Renegade Citizen - Exploration in RPGs

Rob McCrady talks about exploration in RPGs:

Exploration in Role-Playing Games – Why Is It Such a Touchy Subject?

Even though this doesn’t seem like a huge issue for most gamers, there is still a pretty big percentage of them that refuse to consider some video games as being a role-playing games if they don’t include exploration in their design. So why is it such a problem for most of them? Well, it all pretty much has to do with personal preferences for the most part, but it’s also about how most gamers got acquainted with the role-playing genre in this day and age.

Of course, it would be only natural to start from the beginning, specifically from the exact point when role-playing games came into existence, but I’ve already covered this subject in a previous article. Check it out if you want to learn more about the origins of RPGs. No, we are going to first see how the difference in years and trends gives the newer generation of gamers new expectations from this video game genre.

So how does the way gamers learn about the genre effect role-playing games?

Well, everything. It can even show us why so many gamers are fixated on the idea that a game needs to incorporate exploration to be considered a true role-playing video game. After all, they become acquainted with newer games first, so they come to have bigger expectations from future installments. Not to say that older role-playing games from the ’80s and ’90s didn’t focus on exploration. Games like Fallout and Daggerfall basically popularized the concept. It also helped that the developers added plenty of random encounters and entertaining Easter eggs into the mix. [...]