Why modern RPG's fall short of, well, everything.

I have been giving this a lot of thought. I'm probably the biggest RPG-nerd you can envision. RPG's give me something most other games don't, a story, a system and several ways to handle both. The list of RPG's I have played is long and illustrious, but the the RPG's I have completed is considerably shorter with most of the DNF's happening in the last 10 years, with the latest most prominent disasters of all time, the total letdown that Skyrim was, (There I said it.), and the "I have no clue what I want to be so I'm trying to be it all" Kingdoms of Amalur as trumps.

One of the first things that come to mind is that SP-RPG's seem to think they must follow the flow of MMORPG's. Crafting, gathering and going out of your way for some silly ingredient you only need for one weapon that is obsolete the moment you craft it, because shortly thereafter you get a drop that trumps your hard work. Crafting and gathering work in MMO's because you're providing a service to other players and if your shrewd about it, you can get them to overpay you about 20 times the intrensic worth of an item or ingedient. This mechanic is not present in SP-RPG's. There it is just an empty activity designed to stall your progress. In Skyrim, if it had been a mini-game that would become easier as you gain skill, then it would make sense in a way. But your skill only opens up better versions of stuff you won't use. And I won't even get into the pointlessness of crafting and gathering in Kingdoms, because that isn't even skillbased... Tip: Go feablades and forget about everything. Your I-win weapons will see you through and for the rest, common thievery is laughably easy.

Picking locks: No more please. Just stop it. It was awesome in Oblivion, fun in Fallout 3, ho-hum in New Vegas, dreary in Skyrim and downright stupid in Kingdoms. Just return to the skill-check diceroll and be done with it. Am I playing a RPG or a frigging catburglar simulator? Since when does high-fantasy equal a life of petty crime? It's not even functional anymore. There you are, toting a big ass Battlehammer of Buttrape that pwns all, but you whip out your lockpicks to open a rickety wooden door? Get real. Or you have a military 12gauge crowdpleaser and you do the same, without just blasting the lock out of the door? Get real again, and stop placing locks on things that don't deserve them: the rickety wooden door, the weathered chest that has been exposed to the elements for years, an average locker, a goddam frigging window with broken glass in it... Just stop it. A functional use of your lockpicks would be if your ingame loveinterest was abducted, you rescue her and upon the moment of rewardsex it is revieled that the evil boss you rescued her from stuck her in a chastitybelt. You can't very well use your battlehammer or shottie on that lock...

Talking to everyone. Stop that. Really. If it comes to the point where you have to talk to children to be put on questlines or to just some face in the crowd for the same thing then the point of playing a RPG has been overshot. Nice point in case, the first hold you go to in Skyrim. There's not a single person there who can chance his or her underwear without sending you away om something inane. In early RPG's you did the same thing, but you knew that the old lady near the appletree would just mutter something about young folk running around like headless chickens. She wouldn't give you quest that will turn out to give you a deeper understanding of the peril the village is in. Like never. Maybe the shopkeep would ask you to clear out some vermin in his warehouse (the infamous early Squaresoft sidequests), but for the MQs you went to the people that mattered. In the early RPG's you talked to the extras for a cute laugh and basically you only did that in the first village. After that, you stuck to the headliners. Do that now and you lose out on bits and pieces that may, and lately often will, come back to bite you in the ass. Not cool. Consider this, you're dressed to your crown in plate armor and carry enough pointy cuttlery to scare the Mongol Hordes into surrender.., are you really waisting a week in a backwater to mingle with the locals?

Morality... I cringe now when devs flaunt their awesome new morality-system for their new game. New Vegas was the breaking point for me. Talk to face X and be cut out of a quarter of the game? Really? And after nuking a village in Fallout 3, or letting Anders live in Dragon Age II only because my protagonist is in a puppylove relationship with him, 3 points of evil for breaking a lock on a chest belonging to a nun doesn't really phase me anymore in other RPG's. And at the heart of it, the choices are between black and white, all or nothing, with results that in the grand scheme of things don't mean much. Even though I don't consider Bioware to be a worthwhile studio anymore, there was a time when they excelled at it. Knights of the Old Republic still stands as the one RPG that got it right. Though if I have to go absolutely purist here, my ultimate vote goes to Planescape;Torment because all your choices there amounted to zilch just to prove a point. Bioware didn't call it "Torment" because it sounded so cool at the time! XD

I feel that the sandbox idea for RPG's has ran its course. In TES it made sense right up to but not including Skyrim. Because in older TES', you were dropped off somewhere and whatever you wanted to do next was up to you and you'd better get ready to live with the consequences. In Skyrim, you become Dragonborn and are trusted into a series of events you can't turn away from because you are the frigging Dragonborn. In all the other TES', you're just you with a penchant for killing stuff that may, or not may, further the story. In Fallout 3, you can just take off and your father will happily sit in his virtual reality chair being a virtual dog for all eternity. In New Vegas you're just put on a large map but the quests have you going forward in a manner that reeks of linearity. I admire the way it all fits together in New Vegas, but the incentive to go away from the questlines and explore is just not there. Kingdoms of Amalur has it wrong from the start. An open world is not a collection of interconnecting mazes or one-way streets and freedom to be what you want is moot when your choices are made pointless by the inclusion of a set of weapons that make you invincible regardless of class. (Faeblades) What's the point?

I have said that Bethesda might well have ruined RPG's for years to come with Skyrim, but I can't stand by that anymore. Skyrim was just pretty, but it ultimately didn't deliver beyond that. It joined the ranks of RPG's that take forever to finish and offer a bossfight that is just rediculous. Alduin dies in seconds. The saving grace is that you actually have to fight him, otherwise Skyrim would be on par with Fable II. Kingdoms is just ugly as hell, the story is run of the mill and the flaunted lore is Tolkien filtered through a big mazed net but the fighting system was great till my toon found a pair of faeblades. That totally took any difficulty away. Yes, I can of course not use the faeblades, but isn't that self-defeating the point of playing a RPG? You start as a nobody and you train up and get better gear. But at no point should gear give you the upperhand. Kingdoms of Amalur is unbalanced and as the fighting is actually what makes Kingdoms worth playing, I think that's a pretty big deal.

All of this, I realise, is because RPGs have become mainstream. ME2 is a good example of bending knee to the mainstream and ME3 is even blatantly, "hey, this franchise was never really a RPG, we wanted it to be a multiplayer shooter from the start, but we lacked the technology to do it". (Actual Bioware excuse, in one of their developer diaries). I was already raising an eyebrow when the emphasis was put on coloring your armor instead of tinkering with your stats in ME2. Years ago, when people smirked when you said you played Bladur's Gate, RPGs were hard. And not necessarily in the battle-system, but mostly in the stats and your understanding of them. They were hard and rewarding. And that's something modern RPG's definately are not.