What counts as an action RPG anyway?

Imagine an alignment diagram. On one extreme you have people who consider action RPG to mean purely Diablo-stylee stuff because they grew up playing PC games and needed a phrase that meant "not Ultima". On the other extreme you have people who grew up playing console games and use action RPG to describe things that are more Zelda-like, because they needed a shorthand for "not Final Fantasy". In between are like seven graded variations based on whether you think Dragon Age became an action RPG at some point, and when.

It's messy out there, gang. What's your personal definition of action RPG, and where do you draw the line?

Lauren Morton, Associate Editor: There aren't enough Diablo-likes jostling about to justify having their own roped-off genre so I'm drawing the line at anything that has real-time-with-pause or a tactical pause. Those can be just miscellaneous RPGs: tactical, strategy, turn-based, whatever. Anything without that is an action RPG and I invite no one at all to come up with an exception that confounds this rule.

I guess that sort of makes neither Dragon Age 2 nor Inquisition action RPGs because both have a command menu that pauses combat. So does The Veilguard. And does this make all modern Fallout games not action RPGs because of VATS? Never mind, this is a cruel game, Jody, and I refuse to play it. Path of Exile 2 is definitely an action RPG and the original Baldur's Gate games definitely aren't.

Jake Tucker, Editorial director, PC Gaming Show: If I can dodge-roll it's an action RPG, if I have to pay attention to pages of dialogue it's a regular RPG. In events of a tie, it should be classified based on whether you spend more time reading or rolling.

Lincoln Carpenter, News Writer: There's a simple metric for determining whether something is an action RPG, and it's how many skeletons you can blow up in a minute. Anything less than six: disqualified. Ideally, you want to be able to clear a dozen per minute during normal gameplay—leaves no room for ambiguity.

Bonus points if loot tumbles out in a literal shower of pauldrons, falchions, and gold coins.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: The PITA here is that there are two types of action RPG. ARPGs, which are Diablo-esque isometric games with chunky progression/build systems that nonetheless play out in a very action-oriented way, and action RPGs, which are third-person action games with RPG elements, like God of War 2018, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, etc.

Point being, naming conventions are hell and we all belong here.

Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: Sometimes I need a way to describe RPGs where the story and characters and roleplaying don't matter because they're all about killing monsters and taking their stuff. "Dungeon crawler" was OK when that kind of game didn't leave the dungeon, but when Diablo 2 makes you spend an interminable amount of time in a boring desert it's hard to think of it as a dungeon crawl. For me, action RPG is useful as a way of saying "games like Diablo" because there are a lot of people who love RPGs but don't care at all about "games like Diablo" whether they're Torchlight or Path of Exile or Borderlands.

(Or Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Dungeon Siege, Darkstone, Revenant, Last Epoch, Sacred, Warhammer: Chaosbane, Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr, Victor Vran, Nox, Wolcen, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, or any of the ones I'm forgetting, or any of their multiple sequels. That's enough games to be their own subgenre, Lauren!)

When we start calling, say, Mass Effect an action RPG because the combat was designed by someone who played Gears of War at least one time, it stops being a useful term. Whether you like them or not, the story and characters and roleplaying are the attraction of Mass Effect just like they are for Final Fantasy 16 and The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Calling them action RPGs because they don't have turn-based or traditional RTWP combat doesn't help people who want games about action, because if you just want that you're not going to sit through all those conversations and cutscenes to get them.

I used to be able to dodge-roll this entire conversation by calling action RPGs hack-and-slash games but now people call anything with a sword in it hack-and-slash so that stopped being useful too. (I don't think "ARPG" is a useful distinction from "action RPG" either.) People made fun of Rod Fergusson when he suggested we bring back "Diablo-like" as a term, but he was probably right. If even the Assassin's Creed games are action RPGs, it's a meaningless term.

I will die on this hill, and when I do the rest of you can probably loot a sweet falchion off my corpse.