Also, there is a story on rails. Whee.
Yes, there are hundreds of those cookie cutter dungeons and there are towns to roam, but the same is also true of panning over Google Maps and nobody is saying that is a deep game.
In skyrim challenging an NPC to a drinking game, passing out and waking in another city having desecrated a temple, a quest opening from this.
In skyrim again, finding an abandoned lighthouse, a mystery as to what happened to the occupants, sadness again upon finding their fate.
In morrowind a quest for the thieves guild, steal an elderscroll, for what reason? That quest was great, well written, engaging. Nothing cookie cutter there.
And of course FO1/2 or Arcanum have great moments like this, and all the games mentioned have their failures, boring and quests, dungeons of limited scope. But the modern Bethsesda games have depth, they may be deeply flawed, grand experiments perhaps doomed by their scale, but dismissing them as shallow seems a mistake.
So what classic RPGs differentiate themselves significantly from this?
In FO3 in particular the cookie-cutter nature isn't so much that everything looks the same, it's that while there might be half a dozen emails to read on terminals in a ruined building, there's barely any context and almost never any resolution.
With a lot of the open world RPGs now we have the illusion of depth in that the scope for exploration is vast, there's a lot of variety in the visuals (because we have lots of memory and storage now), but limited variation in flavour. If we had significant effort invested we wouldn't have stuff like the 'took an arrow to the knee' meme.
Obviously we can't hold everything up to be something which it isn't here. Even Fallout 2, which I count as being one of the best games ever I've played (once they worked out all the bugs anyway), had lots of repetitive wilderness encounters along with all the great special stuff. I think the key differentiator here is that didn't try to give the player a massive world with relatively little content, they gave enough to make you feel like you were exploring, but not enough to make it tedious.
On topic, I'm glad people are putting themselves out there to pitch game ideas to the public. Even if of the half dozen games I've backed on Kickstarter none make it to production I can't say I'll regret having put money into them. I've gotten my money's worth just from the updates which have come out of some of them (particularly Project Eternity and to some extent Clang).
And I compare it to the "Hello Traveler! (Push X to Continue)" diaglouge that 98% of NPC's in SNES games provide, and I'm just shocked that people think those old games had depth.
They spent years writing the surrounding material for Oblivion.
Just because you steam rolled the main story and chose not to explore, to read and experience that world doesn't mean there wasn't depth.
The difference is, in those old SNES games -- there is no depth to experience outside of the linear story. It's the story...and that's it.