Right now I'm playing Fable 2 on the Xbox. It's such a bittersweet experience for me while I'm playing it. The world is so dead yet looks so alive. It's a feeling that you could do whatever you want to, yet you're so very constricted.
The main town (Bowerstone) that looks like an enormous town from afar, but when you're in it, it has three main roads, a couple of back alleys, a graveyard and a castle.
When I walked around the town my first thoughts were that I could do whatever (almost). But almost immediately I could see the flaws in my previous thinking. There is just so little to actually do! You can kill or marry nearly everyone and buy almost everything. Thats a whole lot if you compare it to alot of other games. I'm not saying that the developers said that you could interact with people in a whole new way and do everything you could think of doing (but with Mr. Molyneux you'll never know). But it's like being a rich kid with all the toys you'll ever want but you were locked up in your house. After a while you would start to see all the fun you could have with your toys if you only had a friend to share the toys with.
I think this is the biggest problem of open world games, you'll always want more! What if you could do whatever you wanted?
I would probably be the biggest wuss in the whole (game)world. Start a family, get a job, get friends. Just do normal everyday stuff. Sound pretty boring when you say it out loud and why not spend the gaming time to do it for real or play The Sims? Well, The Sims is just as hollow as Fable 2, there is always a boarder wich you can't cross (plus, The Sims is boring). And if i grew tired of my real friends and family or job doesn't mean I can kill them or quit without any consequenses for me. Sure, there would sourly be consequences in the game, like cops running out of every corner of town. But death is not a problem in a game! You might lose play time, experience or whatever in a game, but thats no measure to what you'll lose in real life.
I would probably grow tired of my "life in a game"-game kind of fast but I would love to have that option.
After all this I still love Fable 2 and with allot of flaws it's one of my favorite games, every time I start a new character it feels like coming home. But that feeling is a topic for a later post.
 
 
Edit: Self promoting is gone!