Fallout: New Vegas has the old-school, on rails “level 20 giant radscorpians anywhere you shouldn’t be” and it (literally) kills any sense exploration you might have. It really reminds me as to why not many game companies use that model anymore. Fallout 3 was so amazing to me because once you hit level 2, you could basically wander anywhere across the entire map. Sure, there were some caves/cities that had Yaoi/Death Claws that no level 2 could handle, but the majority of the map was wide open to explore at your leisure. I cannot imagine someone having the same fun (or having any replay value) in these games-on-rails, Cataclysm-style.

…because you talking about the oppressed mages in DA2 just made my brain say, “Help, help! I’m being repressed!”

Then I wanted to go see the violence inherent in the system, and it all went downhill from there. There were knights. They said “Ni!”.

Attempting reboot.

(Semi-off topic: Any decent PC or 360 RPGs out there with _relatively_ modern production values that start you out with the proverbial club and padded armor and roflstomp you if you have the audacity to move more than a few inches from the game start point without levelling up a bit? Or to put it another way — modern RPGs whose levelling mechanics are 180% from Oblivion and its logical successors. I mean, I like DA and all, but I’m feeling the itch for an old school, Dragon Warrior/FF1 type thing.)

It was pretty cool, except that the storylines weren’t predictable, by which I mean just talking with some guy, with little indication of who he was, could trigger the main story line, locking out the others. And so much of the game was about modification of your ships that suddenly you’re stuck with the junk you have and a lot of the fun was lost.

Arguably, the closest I’ve seen to heroes were people playing DAoC who got their fellow Hibernians organised and raiding relics, even though we were the outnumbered underdog realm.