Worded in a less cynical way, this is pretty much what fans want, or rather, have played if they played Bethesda's past games. I loved Fallout 3 and Morrowind, but there are very few things you can do that will have a lasting effect on the world. And some of those choices, such as blowing up Megaton, were there for the sole purpose of saying the game features such a big choice, and there were only a small number of consequences resulting from it. And I'm fine with that. I play Bethesda games to explore, and to enjoy the modest RPG elements, such as collecting loot, earning experience and doing quests. It's a unique combination, as most "pure" RPGs don't give you nearly as detailed, large and, most importantly, open world as Bethesda does, and most games that do are rarely RPGs (such as Just Cause 2). You're criticizing Skyrim by taking it's main feature, exploration, and making that seem less attractive than it really is ("steering a puppet through a sandbox" vs "exploring a large, hand-crafted open world"). If you don't like it, that's fine, but if you keep expecting things from Bethesda they've never seemed to care about implementing in their previous games, you'll keep being disappointed and you'll keep finding reasons to not like them for not doing things you shouldn't have expected them to do.
Funnily enough, they did seem to implement things in their previous games, such as providing a main character with a past, with traits, talents and disabilities. And they also did implement effects on the world - e.g. in Morrowind, where you stood in terms of the Thieves' and the Fighters' guild made quite a difference, as depending on which quests you took on when, the two guilds could give you conflicting goals. They could have introduced even more severe repercussions, as some conflicting goals did not have major consequences, such as when you stole from the Mages Guild or were supposed to steal from one Mage for another, but there were conflicts nonetheless. And there was the chance to kill Vivec and complete the main quest nonetheless - just as some counterexamples concerning the world. As for the character, you had to make choices right at the beginning what his fortes were and what his underdeveloped areas would be, in the form of birthsigns signifying the influence of fate, and in the form of classes, signifying upbringing and educating. Yet people yell "They limit freedom". I call BS on that. They limit the freedom to be a mannequin and force you to think about who and what that person is. Tell you what, there's people in P&P games who write pages upon pages about the history of their character before the first session even starts - because it's important to think about who your character is as a person.
You speak of "exploring a large, hand-crafted open world", but I say that's not true. In a world, exploring constantly means getting into an observer effect situation. Exploring, finding out, means interacting, means having some effect. In a real world, people will react to your exploring (or "snooping around" as some of them might call it). That's why I call it steering a puppet through a sandbox: The world doesn't behave like a world, more like a diorama. And the puppet you explore it with is stiched together from more and more coarse modules. It doesn't help if there's gazillions of them if they are coarse, and especially if some of them are stitched onto a system that was originally created to work fine without them. Again the contrast is The Witcher, with a system that was designed to combine skill levels and skill trees from the get-go. There's a huge number of ways to dress up Lego figurines, or Playmobil, if someone knows that. Doesn't change the fact that they're still a far cry from a real person, and most importantly, you can plug and play and plug and play without it hurting the figurine in any way that you switch modules on the run.
» Mon Aug 22, 2011 5:42 am 
