Character builds, branching storylines and spells – what makes the perfect RPG?

In this week's newsletter: Fallout and Baldur's Gate veteran Feargus Urquhart on the hard-to-define genre

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I play a lot of RPGs (when I can make time for them), and have done since I was old enough to read. I was an obsessive reader of fantasy as a small child, an interest that naturally carried over when I started playing games on the SNES, fascinated by the worlds and characters contained in those cartridges. It's an excitingly heterogeneous genre, encompassing everything from Baldur's Gate 3 on the nerdier, D&D-adjacent side of things to Final Fantasy in the ultra-stylish Japanese RPG corner and Mass Effect in the story-driven realm. (And then there's Dragon's Dogma, off on its own island, paying no attention to what any of the rest are doing). There's so much variety that I've often asked myself how to define RPG.

Is an RPG a game where you create your own character and customise their abilities, personalising a build to suit you? A game that you can play in plenty of different ways, like Bethesda's Elder Scrolls? Must it have a non-linear story? Should you have choices about how things play out? There are a multitude of exceptions to any one of these features of role-playing games: sometimes you play your own character, sometimes you're given one to inhabit; sometimes you fight with magic and swords, sometimes with guns and telekinesis; sometimes you take turns carefully planning moves as in a strategy game, sometimes you run in there and mash buttons like you do in an action game. I'm no genre pedant - arguments about whether, say, Zelda counts" as an RPG send me to sleep - but still, it's inconsistent.