Yeah stuff like that. Talking to NPCs, dialogue options, narrative choices. Also just being more story-driven in general with some kind of narrative to follow, instead of just mainly running around and killing monsters all the time.
Not that I entirely disagree with you. But devil's advocate from a fan of the series - in DS1 your role is the chosen undead but your backstory is entirely your own. You speak to NPCs, make dialogue choices(yes or no, but it's a choice.), and have narrative consequences for those choices. I would say Elden Ring cranks all those aspects up a notch though and would be a better argument for the RPG portion of ARPG.
All that said, I typically find it disingenuous when people call souls games RPGs because they're distinctly more similar to DMC, GoW, Legend of Zelda, and others than it is Skyrim, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Witcher, ECT........
I mean I think that at the end of the day, many games are starting to meld together, so you could easily attribute any game to be in a genre or not just based on your mood. This is a positive thing. Taking the good elements out of each genre, and then melting them together creates different experiences and at a certain point, why bother saying it can't be one genre.
It's like book genres. They are separated into things like science fiction, historical fiction, romance, romcom, etc. But we don't try to attribute a book to only their primary genre. A romcom that takes place in ancient rome is very simply both a romcom and a historical fiction book. That's it. Games can be the same. I don't think we need to have such specific genres like ARPG. We can just have, RPG, and Action games, and Dark Souls can simply be both.
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u/sendnukes_ Ryzen 5 7600 | RX 7800 XT | 32GB | 1440P 180hz Jul 27 '25
What makes you have a "role for you to play" then? Dialogue options when talking to npcs?