Fallout’s Forgotten Revolution

Daggerfall was the game in line before Morrowind and it had a lot more freedom, but it was a lot less polished and more glitchy. But there was so much you could do - you could set a teleport spell in the daytime towards a shop, teleport in at night, and rob the shop. That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense that players always want to do in a game like that, and Daggerfall let you do it.

But it was broken at times, dungeons would load broken configurations, and the game wasn't polished with finesse. Morrowind is a much, much more polished and overall satisfying experience than Daggerfall, but it's much more streamlined (though, still immense amounts of freedom compared to a normal game).

There's other games that offer a great deal of freedom - Baldur's Gate and Darklands come to mind. They came after the games market had started to get much bigger, but before the standard became extremely polished. It'll be good if there's a trend back towards more freedom, and eventually someone will get pseudorandom design and encounters right in terms of polish. I've largely moved on from games, but if someone can give a Darklands amount of depth in a game with as many different choices as Fallout 2 and as much polish as a modern game - well, I might have to block out a month at some point to waste a lot of time with it. But, this seems like it's still quite a ways off.

In particular, Ultima IV pioneered the concept of a computer RPG protagonist making ethical choices. Instead of "go kill the bad guy", the game simply tasked you to excel at virtues.

Parts VI and VII were the first games to create a truly immersive RPG world. The non-player characters would have a life of their own: during the day they'd go to work, then enjoy a drink at the pub, and then go home to sleep. Static and inventory objects could be used together in inventive ways -- making bread was the classic example. The plot lines were well-developed and touched upon social issues.

(Ultima VIII and IX were developed in 1994-99, after EA had swallowed Origin. Those games are travesties that are best forgotten.)

There was at least a third one: Arcanum. If anything, Arcanum gave the player even more choices as one of the choices of infinite graduations was the player's navigation between technology and magic, which had consequences throughout the whole game.

Arcanum was also the second game series I've known (after Fallout) where playing "evil" throughout the game was actually possible and not a dead end.

There's a certain novelty to being able to do "anything" in a game world, to be sure, but I much prefer games that offer small pockets of freedom within a strong linear narrative. Mass Effect is perhaps the best example, with its cinematic storyline and rich conversation trees.

Of course that's not surprising: you can't spend too much work and polish for a part of the game that with some luck nobody would ever see.

This is why I personally prefer more streamlined games of late.

PS:T transcended the genre, though.

What all these games (old and new) have in common is that they are often described as unpolished. And they are technically unpolished, because creating the enormous amount of content takes time and resources, and makes playtesting and balancing extremely difficult. On the other hand, the stories and characters of these games are often very polished compared to the the paper-thin stuff in most games. These days, the demand for better graphics gamers have these days makes the equation almost impossible - it is just too expensive to create the contents, lots of it which many gamers won't even see.

Witness the number of reviews that call the graphics of Alpha Protocol poor. Personally I think the graphics are amazing.

My memory is hazy but I thought that the game was only published by Interplay. It was actually designed and developed by Black Isle (most of its former members are now at Obsidian).

There is also a big price for Fallout's complexity and freedom, that isn't mentioned: bugs. Both Fallout 1 & 2 were very buggy. This just isn't acceptable on console games (not to mention that hard drives aren't standard on all consoles), which helps explain the lack of freedom in modern video games.

A few games have embedded Lua or Python for user scripting (i.e. Vampire:Bloodlines used Python for dialoges and quest creation), and a couple of games have started to require having .Net runtime installed... but does anyone know of a core game engine in high level languages, and C/C++ is only used for graphics?

Evil - Kill everyone, get their guns, their bullets, their armor.

Good - Politically resolve situations. Often less/equal money. Requires more diplomatic skills. Potentially less ammo, less guns, less armor. However you can rob everyone blind and still play the good role :)

Its all about creating allies or trade routes or killing the hell out of everyone.