What sort of novelty makes an RPG?

In his presentation today Mason talked about how RPGs play with their own language and dialects. I think this helps explain a lot of another blog post, The Assumption of Gamer Knowledge in Undertale: the intent is not to gatekeep people without specific knowledge but to make a new role playing game for people familiar with the genre, and in that sense an exciting new game has to build on existing games. So this got me wondering if there's a sort of "life cycle" of a genre and a way RPGs fit into that.

For example, there might be a parallel between the transition from the military war games to commercial little war games Mason mentioned and the transition from Starcraft and Warcraft to DotA and MOBAs. The two transitions seem extremely similar in that you go from a unit controlling macro view to focusing on a more specific unit (your champion, maybe your Napoleon?). So one genre is sort of born out of another. And it's in that transition period that there's potential for the sort of RPG Mason was talking about.

Today nobody knows or cares about lore in League of Legends. That might be an exaggeration but the whole lore universe was basically deleted and people went on playing like nothing happened. There are probably people who care about it but even then it's very removed from actual gameplay. People started playing klepto Viktor top because it looks fun or strong to play, not because a new story about Viktor and Jayce came out. I think that's because by now we're far enough along in the MOBA life cycle that we don't really need an explanation or justification for how any of it works. As Mason said, it's a platformer, so you know you jump on platforms and die by hitting enemies. In the same way, it's a MOBA, so you know your team tries to destroy the enemy team's ancient or nexus or whatever and kill them in doing so. And it's kind of all figured out. There's still room for refinement of gameplay-people get better all the time, games get better all the time (I wouldn't know, I only play League because it's objectively best, but I think there are other MOBAs that supposedly improve upon it in various ways). But in terms of the premise of the genre everyone knows how it goes.

I also doubt an Undertale clone could be as surprising in the same way that Undertale itself is. What makes it an RPG challenging language is its new presentation and subversion of old concepts: monsters, exp, maybe the player's own position in the story and relative to other characters. So there almost can't be another game like Undertale because it's a transition to the new way of thinking, just as there's a transition from fighting by controlling many units to controlling just one. The latter may not have been as dramatic, but it did require a shift in lore. But once it establishes the new genre the lore fades to the background.

Can you still have an RPG, even if the lore isn't front and center? I don't really think so, because of what Mason said about needing an interaction between the game, lore, and player. When you're a kid and the new Pokemon game comes out you might actually be thinking about it as an abstraction for battling or exploring or something really cool like that, and in that case it's an RPG. But it can also not be an RPG when instead of having those thoughts it's just a mechanical SR does 50% hp because fire/flying is 4x weak to rock. So I'd say once you get all the lore around becoming a Pokemon master and start to focus solely on refining the mechanics of gameplay it ceases to be an RPG.

So this might be a bit vague and out of whack with technical or intuitive definitions of RPGs, but I'd say what's notable about an RPG is how it changes the player's orientation towards the genre. And to do that it has to come at a time of transition, or itself be the transition. I feel like I'm repeating myself in a really vague way because I don't know a lot of concrete examples to draw on, so maybe this isn't really that important to an RPG, but it seems like for the game to be self aware in a way that challenges the player's role it has to do something new with its genre.