Darpaek wrote...
I've never understood why "story RPGs" and "sandbox RPGs" have come to be viewed as mutually exclusive. I happen to admire the worldcraft in the Elder Scrolls games. I would like to a "story RPG" within a "sandbox RPG" world (I feel the BG's accomplished this pretty well for their time - the FF games do this well, too). Just because Bethesda epic failed doesn't mean anyone else would.
It's a matter of production time and value. To have more of one thing, another has to go by the wayside.
To focus more programming and resources on flashy graphics and sound, gameplay and writing often get pushed aside.
To spend more coding hours and money on bigger, open sandbox worlds, you have to develop the random encounters engine and the scaling codes and all those locations must be rendered and you need to generate tons of short dialogs for all the people you can talk to (if you want some level of immersion and aren't making an absolute wasteland with no people to interact with.) This usually means deeper, more well-written dialog is pushed aside as well as deep, interesting stories.
To have deep dialog options and stories, to be able to have richly detailed and important areas to explore in a very well-connected campaign, often the software development time is pulled away from making bigger areas and endless random people and such.
To have a huge open sandbox world with most semi-important NPCs and up having less shallow, at least partially relevant and not repetitious dialog (anyone else sick of how it seems most NPCs in Bethesda games must have a list of talking points they share?) on top of a deep, involving story that you can sink into AND yet wander around whereever you want - that takes the time spent on developing Oblivion and adds to it the time spent developing Dragon Age, basically - in other words, it is not realistic for a game company to spend the time and money doing it.
That doesn't mean you can't shift between the two. I think Morrowind and Oblivion, to me, were too big, too open, and the "main" storyline was not only forgettable (you could easily ignore it) but forgettable (you could easily lose track of and not remember that you were doing it.) But Fallout 3, a much smaller world map and much more controlled story-line than Oblivion, with better dialog and a more engaging storyline, bridges the gap a bit.
The more you get of story depth and dialog depth the less you can have open sandbox - that's just how things are right now.
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there was a mod that added BG NPCs
