DiscoGobbo

My ideal RPG already came out in 2000/2001. It was called Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and its expansion Throne of Bhaal.

• Epic Story
• Memorable characters and one of the best video game villains ever put to pixels.
• Large world with many side quests.
• Engaging and challenging combat.
• Loot and the acquiring thereof.
• Graphics that have aged gracefully.
• No stilted or overbearing morality system. (Full Disclosure: Yes, you gamed the shit out of what was there.)
• You must gather your party before venturing forth.

I'm still waiting for a contender for the throne but given the direction of the video game industry and the state of the RPG genre, I'm not holding my breath. Dragon Age:Origins came close, but didn't quite cut it.

@Beaudacious said:

To me SWG was never a game, it was Second Life: Star Wars edition.

Pretty much this.

SWG had phenomenal community and social aspects as well as a crafting system that had more depth than any other MMO besides EVE. What summarizes SWG's good points for me is this: My roommate and I played a ton of the game after launch, though he played a lot more than I did. After dicking around with different classes I eventually settled on mastering Rifleman. When I mentioned getting a set of the best rifle in the game he said "I know a guy, makes the best stuff at the best prices. Here's the coords to his shop." Sure enough, this crafter had top quality gear. The fact that you were able to "know a guy" that could hook you up places SWG's crafting far above all other games (EVE aside).

Playing the actual game, however, wasn't that fun. Many features were missing at launch, like landspeeders. In a Star Wars game. The planets, while well done in specific towns and iconic places from the movies/expanded universe, were a mess of seemingly procedurally generated terrain out in the wilderness. Unattractive, nonsensical and worst of all: empty and boring. Everyone was a creature handler with a pair of Not-Rancors following them around. Or a couple AT-STs. Walking through populated hubs became an absurd test of your PC's ability to render everyone's pets. God help you if a fight broke out.

Other posts have mentioned exploiting Kryat dragons and such. Exploiting the gameplay felt like the rule, not the exception because the gameplay was busted. Hell, we leveled our characters with ingame macro loops while going to class because leveling advance combat classes in SWG was god-awful tedium.

So yeah...I'm not upset that Bioware is cribbing heavily from the WoW formula in terms of gameplay. The formula is familiar, and a little tired, but at least its fun.

@BBQBram: My pleasure!

This is one of the few games where I sat there and thought about it after completion, instead of the typical: "Well that was fun." One can only hope in the future we'll get games with narrative (and not just story) more often than a few times a year.

2) It was raining heavily during the chase, and all that water has to go somewhere. So yes, the writers did that to make it more dramatic.

Also, for the last couple hours you've been dealing with arson cases, with many dead, burnt bodies. The final suspect was a flamethrower handler. The big secret from the characters time in WWII is when they burned a civilian hospital. Veterans were having their American Dream literally go up in flames. In the last level of the game you're surrounded and ultimately killed by the thing that's supposed to save us from fire: water.

They played the Cole and Elsa affair very subtly out of homage to the Noir films that inspired the game. In the 40s sex and/or infidelity in movies was implied, or at best occurred during obvious camera pans and music swells to a shot of an open window with curtains billowing in the wind. The moment where Elsa wordlessly lets Cole into her apartment is when you're supposed to realize that he's been going back to that club for a less than noble reason. Up until then, it's supposed to be vague to allow you to read into it and question Cole's supposed moral superiority.