I'm going to ask a lot of rhetorical questions this week. I'm not sure I have the answers for those myself, and I hope that if you do, you are a developer or publisher and the future of our gaming love rests in your hands. I sat down reflecting about the future of RPGs and that brought me to thinking about traditions. From one society to another, human beings have different traditions that they follow. It's the same with games.

Game genres have different traditions to which they cling to. Action games have a simplification of rules and a plethora of weapons at the player's disposal. Real Time strategy games have the different units to command. Adventure games have lush backgrounds, puzzles and slower gameplay. What is the tradition for RPGs? When we say that a CRPG is "traditional", what does it really mean? What feature is in every single CRPG and why?

What is a CRPG?
These questions go to the very core of identifying what really makes a game an RPG. There have been many debates over what really defines the genre, especially these days as more and more cross-genres emerge. An Action-RPG doesn't play the same as a pure RPG, but it's still called an RPG. What is the defining feature that puts this action game over the fence that separates Action games from CRPGs?

It's the statistics. An action game will be a simple action game if the protagonist doesn't have any attributes with numbers attached to them. Some who know the Thief series of games will tell you that there were some RPG elements in those games, but strangely enough they were never categorized as Action RPGs simply because you never had access to your character's stats sheet. Some would argue that Diablo is more of an action game than Thief, still it was called an Action RPG simply because you could click a button and see your character's stats neatly displayed on your screen.

What else?
The story doesn't define a CRPG. We've seen many great adventure games with epic stories fail to have that RPG title attached to it. Then again, many Action-RPGs have very simple stories, told in a very liner and predictable fashion, but they are still called RPGs. It's not the interaction either. Interaction is often limited to a very few specific actions with the surrounding world. Let's not even mention dialogues, even though it seems as if some developers think it's an absolute necessity to put dialogues in a CRPG just to make it seem like they have a story to tell. It all comes back to the stats. Most CRPGs you have ever played had the protagonist's stats sheet somewhere hidden in the interface.

Is that good or bad? What does it really mean? Are we so interested in numbers that we need to see our character's relative strength displayed in numbers to feel secure as players? It might be a question of customizability, but what's stopping the developer to just offer us a set of pre-built character classes from which to chose from? In some CRPGs stats are so useless as to be considered decorative to the interface. But they are still there for some reason. Is that really the defining feature of a CRPG in today's market?

Questions, questions... and more questions
I'm not sure what to make of it all, but one thing's for sure, stats are definitely a tradition in CRPGs. We seem to need them to feel secure. But one thing is troubling (or reassuring depending on which side towards which you tend to lean to). Throughout history traditions have always been changed, or completely forgotten. With that in mind, what then will happen to the "traditional" CRPG? What will be the next evolution of CRPGs in the years to come? Will stats change? Or will they disappear completely? Would we even care if they did? Will the next few generations of players care about stats? Will they even notice if they are gone?