The more RPGs try to present moar options, the harder they fail.

Planescape: Torment - so you can do whatever you want, to, right? Make yourself anew, be a hero, be a villain, anything? Well too bad, the game shoehorns you into atooooning for your siiiiiiins. If you don't want to die, this is not the game for you. Like, seriously, there's the whole multiverse out there, and you're one of the most epic dudes that ever walked the planes. Fight immortal vikings! Bang elf chicks! (Bang elf dudes, too, there's no difference.) Kill a god! Kill the Lich Queen, because why not! Storm Carceri and raze it! Mass-produce Swords of the Planes and stop the Blood War! But noooooo, no matter your alignment, no matter your philosophical persuasion, you must choose death or lose the damn game. It's *extremely* preachy, and it goes against all that talk that belief matters; you try to mess with the inevitability of death, you're DAMNED. Because you're MORTAL, geddit, and every other immortal in your party is also so TORMENTED. Now don't get me wrong, PS:T is a great game and must-play for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to writing, visuals, characters, rescuing githyanki and modrons from the scrap heap (IMPOSSIBLE!), but the chassis is bad bad bad.

Fallout 1: find the water chip or lose the game. Again, theoretically, you can be anyone, believe in anything, join any faction you want. But if you do not help those assholes who kicked you out to find them a water chip, all alone, instead of, you know, getting their shit together and migrating outside. you LOSE. Why? The Vault population dying of thirst or dispersing in search for supplies makes the mutant army LESS of a threat.

That single-minded focus makes no sense in any roleplaying game that prides itself on freedom of choice.

Add to this double dis-ingenuity of the so-called choices and consequences (where those choices actually exist; don't even get me started on the ohsodeep LINEAR crap forced on the player under the guise of a TOUGH MORAL DECISION). Interactive media has insanely high preaching potential, unrivaled by any non-interactive media, more powerful that REAL LIFE. Because you don't get to clearly see the consequences elsewhere. But in videogames, it's all clear-cut. You do this, you get a happy ending and a mercedes full of cheerleaders. You do that instead, you get screwed for all eternity. You do not get to speculate on what-ifs, it's all hardcoded. And all that pile of wtf is completely arbitrary, depending on what IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON the devs wanted to teach you, or whatever they felt will bring them the most press buzz. They do not draw those outcomes from even a vaguely realistic distribution.

And then there's the opposite fallacy, where every option is just as valid as the next one. Excuse me here princess, but oppressing your people is not a viable economic strategy IRL. If we're going DEEP, REALISTIC and MATURE, not cartoonish, wish-fulfilling and fanwanky, it shouldn't be the "evil" option, it should be a loser's option. Go for megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement, and the game is exponentially more difficult. Promote quackery, and the brainwashed citizens storm your research lab and you're left with sticks and stones against Prof. Zakharov's orbital nukes.

World-destroyers are a staple of RPGs for a good reason: the world is where you keep all of your stuff, every alignment can agree that stopping one should be top priority. That keeps the plotline manageable. But then the dominant arch-story is "how characters of all stripes are saving the world", not "different things that different characters do". They all do the same, it's kind of the point. And if they don't, Q = programmer man-hours per typical gameplay hours explodes exponentially. That's another reason why I'm not convinced by PE's projected 80-hour epic playthrough length: I'd rather finish [TITLE REDACTED] (not an RPG) in an evening and go through the week reeling from the concentrated AWESOME.

Settings. Tabletop fantasy settings are inherently bad (ask me why). CRPGs have an advantage here in that they can claim simulation of wish-fulfillment and exceptionalism on part of the PCs, but CRPG settings that are directly derived from tabletop are ALSO inherently bad.

TL;DR: RPGs fundamentally suck. A lot of them are fun and entertaining, but the platform does not support serious stories and never will.

(I actually planned to make a coherent post about all this, but I'm two weeks late so here goes.)

"Morrowind"? That's not how you write "Daggerfall".

Joking aside, I never got into Morrowind. I tried multiple times (I think it's five by now), but it always bored me quickly. With Morrowind, Bethesda tried to put a 2.5D game into full 3D, which didn't quite work. With Oblivion, they finally managed to make it work, but at the same time introduce other problems, that were carried over into Skyrim.

Oblivion and Skyrim managed to be fun for quite a while. Morrowind was fun for half and hour. Only Daggerfall managed to be fun for a longer time, even though it's quite a buggy mess.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that TES should have ended with Daggerfall.

emerging narrative is a holy grail in game design. The outcome is one out of two:

1- you go the way of sims / 3079 et al - the result is worlds where the player can do what they wnat but then there is suddenly not any game there any more. It is a sandbox (which some advocate is the right thing, Adams was quoted saying "games are not places to tell stores, but spaces ripe with narrative possibilities", or something in that line). Players then complain that the game has no direction, no coherent story and so on.

2 - the other path is trying to create assets for every single possible outcomes, which soon becomes impossible because a) it costs to much and b) it is impossible to predict every single outcome every single player wants. So we end up with telling set stories again.

They shouldn't have even started on TES and should've kept making those Terminator shooters which kept growing in scale and complexity.

You can and will succeed in unmodded Morrowind no matter what you do. There is no need to game the system. The only thing I'd recommend to a newcomer is to not neglect building up your combat skills. Don't build a purely stealth-based character. It's still very possible to enjoy the game if you do, but you'll have less options since you won't survive in many areas.

Gaming the leveling system in Morrowind is a self-defeating endeavour since it makes the game so easy that it's actually harder to enjoy. You'll get a short-time kick for successfully having tricked the system, but it'll be detrimental forever afterwards.

That said, personally I'm playing with Galsiah's Character Development, a mod that makes skill progression seamless, immersive, and sensible. It totally happens in the background.

The "correct" path is to create assets for whatever outcomes you want and present it as a selling point, separate the character from the player. So if game logic insists on e.g. your character being a pacifist (not presenting violent options), that means you have misunderstood your character and need to work out another interpretation of their personality that is consistent with what you've seen, not that the game is being railroady.

Essentially, if everything that goes against the intention of telling a serious story is taken out of an RPG, we're left with an adventure game. And the good adventures do not have these problems. The agent in Spider and Web is a more-or-less loyal citizen of their country; while playing, you can choose to have or not have faith in humanity, but you don't have the option to defect; you're not playing someone who has defection on the menu. The characters in Resonance are doing what they think is best in every given situation, the fact that you are aware that it leads to catastrophe but cannot prevent it is a theme and a selling point of the game. The [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [NON-DISCLOSURE] [ALSO REDACTED] and it's heartbreakingly awesome.

In an RPG, you can't just play whomever you want; some aspects of the personality are fixed, and the exact way they are fixed while keeping everything other degree of freedom adjustable is bad, bad, bad, preachy, and borderline offensive. Like, idunno, the rules of nWoD that state every vampire on Earth must describe themselves in terms of a very narrow interpretation of Catholic morality. It would have been fine if they just said, "In this game, you're playing a Catholic vampire, deal with it." Or even "in this game, Christianity is true." Openly restricting conceptual space is more honest than making supposedly universally correct declarations about every concept a player might have in mind.
...100%?

I prefer they get old titles that are difficult to acquire instead of newer games that are already available everywhere else.

Morrowind.. Why do people say its good? Its not.. the world is nice.. But the game play sucks.. stealth is nonexistent and its just not fun... its bad not good.. horrible.. boring.. retarded...shitty... I cant tell you enough of how much I hate it.. the worst part is that I bought it 3 fucking times... Once on the pc (retail copy) Once for the Original Xbox and the last on steam.. If you go on the bethsoft forums.. every single person on the TeS section are Morrowind worshipers.. They would even go so far as to call it the fallout 2 of The elder scrolls.. I do not see the resemblance as Fallout 2 was a good game..

You complain that the platform does not support serious story telling, and your example is that the players have to play out the story the writers wrote, instead of being allowed to fulfill their every whim, kill people at random, and have video game sex. I am having trouble seeing how adding any of that stuff would make Torment a more serious story.

I think it's the opposite; the more freedom players are given, the more likely it is that the story of the game will be marginalized so that the players can spend their time messing around; I personally saw that with the GTA series, where very little of my play-time was spent on the story. Which is fun, too, but I don't feel that every game needs to be a sandbox.

Open world games usually tend to have dull and irrelevant stories. Mostly it's either main story is more linear than sidequests, but it's good written, or you have more freedom, but the main plot is boring and irrelevant.

The only game that done this right was Fallout 2. You could piss entirely on the main plot letting all of your townfolks to die painfully, if you wished.

Not complete a main quest but without "Game over" sign message should be possible.

As mentioned by Psyringe, I think the learning-by-doing approach is fine, even if some fine-tuning of the rates at which your skills increase is necessary. I just ended up powerleveling to get the best attribute multipliers - and then wondered why they even built bridges connecting the districts of Vivec when you could easily hop from one to the next... I was way more relaxed about leveling when I used some mod that changed this system (AF leveling or something like that for Oblivion).

The level scaling did not cause high difficulty (as I did train combat-related skills), but a high degree of general silliness. Lowly bandits wearing glass, ebony or daedric armor? The lawless sure are gearing up nowadays! It completely takes away the immersion if everything gets scaled to the player, even quest rewards and main quest stages (hooray for Kvatch with a high lvl char, when all of the supporting guards get slaughtered instantly). Becoming arena champion at lvl1 is another favorite. And later on, 100% damage reflection took care of any problems that might arise. I do feel that balance in vanilla Oblivion is seriously messed up if you do not follow the standard path/level progression.

I don't like overusing the word immersion.

What immersion for christ's sake? The thing that destroys any climax in all Elder Scroll games was the dialogue system. And the fucking "how the person likes you" minigame.

Morrowind did that too though. If you kill a central character before they have fullfilled their role in the main plot, you get a nice short message saying you've screwed everyone's future over, but then you can continue to play as much as you want.

The word has been grossly overused by marketing departments in the last decade, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an important factor for a player's enjoyment of a game.

There are three totally different dialogue systems in the Elder Scrolls series, are you saying that none of them worked for you?

Personally, I liked the one from Morrowing best. It gave me the feeling that I talked to actual people, with their own professions, knowledge, and beliefs. Some players didn't like it because it doesn't spell out actual sentences that the player is saying, you just click on tag words. But I never had a problem with that, I just generated the respective sentences in my head. Oblivion and Skyrim have a much more limited dialogue system, partly because of the restrictions imposed by a "fully voiced" approach.

Yes, but no one ever has called that one immersive. ;) Well, Pete Hines might have, but his trustworthiness has been pretty much destroyed by the way he was trying to sell Oblivion. Such as stating several times "And no, this is not scripted" while showing an obviously scripted video of alleged AI gameplay that was actually impossible to happen in-game. But yep, this minigame was terrible.