Also - you can fuck up. Oblivion and Skyrim are so weakly written that basically none of the factions have any flexibility in who can die (and when a quest wants someone to die, there aren’t always other options). Morrowind can handle if you decide you want to off Uncle Crassius for trying to put the moves on you.

That’s something that’s missing from the Bethesda Fallouts. I guess 3 will let you kill Three Dog but that’s kind of it. There are very rarely choices or consequences.

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 5 points 22 hours ago

I like the scroll that makes you jump really high. That made me laugh so hard I thought my spleen would explode.

All open world games face the challenge of building a world that gives the illusion that it's real, and will continue to tick over regardless of what the player does. Little things like the falling wizard in Morrowind stick out to me as things that made the world feel immersively real.

I'm playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 at the moment, and something I've been enjoying is how the world feels like a real world, where I feel a sort of "fear of missing out" when I am playing dice at a tavern and only able to overhear snippets of an interesting conversation a couple of tables over. It makes the world feel like it's really alive, and not just a set of actors on a stage (even though that's definitely what it is). Illusory depth, used skillfully, is pretty powerful. It's cool to reflect on the ways in which this game is similar to other open world RPGs that came before it.

I agree that the lack of killability of many Bethesda NPCs makes the world feel dead. My late best friend said that one of the highlights of New Vegas for him was being able to kill basically the first Caesar's Legion person you meet: he arrived in the town where people were being crucified and went "oh hell no" and killed the edgy Rome cosplayers. He especially loved the fact that they sent assassins after him for the rest of the game.