RPG vs Adventure

One of the key elements of RPG are exclusive choices in character development. You can't have everything at once, you have to chose how to develop your character, and the choice is usually inhibited by limiting the ammount of development points you can get, or through some other means. If you max out your character in an RPG, it is possible to get a different character than someone else, who too maxed out their character.

Meanwhile in Adventure games like Zelda or Metroid - you don't have to chose and can take anything and everything the game can give you. Maxing out the character in such game leaves you with exact same character every time.










RPG: key point is "Roleplay". You may argue that you play a role in any game - in Pong you play the role of a paddle for example, but that's facetious. The actual meaning of "playing a role" is being able to meaningfully affect that role.

In context of an RPG that means having to make exclusive choices in character development. You can't have everything at once, you have to chose how to develop your character, and the choice is usually inhibited by limiting the amount of development points you can get, or through some other means. If you max out your character in an RPG, it is possible to get a different character than someone else, who too maxed out their character.

Meanwhile in Adventure games like Zelda or Metroid - you don't have to chose and can take anything and everything the game can give you. Maxing out the character in such game leaves you with exact same character every time.

It may seem that Skyrim is an adventure game by that metric, since you can "Legendary" skills for perks and get everything, but there's a caveat - Health/Magicka/Stamina distribution on level up.

So yeah, while Skyrim is very close to being an adventure game, but it does the absolute bare minimum required to be an RPG.