No doubt. One can't scoff at 80 hours of solid gameplay. Imagine Skyrim with Diablo style loot system and character progression, though. Don't give the player the ability to craft BIS shit, introduce sets and other epic lewtz and give the player some interesting skills that require "hard to make" choices. Boom! You got yourself a mother****ing game. Introduce DLC expansions with higher level caps, better gear, some stupid new quests and keep printing that money.

I logged over 60 hours in Fallout 3, over 90 in Fallout: NV and over 167 hours in Skyrim. I do everything slowly and savor it.

I can't get enough.

Here take my money..oh wait it doesn't exist. :(

People play for different reasons. While I've played all the TES games (excluding Skyrim, which I recently purchased...) I've always preferred BioWare-style RPGs because, to me, they're like novels in video game form. Cinematic, great scores, moving character moments. It's less about combat mechanics and loot, although they are still a key part of things. It's like being part of something, part of a story. Whereas Bethesda games aren't like that at all. Generally for me it's "tedious time sink" where other folks see gameplay, and I never really feel like I'm a character, the hero, rather just more of a guy sitting at a chair at home trying to raise my avatar's stats by angling my character in a corner of the mage guild basement while I tape my spacebar down to raise an athletic skill while I sleep (I literally did this in Morrowind LMAO). It's a grind.

Different strokes for different folks. :shrug:

That's the world we live in. It's like 15 million people watching American Idol while 400 thousand watch The Wire. I happen to think The Wire is a far better thing to watch, but I'm in the minority.

I've always found plenty of story in the Bethesda games. There's just so much.

In contrast, the more narrowly defined RPGs don't hold my interest as much.

In the end I'm more interested in the story of the world around me than my story. I'm just the guy who happens to come along and save it.

After I discovered Fallout for the first time I spent hours going on the wiki and reading backstory about the world. Holy SHIT.

My 300 hours in Baldur's Gate 2 scoffs at your 80 hours of solid gameplay!

Technology has killed that aspect of gaming (I would say consoles, but it's the same on PC now). I used to think of a long game as something that takes me months to play. Then I look online and see kids complaining that ME2 was too long because it took them 40 hours to finish.

Ironically I recently loaded Baldur's Gate and I swear the first hour of the game, in 2013, was just as fun for me now as it was 15 years ago, for all the tiny 2D graphics, and crappy 4:3 cinematics that look like postage stamps on my monitor. There's still a feeling in that game of big things happening. It's hard to explain, but it's lacking in a lot of today's games.

I love Diablo style romps, Skyrims system of endless quests and Bioware namely the Mass Effect series..Love em' all.

Well, yeah... BioWare is king. BioWare know how to write some truly gripping stuff. They make you play for the story and make everything else secondary. Bethesda make the story secondary and focus on creating an open world. I get it. It's awesome in its own right. If you're going to give me an open world, however, give me a reason to keep exploring it. Give me some unique, epic items in dangerous places, make me work for them. Don't make me peak half way through the experience and get bored with it. :cuss:

Did you ever play either of the original Fallout games? Fallout 2 in particular was just an amazing game that's still playable to this day. Fallout 3 (which I did play, start to finish) felt pretty much like Oblivion with guns in a desert. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but it was a shadow of what came before.

I can't get over that isometric view, personally.

Just completely takes me out of the experience.

Nope. Like I said, isometric = meh.

That was the irony back when DA2 was out and people were complaining about the caves being reused. People who in the same thread would talk about how awesome Oblivion was. And I'm thinking, "wait, what? every environment, every freaking thing, in that entire game is recycled..."

I hear it's better in Skyrim but randomly generated dungeons that all pretty much looked the same with the same level-based enemies popping up everywhere eventually got old for me. I don't think I ever even finished half the main storyline in Oblivion before I got bored and went on to something else (probably lord of the rings online at that point - nothing kills SP gaming like MMOs - i'm in SWTOR right now, with 27 other games on my harddrive at the moment...)

You owe it to yourself to check out Drox Operative man, If you like Diablo style games and space...It's really something, plus these people need your money. $19.95 plus the xpac will be out soon....

http://www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/Overview.html

Ah. Well, it's what I was playing in my late teens and early 20s, so it was never a thing.

I'm actually really looking forward to several isometric games coming out in the next two years, all kickstarter funded - Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera and Project Eternity.

Dang, that looks interesting. I'll get it as soon as I get bored with Borderlands 2.

We don't get bored with Borderlands 2, something else catches our eye and then we come back later to it. ;)

Also when you start playing Drox, there is so much stuff it's almost overwhelming. It really is a lot of fun plus you can put it down and pick it up easy. It creates a random universe for each game and you can give up on a universe and start a new one with all your ship/components/upgrades/level anytime. Oh and there is also a free demo available from the website to check it out before you buy it.