That's only your very own definition, not more not less.
For me personally, RPGs are all about choices and decisions, which includes both narrative and gameplay ones. I know the tendency of many to reduce that all to combat but I don't agree at all with that. In many RPGs narrative decisions are as important or even more important than combat (with Witcher being the best example). That's also the reason why Witcher is imo more an RPG than many others on your list - and a reason why DOS fell short for many in terms of being a fully fledged out RPG.
It looks like you are fishing for reasons to be contrarian :p
It looks like you're still going on selling your own opinion as facts. Honstely, I'm getting tired of that. It seems like you can't deal with differing opinions, nor do you try to understand the reasoning of other people...
Wie sagt man doch gleich noch mal auf deutsch? "Gott weiss alles. Aber der Lehrer weiss alles besser."
Quote
RPGs aren't about the story, nor C&C (Spec Ops: the Line had a marvelous story and choices, yet it's a third-person shooter), it's the menu-driven combat that separates RPGs from other genres.
Of course RPGs are about the story. DOS without a story and C&C is simply a strategy/tactical game. Deus Ex without a story or C&C is simply an FPS/stealth game.
(And Spec Ops: The Line is indeed a hybrid of various genres, like many games nowadays.)
Excluding narrative topics from the definition of RPGs is imo completely pointless. It's of course possible that you're not interesting in them. They're imo still essential to define the genre.
Quote
That's what they are, genres aren't what we personally define them as - a sonata is always a sonata and an FPS is always an FPS, regardless if you think that it's a minuet and a turn-based strategy :p It was defined like 15 years ago.
By whom? You? Great. It's nice that you try to compare everything to music, but the comparison is pointless here. And I've been in MANY discussion about what the core of RPGs is in the past 20 years and it was never ultimately defined by anybody, sorry. But sure, I don't want to take away your definition. You can have yours, I have mine. In the end it's just a classifiction to describe various elements/systems of a game, nothing more, so the whole discussion is pretty much completely theoretical anyway (and therefore without much real value)...
