People who disagrees with me should play one of the point and click adventure games of that time made by Sierra. One of the Quest series (Space Quest or King Quest mainly) and THEN tell me that Quest for Glory doesn't feel like those game. With some CRPG element added on on top of that.
Magic in QfG has very particular uses, to solve puzzles in one specific way. As in typical adventure puzzles which they are. Most magic spells are used there only to solve those one or two situations, those concrete puzzles - and that's all they do. They don't serve any other purposes. Just like objects you collect in an adventure game. On the other hand in a typical CRPG spells usually have some more general use. Even if they are used to solve a specific quest(s) in a creative or fun way - it's usually not their only use. If it is, many would considered it a bad design.
So yeah, I stand by my previous statement. QfG is more of an adventure game - in general. But more importantly magic usage in particular falls into "adventure" category. And magic in CRPGs is what we talk about, isn't it?
I think it's complicated.
I agree it does feel like those games, and I am sure there's some overlap between the audiences. These games have classes, and a unique controllable character, and each class have some limited ways to solve puzzles, it does not work like, say, Wasteland, where your entire party of classless characters often have many ways to pass the next obstacle, and along the close line between solving puzzles and advancing your own way Quest for glory balances to the former and Wasteland to the latter. I like both approaches but I can understand how people think the second captures P&P even better, solving mechanical puzzles is a small part of P&P and finding a way to get a key item on the ceiling of the room probably even less. Also P&P feel means creating your party at the beginning of the game to me, it's one of the differences between video RPGs and other video game genres.
However, in the balance, I tend to disagree anyway for multiple reasons, all these points overlap but :
- they're using their point & click interface but adding skills (including non-combat skills), adding combat, adding resource management, that's a lot of things,
- and I think there's nothing RPG about choosing between fire arrows or magic fire arrows, while having more than one way to open doors is specific to RPGs, and this specific example is interesting because many games put only a couple of very basic things like this exact one into their action game and call it a day, and an RPG, while Quest for glory games go so much further than that, with schedules, etc..., it goes very far into the simulation part of RPGs, with letting each class acts the way of its class like in a PnP table
- The problem with games such as Morrowind, like people said, is that there's no problem to solve and a good part of what you do with spells is bypassing fights and flying above water, if it's just a physics engine and deal with it then I really think that the challenge linked to the use of magic to solve stuff can quickly disappear, I really think it's more satisfying in Quest for glory
- I think that typing commands with verbs (or, arguably to a lesser extent since you can propose less things, using a skill and interacting with the environment) like in Space Quest actually captures the part about chatting with a DM more than many other things such as picking options from lists during dialogs with NPCs for example. Chatting with a DM is not only and very not only about dialogs with NPCs, directly choosing your verb (for example directly a skill) and a target, either with a parser or with a Point & Click interface, and the game answering to that is a better representation.
To summarize theres's no party but if we agree that games like Underrail are legit RPGs too then I don't see any problem for this game to be too.
