cerebus23 said:
now days your locked into just different ways to kill your way through most rpgs, use rifles, hand guns, melee weapons, magic, stealth or rambo your way thru and that is basically it.
In Baldur's gate, there were only a couple of fights you would skip without fighting anyhow, also in BGs, loot was important as well. In BG you can't even properly play an evil character, not to mention that choosing e.g. "chaotic evil" before even the actual game begins is imho silly. The diversity I remember wasn't that huge, the choices you had were like a) kill the dragon to escape the underdark b) fetch some eggs from drow city and dragon will let you out, ok in the drow city you had new quest lines etc but this is not different to today's RPGs.
Also, In BG 1 you could even rambo your way through the very last boss, by summoning whole armies & hasting them (that's why they introduced a summon cap on BG II).
Edit: In PS:T however indeed, there were more non-battle choices.
The extra dialogue etc in new games comes with DLC, personally I don't like payable DLC that much, however in order to make a fully voiceovered vast world, developers may need more revenue. I'm with you on that, DLC doesn't really increase the scope of a game and I miss the "hugeness" older rpgs had. Maybe it would be better if instead of DLC modern RPGs were released in episodic format, eg devs would get $$ from chapters 1-3 and they could put allot of work into ch 4-6 using that money.
Without a voiceover requirement however, some new games, like DA, give a toolset and this sort of content can be created by the community. In NWN2 peeps have almost completed a full BG1 remake, which is quite a task. Tons of NWN2 mods do that and while indeed there exist BG mods, to the best of my knowledge these weren't done using a proper toolset supported by Bio and the volume/scope of NWN2 mods is way bigger.
Many old games seem to get a god-like status today, yet they were developed by the same people and gamers abandoned them pretty fast (e.g. BG for NWN). Even some games that were seen as "fillers" till WoW is released seem to be treaded like the bible today.
From my point of view, the other thing I miss from old school games is battles needing their own tactics, resistances, weapons, each mob being special.
And no, I don't hate older games like Baldur's Gate, I had a hell of a time playing them over and over when they were released but new ones are allot better, much like BG has better than Bard's Tale when it was released.
Can't comment on FO2->FO3 transition, have played only a bit of FO2 back in the day and I don't really enjoy post apocalyptic settings, fantasy & sci-fi are closer to my likings
