Are you done defeating straw men? Nobody asks for a game that has a response for absolutely everything you could ever want to do, the only thing people want is a game where when you join the fighters guild and someone goes "Your first task is to beat up an old woman, someone is paying to have it done, so don't ask questions" you can say "Sorry, I'm an honorable nord fighter, not a thug for hire", and the quest giver goes "Alright, you get no pay though" and moves on to the next quest.

Double post removed. Sorry.

I didn't play FONV but I can quote a lot of ppl who said it's nowhere as open world as Skyrim and that is my whole point.

Scripted/linear = Every choice has an impact. The game roleplays for you.
Open world = you have to roleplay. If you can't, then live with it.

Pretty much.

The problem is you do not seem to understand what an RPG is.You have much more of a choice than you do in ANY Final Fantasy game, yet somehow that is still more of an RPG? Haha.

I will enjoy this game series even more when we get a deeper RPG experience.

Is Skyrim a role-playing game?

Let's see... It's a game where you play a role. Seems like it to me.

Wow. Some people.

Yea yea, it ain't punk rock till the punk rockers say it's punk rock.

Stop getting hung up on your definition of RPG, what people are talking about is lack of choice and consequence as pertaining to quests. You're not making any convincing argument about why the game is better off without more elaborate quest writing by mincing words.

It's doing a pretty good job of scratching my RPG itch. I'd say yes.

Conflict defines you it is a great way to show who really are that's why when my options are how to kill people or do nothing about it i am disappointed
why do i HAVE to befriend a dragon it made me killing Parthenax extremely hypocritical(so i didn't) if i wanted to go total war on the storm cloaks i couldn't (cant sabotage, and it wouldn't matter any way food being less useful health potion it is) i want to be able to try for high king i wanted to call out Ulfric for one on one battle to save his troops I wanted to get more out of saving the world (even if just to reject it) I wanted to arrest Ulfric too or at least try to.
I want to everything i want like they said i could and yes that is unreasonable but so is having an alternative universe on a magical box made out of sand and lighting.
still would like to note it is an rpg but my options being limited on the personality and morality department really made me sad.

A lot of what people call role playing on these forums seems to be the opposite to me. Content grinding would be more accurate. But I don't know how you play, so it's a general observation, not pointed at you.

To respond to your post:

Open world = the game ignores you, but you role play anyway. Most of the role playing involves pretending the game doesn't ignore you.

Slightly less open world = the game responds to your role playing, creating different situations based on your choices, acknowledging you.

Some people argue that RP requires an interaction of at least 2 entities (otherwise you can bypass the game altogether and just RP in your head).

I do not understand your response. I do not need to establish an argument, Skyrim is in fact an RPG. I understand people are complaining about "choice" however as I have stated previously Skyrim has leaps and bounds more choice than any of the FF games (mentioned previously).
Choice, or lack of, does not make a game an RPG.

Minus pen and paper stuff, I started on RPGs with Ultima 6 and 7. Arguably Ultima 7 is the grandaddy of something like Skyrim, it's the first game I remember where you had a big, open world to explore and they removed any kind of menu-based interaction with the world, you just had a paper doll and used objects in the world.

Even back then, which was 1995 or something, there were alot of people saying "is this really an RPG", and actually complaining about the loss of menus from Ultima 6.

The answer, yes, it is. So is Skyrim, sorry you don't like it.

Bingo. Luckily i got into Beth's games at Fallout 3, so an open world dungeon crawler with free(-ish) character is what i expected

Skyrim is an RPG. Yes.
Skyrim has uncharacteristically few choices you are allowed to make about the alignment and morals of your character when compared to the bulk of successful other titles in this Genre that released in the last few years.
People who want to see the game acknowledge WHO you are as much as it acknowledges WHAT you are are not wrong and don't understand roleplaying.

"It ain't punk rock till the punk rockers say it's punk rock" means "It's hypocritical to act as though you get to decide what defines people as part of a group that has no clear laws of membership" You say you are a true roleplayer, and that other people are not true roleplayers, but in reality, what people define as roleplaying differs from one person to the next, a lot of people have disagreements about what it means, and because of that acting as though you can claim the lable and other people can't is just silly.

I mean, if we want to get into the really obscure depths of the roleplay debate, as it applies to pen and paper games you can get an endless debate on whether roleplaying means that you find an in character reason why your character does what is most advantageos to the game, or if you are beholden to do only what you think your character would do, even if its a detriment to the game. Let alone between those two main schools of thought you'd instantly have a huge disagreement on what roleplaying means, and that's not even accounting for all the combinations of the two, or the always much beloved "I want to be a dike to people, then claim I had no choice because it's what my character would do" player.

Unfortunately we live in a world where developement resources are limited. And by resources I mean processing capability, time and money. Having an open world like Skyrim where players can do an infinite amount of things in any order they want and expect the game to react to everything is unrealistic.

Maybe one day we'll have an open world that reacts to every step you take. Let's just hope the machines that create this world won't put us on sleeping pods to harvest our body heat.

You do notice that 7 isnt the first number yes we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 before that. I hope you didnt dare to say that those games you mentioned predate Final Fantasy.

I sadly got involved with Morrowind and now I want a deeper RPG experience that I know Bethesda can deliver.

I have to ask, when looking over these issues, which RPGs have you played in which all of these took place? Most JRPGs are extremely linear, and have little to no dialog options (it's usually just Press A to continue), have very little, if any, quest branching (again, due to them being linear), and the player has zero input as to the personality of the character they play. Granted, all of your actions have an impact, because those are the only actions you can take. Sure, there are a few exceptions to this rule, like Chrono Trigger, and battles can be very different every play through, like Ogre Battle, but all in all, most JRPG/JSRPGs involve the player fighting battles through an intricately woven story. They do not allow the player to detour off of that path, or go to areas in which the story is not yet ready to send the player. However, what they do well is tell a long and (usually) involved story, have interesting battle systems, and take from 40-100 hours to complete. One of the more recent JRPGs that I enjoyed was Lost Odyssey on the 360, and I still claim Chrono Trigger as the best JRPG with FFTactics as the best JSRPG (though Disgaea is a close second).

Even most CRPGs, like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, keep a fairly straight path for the main story. Where it deviates from the JRPGs is that these can have a huge number of side quests that can be as intricate as the main story itself. I think I spent 30 or more hours in the initial city in BG2, just due to all of the little quests and people to talk to. As for the dialog options and branching quetlines, this is an area in which CRPGs, especially back in the Interplay/Black Isle days, really shined. However, again, very little you did impacted the world in any meaningful way, unless it was part of the main story. Your character was also whomever you made them out to be. There were a few rules (mostly due to alignment and class restrictions), but you could RP your character through your dialog choices and actions.

Looking at MMOs, these have very little, if any, way to impact the game world in any meaningful way. Sure, you might have an NPC that is no longer available to your character, or you might be in Phase 3 of 5 in an area due to a questline, but there is no actual impact. Even SWTOR that touts all sorts of story, your decisions impact the story for a mission or two and then gets forgotten like every other MMO, unless it's part of the overall scripted story. Age of Conan did the same with their class stories, but in the end, those decisions all led to the same outcome. While some of the more modern MMOs have dialog options (CoH:GR, AoC, SWTOR to name a few), most of them have Accept/Decline as their only options. The RP you make for your character is completely up to the player and the people they play with. IMO, I think MMOs are the best avenue for RP due to the variety of setting and number of players playing.

With Skyrim, you have similar issues as above, but you can actually get a decent amount of RP due to how open the world is. I would still consider it an RPG since you play your character, level them up, and play how you see fit. In a way, it's much more open than standard RPGs due to the fact that all of the rails have been removed. It is 100% up to the player to choose which quests they want to accept and in which order they want to do them in. You can play just about any type of character you can think of, within the boundaries of the game, which is quite a bit more than what class-based games allow. Just in the 2 months that the game has been out, I have 7 different characters that all play quite a bit differently. It's all in how you look at it and what you make of it.

Now, that's not to say that Skyrim is a flawless game. Bugs aside, the quests are fairly weak, almost none of your actions are reflected in the world, and even old adventure games (like Quest for Glory) allowed a variety of ways to complete a task. But bad quests does not place Skyrim outside the boundaries of an RPG.

False, lots of quests are shoved down your throat and stuck in your journal. For example the ever popular thieves guild quest, its shoved in your book and you have no choice. What if I wanted to play some pyscho vigilante and wanted to murder the thieves guild, the un modded game gives you no option to either destroy or align yourself against the guild. Now my crazy vigilante has to live out his days knowing the thieves in the sewers can go on being thieves because they are all immortal.

I never thought about how limiting the voice acting makes the game, but you are right. If it were text bases (which I would prefer) they could certainly do much, much more with NPCs and quest lines. But as it stands, this game (and all future games) will be limited as long as there is voice acting. With a good voice simulation, they could get around this by simulating voices, but people would hate on that too.

Morrowind wasn't that much more open either about how you could finish quests, the only thing that made Morrowind clearly superior in that department was the fact that there were a dozen factions and three great houses to join, so you could find one that your characters interests and ethics aligned with, as opposed to being stuck with just 4 factions.

I mean, if you break down the factions in Skyrim by D&D alignment (assuming the good to evil scale is determined by you you help or hurt people when it isn't absolutely necessary, and lawful is how closely you are aligned to the law of the empire) what you'd end up with is something like this:

College of Winterhold: Lawful Neutral
Companions: Chaotic Neutral
Thieves Guild: Neutral Evil
Dark Brotherhood: Chaotic Evil
Legion: Lawful Neutral
Stormcloaks: Chaotic Neutral

There really isn't a single good faction in the game that genuinely tries to help people and make the world a better place. (Yea yea, I know, good guys aren't cool, but seriously, all this dark fantasy misanthropic boohoo is getting annoying, let me be a real hero for once)

Just because it's in your journal it doesn't mean you have to complete them. I have a bunch of quests in my journal that I'll never complete because I don't want to.

That's not the real issue. Bethesda just didn't want to do it. There's more than enough additional space left on discs after their compression method, and Fallout New Vegas managed a lot of branching quests/dialogues, and quest consequences while still being fully voice acted.