dungeon crawl that's more to do with fighting monsters, collecting treasure, and dying in traps. I think the variety of different games you can get as a result of focusing on either the interactive story or stat development (or both at once) is so great that the term "RPG" is useful mostly as a very broad label. It's essential in marketing. You advertise a game as an "RPG" so that fans of games that have been called "RPGs" take notice. It's up to them to investigate further and find out if they and the developer actually have the same kind of game in mind. Fallout is an RPG. Dragon Quest is an RPG. It's not really different from saying that Super Mario Brothers and Halo are both "action" games.

http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/feargusurquhart2.php If this really is the unannounced title Feargus was referring to in this interview, they've been working on it since around February '09.

I know, I wanna play Gears of Dune.

I could replay games like Fallout, Fallout 2, or Arcanum several times. In fact, I already did that. I don't need to do it again.

I don't know how much they paid Chris Morgan or how long he worked for them. If they're using what he gave them, they may need someone to help adapt it into something that works as a game. It makes sense for an inexperienced game developer to license an engine like Onyx rather than building one in-house. This is going to need a lot of marketing support. Most people don't know what Wheel of Time (or any other non-Tolkien, non-Rowling fantasy series) is. Red Eagle did get Wheel of Time set up at Universal, but there's been no news about movement on that since. Speaking of Book->Film->Game adaptations, Paramount's developing a Dune remake.

Dang, I want to explore this vault but I gotta hit the gym and check on my girlfriend first.

Caesar's LegionPros: Wear cool costumes, can say things in Latin Cons: Kill, enslave people HELL YEAH

The way dialog options work in NV sounds like the way they worked in Fallout 2 (and others.) The only real differences are that skill checks are blatantly labeled and there's no minimum skill threshold that has to be met before the option appears, I think. Replays with different character builds might not yield as many surprises, but it limits the chance of quests/etc. being buried in obscure dialog trees. For example, how many people went through Fallout 2 multiple times and never found the Vault City combat implants? This talk of dialog options triggered by skills like stealth and explosives is hopefully a sign that this game is using a least a version of the Combat Boy/Stealth Boy/Speech Boy/Science Boy concept.

-Can you tell me how to get to Neo-Tokyo? -[Explosives] Neo-Tokyo is about to E.X.P.L.O.D.E. -Bye bye.

Fallout 3 lacks corrals to hold my horses. Will New Vegas fix this at retail or is it planned for DLC?

"Craning" up to reveal the city is already a very Leone type of thing to do, then it re-frames on a gunslinger in an old duster. That plus the desert, the cacti, and the crosses definitely re-assert the series' Western vibe. I am happy to see that! I think anyone who liked the first games is glad to see the NCR referenced in the first big piece of marketing. Now there are many questions. The robot looks like it could be an NPC that emotes by switching faces on its TV. That would be fun idea (I'd wonder if its coincidentally similar to the Kevin Spacey-bot in Moon.) How much of the "game world" will be made of the actual city of New Vegas? It looks huge in the teaser.

Excerpt from BioWare's response to DLC complaints (from Georg Zoller:) That's amazing to me. It amazes me that BioWare's response to upset customers is "let me explain why you shouldn't be upset." How is an exchange like the one between Zoller and that site allowed to happen? I don't see why anyone chooses to discuss this in terms of what purchasers of a title are or aren't "entitled" to. BioWare and EA are in the business of attracting customers to pay for their products. If those customers are feeling angry or alienated, for any reason, they're less likely to remain customers in the future. That EA dropped SecuROM from Dragon Age means they perceived the wave of backlash against Spore (mainly in the form of its battered Amazon "star rating") as a credible threat to their business. Are EA or BioWare capable of responding to dissatisfaction expressed on a smaller scale, as with these DLC complaints?

Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition includes all the DLC and costs exactly what I paid for Fallout 3 with no DLC last year. If they have "two years of DLC" planned for Dragon Age, I'll wait two years and see what's on the shelf then. At that point, I might as well give it another year and come back when it's dropped to the $20-30 range. I get excited enough to buy a title at launch a couple times a year, tops. DLC schemes like Dragon Age's are ideal for dousing that excitement.

The best way to satisfy video game fans is to let every character have sex with every character. http://www.spellholdstudios.net/ie/sarevokromance

It's a shame that they're willing to dig up these ancient concepts but they're largely ignoring what originally defined them. One example: that drippy monster thing on the Game Informer cover is supposed to be the Phantom Blot, but Phantom Blot was originally created as a menacing pulp villain who was always trying to murder Mickey in surprisingly violent ways. How is a drippy shapeshifter thing an improvement on that? Is he more "modern" now that he has a mouth? ----> EPIC MICKEY <----

When I say "Star Wars," I'm just referring to the original movies, before the comics, before the novels, before the prequel films, when their goal was to give you the impression of jumping onto a massive story already in progress. They don't explain exactly who the Empire are or why they exist, but they do include audio and visual cues to relate them to the Nazis and relate the general setting to World War II, specifically a kind of fantasy version of the war already seen in action/adventure films from the previous decades. Why is the Empire run by an evil wizard? Because a lot of complicated stuff happened in the "past." Darth Vader gets the barest sketch of an explanation but it's enough to work. By "Indiana Jones," I just mean Temple of Doom, which is designed to be a standalone entry that functions without any prior knowledge of its predecessor. Again, you jump into the middle of a situation, the conflict with Lao Che, that will never be fully explained. The whole movie is about following a rather mercenary version of Indiana Jones, the treasure hunter, as he journeys into the unknown and learns to care about something other than "fortune and glory." The unknown gets to stay unknown. How does Mola Ram's magic work? What does it imply if his evil god actually exists? These issues aren't addressed. Buckaroo Banzai is also designed to feel like an entry somewhere in the middle of a series of pulp or comic book stories, with numerous references to past adventures and the looming figure of Banzai's nemesis Hanoi Xan, who makes no appearance in the film and doesn't figure into the plot at all. Banzai is the most self-conscious of all the films I mentioned, and practically instructs the viewer through dialog to learn to understand ambiguity in storytelling: "No matter where you go, there you are." "Why is there a watermelon there?" "I'll tell you later." In all of these cases, it's sufficient for the audience to fill the gaps with their own imaginations. Official film attempts to "complete" the stories of Star Wars and Indiana Jones turned them into something far less interesting than they originally were. It takes skill to recognize when ambiguity is appropriate. There are situations when a question alone will be more interesting than an answer a writer would supply, and there are situations that demand answers. Outside of cutscenes, CRPGs basically tell their stories by allowing the player to run around and vivisect the world, look in everyone's cabinets, chat up every NPC until they spill exactly who they are and what they're doing. It's a like handing the player a manual on a campaign setting that's been torn into bits and prompting them to put it back together. It's undesirable to restrict a player's actions, but you could restrict their ability to gain that kind of omniscience by carefully managing the amount of information the world is willing to give up through dialog and other interactions. By the way, W.D. Richter, director of Buckaroo Banzai, was responsible for the massive rewrite that, among other things, switched Big Trouble in Little China to present-day from its original incarnation as a western set in the 19th century.

If Baldur's Gate is defined by anything, it's the scale of the games and the variety of stuff you got to do. BG II, especially, compiles a whole lot of popular D&D scenarios into one title: fight dragons, fight a demi-lich, fight a tunnel full of beholders, fight a mind flayer city, visit the drow, etc. There were cities, towns, underground tombs, countryside inbetween, and I think everything felt reasonably dense in terms of quests and things to discover. They also put some effort into acknowledging different play styles with multiple kits per basic class type, the stronghold quests, etc. I'd be impressed if BioWare managed to replicate that scale and that variety. I can't speak to the mechanics of Dragon Age because I can't get enough of a sense of them from the materials available. I have gotten a sense of their storytelling and world-building, though, and it's reminding me a lot of their recent stuff like Mass Effect. To start, the player character's place in the world is similarly handled by assignment to the position of "super-agent." Baldur's Gate also gave the PC an innately special position in the world, but the stakes were of a fairly personal nature and were integrated into a storyline that stretched from the first game to the last. Dealing with your inheritance in Baldur's Gate is similar in many ways to dealing with your immortality in Planescape: Torment. Your motivation in both games is to discover more about yourself and stop the people who are trying to kill you. Shepard in Mass Effect is a soldier and his mission is personal in that the title he holds obligates him to defeat the villain and protect the all the NPCs populating the world. A player's interest in this plot will vary depending on how much they care about those NPCs and the world they inhabit. They'll always care less about them than they do their own character. Approaches to world construction in Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect are entirely different. From what I've seen of Dragon Age, one of the largest red flags is that "dragon" is just a type of demon in that world, and that the DA demons seem to be as ubiquitous as ME's Geth. Compare this to the approach Baldur's Gate took from D&D, where dragons are specific organisms with individual histories/personalities/motivations and enough power to claim territory and wealth for themselves. Without the D&D license, BioWare try to design worlds that are streamlined and logical, but in doing so err towards oversimplification and blandness. Their working conditions are different. Dragon Age was conceived by a team working within time and budgetary constraints during the development of a single project. Baldur's Gate got to borrow everything from 2nd Edition AD&D, the sum of decades of work from writers and designers who themselves were drawing on vast histories of mythology and literature for characters and concepts to lift. It's insufficient to describe the Forgotten Realms of that time period as "generic fantasy" when it carried so much weight behind it and was linked to all the other campaign settings by both the planes of Planescape and the space of Spelljammer. Look also to Marvel comics in the 80s for an example of a system for "shared universe" storytelling hitting a peak of madness. If BioWare want to continue creating their game worlds without exterior aid in the narrative department, they ought to screen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the original Star Wars films, Big Trouble in Little China. There's a bright period in popular culture's history when some smart people figured out that you can expand these fictions through suggestion alone, that mystery and ambiguity aren't the enemy. You really don't have to fill in all the holes, or reduce the work until it's a size where all the holes can be filled.

Were these guys unaware of Ellison's current suit against Paramount when they put the Guardian of Forever in this game? It was reported that the Guardian would be the time-travel device in Abrams' Star Trek until Ellison threatened to sue them, too.

Update...random demon bone drops, like DII's gems. Can assemble set of 256 to create Bone Truck...Mike Morhaime is making motor noises with his mouth...

Fifth class confirmed to be Lizard Man

Maybe because the picture only shows four classes to choose from? Shaman (?), Warrior, Sorsoress, Monk. I'd be shocked if it had fewer than pre-expansion DII and that symmetrical arrangement suggests at least two more.

Can I play as Diablo

Given how tight-lipped Bethesda are on anything to do with the next Elder Scrolls, I'm guessing they wanted to reassure people they had an RPG coming after the Fallout 3 DLC ended.

Diablo III is the official sequel to Hellfire