Quote Originally Posted by Meneldil View Post
I don't have much time to reply to all the points made earlier, but I think one big difference between the Golden Era-RPG's (late 90's) and nowadays RPG's is the way the world seems to be closed.
That's true of many contemporary RPGs - perhaps especially Bioware ones. But it's not true of others such as Oblivion, Fallout 3 or MMOs such as World of Warcraft.

However, there's a trade off between the vastness of the world and its richness. Morrowind is an example of a fairly modern RPG that's very large and open, but IMO suffered in comparison with Bioware games in terms of the quality of the dialogue, quests, story and NPC characterisation. Personally, I think Bethesda were right to trim the world for Oblivion and introduce a more cinematic main story, but still did not go far enough. I think MMOs also tend to verr too much towards breadth rather than depth, quantity rather than quality.

The interesting case for me will be Star Wars the Old Republic - seeing if Bioware can combine the breadth of an MMO world with the quality of their SP games. In this case, I can totally see that it will take the revenue stream of WoW competitor to make a success of such an ambition.