Crosmando: Does it contain all the lore rapes from the movie, such as the Dunlendings not being in the battle, or Haldir appearing with an army of Elves before the battle?

Elmofongo: (Slightly off topic)

Its times like this I wish most MMOs are single player RPGs, I really wnt to explore the world like Middle Earth, Azeroth/Outland, Norrath, and SWTOR's worlds.

Excluding Elder Scrolls and Gothic (and yes Ultima 6 and 7) why are their so few Single Player RPGs with Open World Sandbox?

Crosmando: Money I guess? Most companies look at the billions WoW has made and chase that money. Command & Conquer 1 ended up selling 10 million copies, and countless RTS games during the 90's chased that money, same goes for Doom and FPS games.

World of Warcraft was like that, but on a completely different scale, it proved that you could make a game that you didn't just have to sell once, but could keep selling every month. Everyone looked at the money Blizzard made with green-eyes and tried to get some of the MMO pie (almost all failed of course).

I imagine most publishers look at open-world single-player RPG's and think of it as a waste, why bother making a huge world for only single-player. Too expensive and too risky.

I think there's some hope in mid-budget indie games though, Age of Decadence, Wasteland 2, and Project Eternity (I think) all promised to be open-world cRPGs.

Crosmando: Oh, "seamless", you mean what I call a continuous world. No in that case modern TES games are the only ones doing it.

The issue is the huge expense of making a hand-crafted continuous world in high-definition 3D graphics, unless they use procedural content like Arena/Daggerfall.

I don't like those type of games mostly because they throw the baby out of the bathwater, the great advantage of computer games is abstraction. Even Ultima had this, on the travel map each "town" is represented by a "house", once you go inside it opens another map. Same concept in Fallout/BG too. Instead of actually creating a complete continuous world, which would be beyond the resources of any developer, they "fake" it by making town maps connecting by a travel map + random encounters + the imagination of the audience fills in the blanks.

Towns in RPG's, imo, were never meant to be accurate reconstructions of the real thing, they were meant to be abstract representations.

Elmofongo: Excluding Elder Scrolls and Gothic (and yes Ultima 6 and 7) why are their so few Single Player RPGs with Open World Sandbox?

Fenixp: Two Worlds games. Far Cry 3 if you'd really, really want to consider it an RPG (which it is not). Fallout 3 + New Vegas, obviously. Divine Divinity - and probably the second game as well, but I have not really played that.

Oh right, the Risen series