Damn, I was biding my time until I threw Pacman in here as an example of just how broad the definition of RPG was, but I was beaten to it.
Maybe it's convenient for me that my definition of RPG tends to be similarly broad to that of the games studios... though I must admit that whilst being able to pilot one's character around is nice, I'd like the character development to be more than what's going on in my imagination and for choices and consequences to be more apparent than "decide to do this quest... or not" at best.
This has given me some food for thought. The various "xRPG" terms often make me bristle somewhat as they're frequently used inappropriately to malign some game that the user of said terminology has a personal gripe about, but actually thinking of the likes of the aforementioned Sacred 2 as well as Stalker and a bunch of other stuff, could they really be described as anything other than "Action RPG"? They're much too complex compared to the average shooter (I'm thinking Doom as representative of the genre, to be clear) but aren't quite "there" (at least per prefab character in the case of Sacred 2, though you at least get half a dozen choices... and most do actually have a "dark path" and "light path" now that I think about it) in terms of RPGs. So perhaps, but I still feel a resistance to introducing additional genres into the nice, straightforward categorisation of RPG, shooter, strategy or adventure, even if not everything I'm likely to play fits neatly into that simple division.
Sigh, I dunno. I'm now just rambling, really.
