Not sure why bring FF4 here, there were many games in the series ;-).

Sorry man, stories in old games were MUCH better, the plots were much longer - i don't even have to go to SNES. Fallout New Vegas is a prime example of how a game can play - on same engine - I believe that last good game from Bethesda was Morrowind. And please, seriously Fallout 3 is supposed to have deep story or dialogue? Compared to fallout 1 or 2 it's a very poor attempt (note. I have finished Fallout 3 and New Vegas).

Also character customization has litte to do with game depth - i could still argue that few Final Fantasy games had way more customization. Hell even bethesda's Daggerfall was way more customizable than Fallout 3 - also Fallouts 3 story is a very small main quest on rails as you have put it. It's really weak compared to New Vegas - I bring this reference multiple times to show you how bad fallout 3 is compared to New Vegas on same engine.

The attitude you present here is precisely the reason why developers want to use kickstarter to fund their games compared to publishers - they have the same worries about how games are.

Also you raised some interesting points: - What's that, an entire kingdom capital has 6 single story buildings and a castle with 10 rooms?

- Most of the NPC's have 1-2 lines of dialogue with NO interaction with the PC?

Agreed, but i fail to see how abundance of dialogue options are supposed to make up for good gameplay? - it is in reality a lot more complicated. Bethesda style sandbox games got really dumbed down - the plenthora of options is really a meaningless facade.

Take mass effect as an example - its a shooter with fairly linear gameplay (although it manages to hide this fact well), but it tells a really really good story - It is not a sandbox game by any means but its really good - because it managed to deliver great experience overall.

This is what old games did really well, they delivered massive gameplay - and this has nothing to do with graphics, choice options - its the experience that counts - and for me personally Fallout 3 was a very poor experience - your story might be different obviously.

Having variable story choices is not the sole part of gameplay. Being a sandbox is not the sole part of gameplay. Having a great combat system is not the sole part of gameplay. Having AAA graphics, having many side missions, having complex locations, having complex characters, having lots of different combat styles, having stealth, having character growth, etc., etc.

Gameplay is made up of all those things and you're taking one tiny part of what makes it up and calling FO3 terrible because you didn't like its gameplay mix. It's without a doubt one of the greatest games of the last 5 years. It's just that you don't like it.

Personally I found NV tediously linear. It's a big loop that you go from start town and follow the road round to the dam. Every part of the main story was 'urgent'. End of exploring. Add to that I never felt any attachment to the courier. To me NV had very few unique large locations and was unfinished. Camp McCarran, Caesar's camp, Forlorn Hope, the casinos and the Nellis AFB all felt characterless and empty, as if they'd meant to put a lot more effort into them but hadn't had time so just filled them with unscripted NPCs. Even Novac needed more character. There were so, so many NPCs that were just nobodies. The arena was a total waste of space, a great concept that hadn't been fleshed out.

Conversely I thought FO3 was amazing, you had to roam all over the map. It felt as if you should set up in certain locations for a while, so you got to know them. Every place was packed with unique NPCs and there were practically no areas just crammed with 'anonymous' NPCs apart from areas you'd actually expect them not to talk to you like the BoS compound. You got a house. There was no constant urgency to follow the main mission until the late stages. I loved it. I like being told a story as I play and having too many choices means the story and characters inevitably become extremely shallow, to me, the NV story was shallow.

So based on two totally different aspects of game play we have two totally different opinions. I still enjoyed NV. It was just very shallow and didn't give me the wasteland survivor vibe that FO3, imo, did so well.

Yes it all boils down to peronal taste. But i would try to restrain myself from statements like "one of best games of last 5 years", because clearly most of "fallout folks" that liked fo1 and 2 just didnt like it - so clearly you are the target audient - I am not. Also, there were a lot more interesting quests in New Vegas - and more side quests in general - maybe you didnt explore the game enough ;-)

Then again nothing beats Vampire:Bloodlines which is one of best examples of how a modern RPG could look like.

And back on original topic - this is what some of kickstarter games are about - made for an audience like me :-)

When I think about depth, I think about things like: finding people to talk to. Side quests. Fleshing out cities and industries. I think about a deep world -- something SNES games almost never gave.

I think about exploration and emergant gameplay, something SNES games almost never gave.

I suppose if your definition of depth is purely story based and can be fulfilled through a linear, one-story-fits-all game, then those SNES games can be deep.

It seems there is a disagreement as to what constitutes depth. If you want a "Sandbox" then most old-school RPGs will feel very shallow. You have numerous choices, but exploration and interaction outside those choices is limited.

On the other hand, if you want control over the story, many sandbox style games will feel shallow. Batman: Arkham City gave you a great sandbox with tons of things to discover and the story was fantastic. But your control over the story was minimal, limited to pretty much whether to do a side mission or not. You had absolutely no choices that affected the core story at all. Infamous 2 was similar. You had a lot of area to explore and interesting side missions, but you had only about 3 real choices and they lead to only 2 endings. The story was deep, the sandbox was wide, but your control was minimal.

I think there are great games on both ends (and in the middle) of this spectrum, but "sandbox depth (or width)" is very different from "story control depth".

There's also a lot of nostalgia based on the options available, and our expectations were much, much less. If we'd been given the option to play both, Fallout 3 would have been considered the more "immersive" experience without question.

The structure of Oblivion/FO3 is this: there are hundreds of cookie cutter dungeons strewn through a landscape. Wander the landscape, entering each cookie cutter dungeon and clearing it mechanically.

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.

Ahh memories. I recal wondering the wasteland in FO3, and coming across a radio distress. Locating its source, a long dead family, feeling...sadness.

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.

"The structure of Oblivion/FO3 is this: there are hundreds of cookie cutter dungeons strewn through a landscape. Wander the landscape, entering each cookie cutter dungeon and clearing it mechanically."

So what classic RPGs differentiate themselves significantly from this?

I guess it's a matter of what you consider a classic and whether you want the same open-world game type. Fallout 1 & 2? Baldur's Gate? Shadowrun from the Sega Genesis (my memory's a little hazy on that one, I just remember it being pretty good :), even the old SSI D&D games weren't terrible at this for their day. When you went somewhere it was for a reason or when you got there there was something interesting to do.

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).

I think about the thousands of "books" and scrolls and story to experience, hours of voiced dialogue and just reams of unvoiced dialogue...

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.

Both of you are being a bit ridiculous here -- the other poster is pretending his opinion on Fallout 3 is objective fact, and you've got a very limited definition of depth.

A game doesn't have to offer narrative choice, or customization, to somehow be "deep". A story on rails can be an amazing game if the way you interact with it deepens your engagement with the story. (I'd say that's very much the case with ChronoTrigger.)

That's fair. I'd still bet that if you counted up the amount of writing and world building that went into Fallout 3 and compared it to any SNES RPG, you'd find dramatically more "worldbuilding" and "depth" in Fallout 3, but I don't have data to back that idea up, so it is what it is.