The game is not a shooter, according to CD Projekt Red. So your words are in conflict with the developers themselves. It might have shooting combat (which we still don't for sure - it seems likely they'll add or have already added stat-influenced combat of some kind, though still in real-time), but it is not a shooter by nature.
The devs can say what they want, but the game has shooter elements. Even if regarding the game as a shooter overall is mischaracterizing what the game is essentially about, the fact that shooter combat is clearly heavily present means that those portions of the game can rely quite heavily on the player's skill as a shooter, which is the only point I was trying to make by calling the game a shooter.
Uhm... That's categorically false. By all means, you can think that. But you could call literally any game on the planet an RPG if that's the only criteria you need. Is COD's singleplayer campaign an RPG? What about Battlefield? Maybe Mafia III, GTA V, or Red Dead Redemption 2?
It's clear what I, CDPR, and just about anybody else means when they say RPG - on the large scale, anyway. Stats, levels, character-centric gameplay, to some degree. We disagree on when the character should end and the player begins, but we can all mostly say there are a few core tenants of an RPG that are consistent.
Of course I'm hyperbolizing by saying "all."
I should have made this clear: I disagree with the gaming community's definition of an RPG. Defining an RPG by the old trappings of TTRPGs is missing the point imo. It wasn't about stats; it was about story and control. The only part of the focus on stats that I agree with is that the player character(s) had abilities that the player didn't, that needed to be modeled somehow, and that progressed. That was all part of the fun, but I think that while it was a good part that I would like to see in games, it actually isn't a necessary part of all RPGs. There are plenty of TTRPGs that exclude it to a large or even total degree.
That's why no matter how they give you control over numbers like money and damage, GTA, CoD, and Fortnite will never be RPGs. RPGs are, at their core, about interacting with a story in the role of a character, not spectating a story in a premade character's skin. The Witcher 3 actually barely qualified as an RPG to me (although it did).
Why not both? The injury system you mention is very similar to what was already in Cyberpunk 2020. I don't disagree that we should add more layers of complexity in the form of injury systems, or other mechanics that challenge the character (and, mentally, the player). But this doesn't need to be an all or nothing situation.
Yeah, I just meant basically that we should move on from the old trappings of RPGs and recognize them as actually peripheral to the RPG experience. As long as you have fun mechanics by which you get to do stuff as a character, the whole "stat, numbers, equipment" set of qualifications for being an RPG is actually met imo.
