On RPGs:
If you are making decisions about where to go, what to specialize towards, etc. in such a way as to feel immersed into that world and into your character, the game can be an role-playing game. Alternatively, even if you feel no personal connection to the character, but the view into the world is altered by their frame of reference as to playing as them rather than merely a them-skinned hand manipulating a gun or them-shaped obfuscation between your camera and whatever you're swinging at, that is a role-playing game. Because role-playing games are about... playing roles that are part and parcel with the world that you view through them and the personal experience of which you can change to some degree by altering or reframing that role.
There is no particular customization menu size after which a game is an RPG (let alone just an RPG) nor before which it must be sub-divided into something else. There is a degree of role-play (either through a self-made role or that of a significantly affecting perspective) that splits the difference, though.
Nitpick, but WoW itself didn't come out into the end of 2004 and didn't become any huge leader in popularity until 2005-2006, which is in the second half of the 2000s. And at least many of the competing MMOs in the remainder of that decade specifically tried to be distinct from WoW as to copy it.
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On Elemental/Many-Categoried Outputs:
Short Version -- They're bloat-enforcing rubbish.
Long Version -- Virtually all systems of elements or similar analytic damage types have been rubbish that requires more buttons for the same gameplay results as were possible without that bloat, generally ultimately simplifying gameplay while reducing the content one has full access to. That said, there are undermechanics that can comprise such types but are more universally interactable that can be of use to gameplay. I've yet to see a game handle "elements" or the like in that way, however, which leaves such system best suited only for commanding multiple units rather than being just one unit among many similarly singularly-controlled units, especially in games capable of smaller group sizes and random matchmaking.
Outside of mechanical error (literally turning slightly faster or hitting harder than intended, etc.), execution ends up as such specifically because of what ideas went into it. Those ideas can be more integral or more overarching, but the only parts worth discussing are ideas. The rest is someone typing in a potency modifier wrong or slipping up somewhere in a coded procedure.
And, in many, many cases, the ideas were bad virtually all the way up, i.e., from the point they could be called the 'spirit' or even 'intent' of the idea that would trickle down into implementation. What replaced it hasn't always been better, but you'd have to remove every trace of what X system was from XIV to go far enough back to redeem the idea of, say, separating elemental from unaspected magic damage or of Fire/Frost/Lightning/Earth/Wind/Water Resistance.



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