Doesn’t the a in “aRPG” stand for “action”, and the genre includes basically anything that’s not a turn based RPG? I’ve never seen it used to refer specifically to isometric games.
Oh, and you should try Transistor. It’s not super heavy on the RPG mechanics, and it’s a bit short, but it’s really good and has that slower paced isometric combat you seem to be looking for.
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When reading the post I thought the A in ARPG stood for American, like how the J in JRPG stands for Japanese.
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Nah, those are called “Western RPGs”. Also, usually the proper abbreviation for a Japanese RPG is jRPG, which is kinda weird, isn’t it. “Japanese” is the only proper noun in there, and written out it’d be more acceptable to say “Japanese role playing game” over “japanese Role Playing Game”. Abbreviations are weird.
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Like two years ago ARPG was still the tag for "Diablo likes" It surprised me to see games like Witcher and Elden Ring be under the tag when I was browsing Steam.
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Weird. That’s never been the terminology in game design circles—at least not the ones I’ve been a part of. I’ve been studying game design for quite a while now, and “aRPG” has always referred to any RPG where you act in real time, as opposed to turn based/ATB. Diablo games & the like have just been called “isometric RPGs”.
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Well if I google "ARPG Games" now I get: -Diablo -Grim Dawn -Path of Exile -Victor Vran -Titan Quest -Wolcen -WH40K Inquisitor Martyr -Warhammer Chaosbane -Torchlight 2 -Wikings Wolves of Midgard As the first top 10 in a list and I know 8th of those are isometric looting games. And it's quite literally a straight up google search with "ARPG games" Wonder what you'll get if it's just my google cookies playing a game on me.
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Nah, mine was pretty similar. Weird. Wonder if it’s some sort of difference in terminology between casual use & “official” use, or something. It’s also possible the places I study game design just didn’t use the term early on.
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Edited by Knavenformed: 7/16/2022 2:30:20 PMI just find it weird since pretty easily searches for arpg get me what I want, but now in Steam I have to jump through hoops to find the genre of games since there's no label for it anymore that excusively fits them if "arpg" is now loosely any real time roleplaying mechanics game. It's a good counterpart to cRPG and it was easy to distinquish between the types back when open world rpg's weren't that big time. And even then "open world RPG" already tells you quite a lot what Witcher, Elder Scrolls, Fallout etc have to offer while Elden Ring already has the "Souls Like" tag with "Open World" tag added. Now aRPG games don't get filtered at all.
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I feel that. Back on the 360 shmups had their own tag, I believe, but on the Xbox one they’re thrown under the umbrella tag of “shooter”. As you can imagine, that includes a wide variety of games, including shmups, twin sticks, FPS, TPS, etc. Now it’s kind of a pain looking for them.