Disco Elysium is Interactive Fiction.
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The only Zelda game I recall being called an RPG of any stripe with any regularity is Adventures of Link, and it’s the red-headed stepchild of mainline Zelda titles. And for the record, Zelda was what I was think when I mentioned Adventure games in my previous post before adding the action adjective to distinguish from text adventures and point-and-click affairs, though, when I played Ys: Oath in Felghana on PSP, my introduction to Action RPGs, my thoughts where along the lines of, “This is like Zelda, but instead of getting stronger primarily through collecting heart containers and itemss with unique abilities, you get stronger primarily through better generic equipment and leveling up via combat experience”.
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Seeing how the Zelda games are widely considered to be RPGs despite them famously relying on player skill,
Assuming we’re calling it an action RPG, Zelda isn’t unique for demanding player skill. Most action RPGs (such as Secret of Mana, Kingdom Hearts, and — as @mewtamer mentioned — Ys) require skill.
What sets Zelda apart from other action RPGs is that it doesn’t offer levelling up directly from combat, which is something that most ‘true’ action RPGs do. I say mostly, because even Zelda gives you more HP after boss battles, which is an extremely streamlined/reduced version of RPG levelling based on combat. I think the newest games have item levelling in addition to this.
There’s also other RPG stuff in Zelda, such as towns and dungeons, status-effecting costumes, and grinding for consumable items, weapons, and cash.
(I don’t think any of that actually has to do with Zelda’s biggest feature, which is the diegetic/gameplay-based key item progression also seen in Metroid and Metal Gear, where you tangibly use key items in-game instead of just presenting/carrying the item.
That’s what allowed Zelda to turn dungeons into large, immersive, interactive and interconnected spaces — not just small areas that lock you into combat or puzzles just to get a literal key. Even though Zelda sometimes falls back on the latter.)
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…And yet the Zelda games are officially classified as action-adventures, and the series’ creator famously insists they’re not RPGs like practically everyone else calls them. All of which is well-documented, and furthers my point that the lines are blurry. Which is all I claimed. I did not claim Zelda does or doesn’t belong to any particular genre. Just that its classification has been famously contested, which is what we’re discussing here.
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Yeah, I wasn’t trying to counter you, just going on a tangent. Sorry if it seemed otherwise.
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“RPG” makes the most sense to civilians. More specifically Sunless Sea is a QBN (quality-based narrative) with a realtime graphical navigation mode akin to 80 Days with its globe-branching navigation, only Sunless Sea is is also rogue-like in that it scrambles the map and there’s an element of carrying knowledge and stats between playthroughs. 80 Days explorable globe is consistent, but the rogue-nature of it comes from cycling travel schedules extensively simulated to inspire chaos and improvisation with decision windows that open and close in real time.)
A QBN is basically an RPG on steroids, perhaps having hundreds or even thousands of stats - or more specifically qualities - that are more bewildering and freeform to keep track of as opposed to formal RPGs which may have 8-20 major stats.
This is not entirely true, but in general an RPG invites the player to build character by directly interacting with the stats, where in a QBN the player does stuff and the qualities reflect and reinforce character building and behavior obliquely. From what I’ve seen of Disco Elysium, it seems there’s some QBN-type of engine happening under the graphical-adventure navigation.
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Wow, this post gained a lot more traction than I thought in half a day…
I think Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead technically works this way. It’s based on a tilemap, but there is an action log displayed, and many things are just a bit of fancy UI over a parser interface (e.g. press “e” to eat, the item menu plops up, and you press the number of the item you want to eat, could just as easily be “eat strawberry”)
So skill trees are the crossing point for you? And your first point makes practically all Choice of Games games part RPG, interesting.
Which way? I guess you mean RPGs are a subset of IF, right?
The one thing I think LLMs could be great for in 10 years with more maturity is something like an AI DM: Essentially AI Dungeon, but good. With enough guardrails and enforcement of consistent logic, it should be doable.
Basically. But as there is no defined agreed-upon ideal of a narrative game, I’m just asking for personal opinions because I’m curious.
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Correct. 
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Taxons are useful for some purposes, but dangerous to rely on. I have witnessed (and argued in) many discussions over the years about this and other similar issues. They all end up rowing upstream, trying to apply scientific rigour to a discipline (experiential gaming) that bravely resists all efforts to be partitioned into neat boxes. As it should be.
One of the problems is that the terms of discourse mean different things deepending on the context. Some have always argued that RPG is any game where a player assumes a role in a fictional setting and acts according to a pre-defined set of rules conditioned by such role. This applies to practically to all games, so it’s not very useful.
The term RPG is usually meant in a much more restrictive setting: a game where the player’s avatar/s evolve (based on abilities, attributes, capabilities or other quantifiable metrics) through experience in some way. This is still fairly wide, but applies to what others call “CRPGs”. More nuanced restrictions in meaning come into play: whether action is an integral part of the gameplay, whether typical tropes of the perceived genre apply. Everyone assumes that their conceptualization of the term applies to others. Hijinks ensue.
@VictorGijsbers had an interesting point: that IF and RPG are orthogonal categories and there are examples in each of the four quadrants. I think I’m open to subscribing to this rather than to the view that either of them includes the other or that both labels describe categories on the same conceptual plane. I think this is an idea that should be explored.
And yes, Disco Elysium is definitely IF. It is so many other things as well that it would be easier to describe what it isn’t. And like Harry du Bois, I’ll drink to that.
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I had to look up “Taxon”. I think you are right. I find it interesting that often games which mix genres are more successful than others. Sometimes these creations found a new complete genre. Sometimes not.
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This, unfortunately, it something LLMs are incapable of on a fundamental level. If you make something that has an actual world model to work from, it’s something fundamentally different from an LLM.
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I wonder if a series of LLMs could achieve what Tarek mentioned; guardrail LLMs, basically. Afterall, we are just piles of organ meat… but a symphony of meat. Could a network of LLMs with specific task prompts create an intelligent symphony?
Unfortunately, not really. Again, LLMs fundamentally cannot have a consistent world model or knowledge store. It’s why “hallucinations” are a problem that can never be solved except by using a fundamentally different architecture.
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I’m not talking about 100% accuracy, but there’s not even a way to determine a consensus among multiple LLMs?
The problem is that an LLM doesn’t truly “know” anything except which sequences of words are most likely. Sometimes that correlates with factual accuracy but often it does not—for example, it knows that people usually respond to “what’s your phone number” with ten digits, but it has no idea that those ten digits actually have a meaning to them, so (before OpenAI put a specific guardrail in place around that specific prompt) it would just make up random phone numbers.
You need something fundamentally different if you want it to have some sort of knowledge about the world beyond probabilities of word sequences.
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That’s how I understand LLMs as well. I just see them as a gear in a machine and if you put enough of them in the right places, they can become more than the sum of their parts… but I tend to favour a sledge hammer over that of a scalpel. 
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Yeah… RPGs are such a blanket term that I think it’s better to identify the beginning and end of the “zone” of what constitutes an RPG.
Choice of Games is exactly what I thought about too, actually. Those games start with the foundational elements of an RPG (stats that reflect a measurable thing) that affect possible actions (algorithms for success/failure). Computer games that mirrored D&D mechanics adopted the RPG moniker, from my understanding, to draw that audience over originally.
We can get very philosophical and talk about the spirit of it… or we can identify what’s been accepted culturally in videogames. Role vs. Roll, basically. I think it’s useful to decide which aspect you want to explore. I’ve picked the Roll lane, obviously.
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I think the core of RPGs is that you can choose your player character. Either with only some stats (attributes) you can pick or by choosing a character class.
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A QBN is basically an RPG on steroids, perhaps having hundreds or even thousands of stats - or more specifically qualities - that are more bewildering and freeform to keep track of as opposed to formal RPGs which may have 8-20 major stats.
Interesting. I hadn’t heard that term before.
Digging up this blog post from Alexis Kennedy, who coined the term, I get the impression that QBNs/resource narratives don’t strictly need to affect the text of the game?
eg. I assume they mention XCOM because it’s kind of a story of “the bases I built, the soldiers I lost and recruited, and the missions I was assigned/chose” — even though AFAIK the core story text (briefings/cutscenes) doesn’t change based on those things.
Is that right?
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“The line between IF and text-based RPGs”
What line?
Beyond Zork
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