Morrowind was a game that I can only assume was subject to no formalized testing whatsoever. It's been many years since I played, so I can't give you a bunch of examples, but I can remember one. There was a potion you could get that increased your strength by a certain amount. The potion was cheap, available all over the place (I imagine you could make it yourself, but I never got into that) and. . .stacked. I remember picking up some quest I found, going to the location, and being obliterated. I drank five potions, went back, killed the thing in one hit.

Morrowind is full of that crap.

As to the rest of your message, I agree with you; Morrowind was not nearly as bad as a lot of Western RPGs are about keeping you in a box. That's what initially attracted me to the game, actually. Unfortunately, it still suffered from over-modularization, as all sandbox RPGs (which are typically Western) do. I didn't feel free, I just felt like I had to walk farther to find the small, scattered pockets of disjointed content.



Acknowledged. I want to make clear once again that I don't believe all of my complaints exist in all Western RPGs, just that they're typical of such games. I'm generalizing in a big way, and trying to paint a broad swathe of games with a very narrow brush.

I could swear that the enemies (or at least some of them?) did scale in Morrowind, though. I suppose I'm wrong, as it's been a long time since I've played, but I thought I remembered scaling enemies...



Yeah, and I think that's a positive. There are a lot of things I really like about Morrowind, actually. It dodges a lot of my main complaints about Western RPGs, but it only fulfills about half of what I want in a game. I'll touch on that down below.



So you say. And I say differently. Since I'm not willing to pull out ME and waste 40 hours proving my point, though, I guess I have to concede this point to you. Maybe I couldn't beat it without allocating any stats. *shrug* I am 100% positive that I could beat it by allocating stats in the worst possible manner, however, and have no trouble doing so. I still view that as an illustration of the "your character choices don't matter" point, even if it's not as strong an illustration as "I could do it with no points" would be.



Sure it was; it was just more action game than RPG. As was (I contend) ME1. ME1 just wasn't quite as far gone, that's all. Action games aren't bad (I enjoyed ME2 a lot, actually), they're just not RPGs.



Of the three, I would agree, I tend more towards the Gamist mindset. It really doesn't describe me very well, though. I like a game to have challenge, but that's not why I play. I don't like games that are considered to be very difficult (like Ninja Gaiden, for example). I don't particularly thrive on the sense of accomplishment that comes from finally beating that boss you've been stuck on forever. Or at least, I should say that I don't enjoy that feeling more than I dislike the frustration of playing a boss thirty times in a row.

Continuing from what I talked about earlier, I want basically two things from an RPG.

1) An awesome story. People complain these days about "games turning into movies" or whatever, but I don't mind that at all. So long as the movie is good. I want something exciting, epic, and coherent. When I say coherent, I basically mean "not modular." I actually hate episodic television shows for the same reason. If you can't maintain a continuous storyline, I have a very hard time caring. And I want to care. I want the story to be my reward/motivation for the portions of the game that I play myself.

2) Accomplishment/collection/stats/rewards/whatever. Western RPGs severely limit these things. Western RPGs make me feel trapped, and irrelevant. They dole out the majority of the resources themselves, and I feel like what I'm doing in the game will happen pretty much the same way regardless of what I do. In a JRPG, I can go after the rewards I want, when I want, and use them how I want. Incidentally, this is why I get so sucked in by MMOs. Such games give you lots of the sort of freedom I want. I can play through as normal, or I can spend ten hours farming an instance for that one awesome weapon I want (even if my time would have been better spent doing something else), etc. It's true that MMOs are a little bit lacking in the story department, but the social experience kind of makes up for that.

Anyway, that was off topic. Point is, I don't really view myself as a gamist. I just want to play through an awesome story, be able to go after what I want, and have it make a difference. *shrugs*