/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10858029
>How so?
Sorry for previous brevity, thread was precariously perched near page 10.
The tactical combat is the only element that is specific to only RPGs and Tactical Wargames. Virtually everything else about an RPG is a more generic feature and you only get "RPGness" out of them when you combine these generic traits in a particular way.
>top-down world
Top-down is one of the two main options for simple 2D perspectives. You have a top view or side view. Games will overwhelmingly pick one or the other.
>navigateable
A feature common to action games by the 90s. You couldn't replay levels in SMB3 but there was a navigable world map. By SMW, levels were meant to be replayed to find hidden exits.
>with towns
Which Zelda 1 does not have and ALTTP barely has.
>a consistent "setting" to that world
Almost all videogames had settings once tech advanced enough to depict them. Mushroom kingdom, for example. These settings often lack verisimilitude, but then so does Zelda's.
>dungeoning
Reasonable to suggest, the problem is that videogame concepts of "levels" are basically almost the same as a "dungeon." Videogames started off with "stages" and "boards" which pretty quickly evolved into "levels," as technology made it more feasible to implement coherent and discrete chunks of gameplay in areas larger than a single screen.
However, Wargames do NOT have dungeoning (as an essential). The presence of dungeoning is a key distinguishing feature between an RPG and a Wargame, but not between RPG and other genres.
> sim mechanics to world
Tricky because it's really a somewhat specific kind of simulation that makes for an RPG. A hypothetical fully realistic simulation videogame is not necessarily an RPG.
>(got added over time)
As most of these features did, to non-RPG genres. The only thing that wasn't widely adopted was the wargame-style combat model and its associated stat system.