Although there were certainly some fascinating characters in Oblivion, most of the NPCs in the world were a little bit more bland than Morrowind's characters and the main quest was not as compelling. Many of the side quests and the Dark Brotherhood questline were epic, memorable and well written quests, however, in part due to Xbox disc size limitations, they were only able to use 14 voice actors for hundreds of fully voiced roles.
In the case of Skyrim, I found the main quest, the major faction questlines, the civil war questline and many out of the hundreds of side quests to be quite well written, brilliantly voiced and much more compelling than previous TES games.
Personally, I enjoyed DA2 quite a bit, logged over 200 hours on the game, and DAO and ME2 are also among my favorites out of the past few years.
You can have a very rigidly structured epic story featuring pre-defined protagonist, with moving cinematic scenes involving companions/party members who play key roles in the story, which is all about the main quest, with some minor deviation in the outcome based on your choices along the way.
You can have a non-linear open world epic story featuring a much more customizable protagonist with perhaps slightly less moving, but still quite compelling scenes involving any out of hundreds NPCs, only a few of which will have any bearing on the main quest.
You know a few details about your backstory - arrested on the border attempting to cross into Skyrim, for example - but the rest is up to you to decide, imagine and let this character's history, racial and economic background, etc., inform the choices you make as you role play, develop relationships with various NPCs and dozens of interesting factions, ultimately progressing from a weakling nobody to Slayer of the World-Eater and Master of the Thu'um.
Either approach can be executed well or executed poorly; however, I imagine it is simply not possible to take both approaches for the same game. Unless -- I've never played MMOs before, but maybe that is along the lines of what Bioware is attempting with TOR, resulting in a budget of probably hundreds of millions of dollars.
Modifié par naughty99, 18 novembre 2011 - 06:07 .