And I agree to it becoming a useless term. Which is part why I disagree that Witcher is 'everything an RPG should be'. It's not. Maybe it's everything a great Open World Action Combat RPG should be. But not what every RPG should be.
I'd argue that the phrase should stop at "Maybe it's everything a great Open World Action game should be," considering the combat is merely a decent way to pad the time between narrative moments and the RPG elements along side the actual roleplaying, e.g. leveling, loot, customization, are either threadbare or just poorly designed. Mechanically,
The Witcher 3 is a mess; however, much like
Skyrim (though in a slightly different fashion), it's a mess that can still be fun. Certainly enough fun to ferry you through its well-crafted narratives.
And like I said earlier, I think we need a different name for the kind of game
The Witcher 3 is. It's not an RPG, and unless people are deliberately trying to spark the ire of "traditional" RPG fans (though, I shouldn't need to call them that, as if roleplaying is some sort of outdated game mechanic for crotchety conservative grandparents), it's not very productive to call it one. It, like many other games these days, is another genre of game with narrative choice added on top. It's done quite well; better than probably any other not-so-RPG I can think of, but that doesn't change the fact that
The Witcher 3 isn't designed like an RPG.
The overt mechanical incarnations of the genre (loot, leveling, skills, economy, etc.) are basic, broken, or otherwise uninspired, the narrative and character premise is designed to be author-driven rather than player-driven, and the necessary architecture for a true RPG simulation is wholly lacking.
The Witcher 3 simply can't be an RPG. The player can bend and divert from the game's drive, but they can never drive themselves. That's not a condemnation of
The Witcher 3. Through it's own drive and its own narrative, the game achieves an emotional weight and a compelling pace that any true RPG could only dream of achieving. I would hope that "it's not an RPG" would stop being seen as some kind of insult. It's not. It's an assessment, and hopefully one that can remain meaningful. Proper roleplaying still seems to be a desirable feature, and it's annoying that the only descriptor for it doesn't necessarily indicate its presence.
What is a condemnation of
The Witcher 3, however, is my belief that it isn't very well designed. Much like the original
Mass Effect (though to a somewhat lesser extent),
The Witcher maintains a number of RPG vestiges that not only seem to make the game more awkward to play but probably detracted from the game's focus as well. For a game that's not much of an RPG, it certainly falls for many of the genre's worst tropes. I didn't need a bunch of +5% skills to scan through, nor the cumbersome and quite limiting level system that frame them. I didn't need a bunch of +3% loot to replace my recently acquired quest rewards, nor the repetitive POI that house them. I didn't need a pointless economy to slog through and ultimately break, nor the awkward fights and races, endless gathering and selling of loot, and annoying item degradation. I would have preferred a tighter game: an action game with slick progression and no BS. Maybe time spent on an excess of activities could have been invested in making the detective mechanics more varied or the boss fights more interesting.
Ultimately though,
The Witcher 3 works as a product. Not because it's mechanics are especially innovative or robust, but because they are accommodating, unobtrusive and standard enough that they do not detract from the game's engrossing atmosphere. I genuinely don't believe it's what
any game should be. Not on the whole. I would hope that more games attempt to have half this game's atmosphere. We need more games with worlds so compelling that they truly deserve to be explored and certainly more games with the narrative competence to actually do the exploring, but from a design standpoint, we, as consumers, should expect better. Not just "good enough given its scale" or "acceptable within its genre" or "fine to progress the story," but holistically designed games with singular, well-realized visions.
