I'd like to see the following in forthcoming RPGs:
A more genuinely interactive system of dialog. As it is now, dialog trees are for the most part condescendingly black or white, KotoR being the most notable recent example. The "choices" exist only to provide a trigger for alignment flags: 1) I will get those flowers for you, little yellow pixie. 2) Die now, stupid pixie vermin! -That kind of thing. I'd like to see more of the path choices that are present in the Fallout/Arcanum titles and the Thieves Guild/Bodhi example of BG2, as well as dialog that moves you into learning different skill sets, or into joining different guilds and social orders.
It might be nice to see emotion's effect, too, in dialog trees. One of the few things Lionheart did well was displaying a symbol alongside a multiple choice dialog option that reflected the influence of a skill your PC knew. But that doesn't include a method of gauging the NPC's emotions, and for that, we probably need to instititue a system similar to that Chris Crawford proposed a decade-and-a-half ago: mixed dialog, with symbols revealing the NPC's shifting mood towards you, and their needs. A merchant NPC who was emotionally neutral and "needed" weaponry when you approached him would presumably be eyeing your axe as a nice addition to his shop or private collection, etc.
And why should questgivers and merchants stop having interesting dialog after you've spoken to them a couple of times? It makes more sense if NPCs that are unimportant to your quests simply don't have dialog, while those who do offer intriguing bits of information on a semi-regular basis. A local gossiping merchant might, for example, twig you to the presence of quests he or she has heard about in the general area, after you've succeeded with one or two.
More subtle quest-giving. "Hi! You're that farmer from the backwater who will solve all our problems after taking on 33 quests, but we don't know anything about you, right? How about killing 125 orcs so I can have back my mother's long-lost Amulet of Rapping? I could have told any number of well-known people about this, but I remained silent over the years just to pass this quest along to you."
Yeah, right.
I think Lionheart had the worst all-time quest I've seen along these lines: in an alternate world Barcelona, you encounter Niccolo Macchiavelli. He informs you, a nobody, that he's working his way up the political totem poll in Spain so that he can achieve his secret ambition of freeing his beloved Milan from Spanish captivity. (Yes, he tells you, a stranger, this in confidence.) Then he offers you the job of bodyguard. And to top it off, there are no PC attribute/skill checks. My character had almost no constitution or strength, and being a newbie, no armor or weaponry. The avatar must have looked like a starving ferret: the perfect bodyguard.
This one's fairly simple, really. It only needs two things. First, quests should be mentioned for the most part in passing, with a symbol that indicates when one has appeared and needs checking in your quest log. Second, some kind of attribute/skill/guild/whatever needs to be employed. So what if your character doesn't get all the quests in any given game? They can play a second time, or a third. After all, you've provided enough quests to keep any player overwhelmed at their sheer number and imaginative display of talent--right?
More realistic economics. If the main city's under siege, as was the case in both IWD games, then it stands to reason they should have very few supplies. Instead, they had plenty. The contents of merchants should reflect the safety of the roads fostering travel, and the ability of farmers, who invariably lie outside the main gates, to provide food. If you assist in lifting a land siege, land routes should reopen, and you might even encounter merchants on your travels. (Perhaps they'd pay for escort, too, if you don't look too scruffy.) If you assist in lifting a sea embargo, ships should begin arriving with exotic fare from overseas. And the value of goods ought to change to reflect supply and demand on a limited scale. Hell, why shouldn't a city armorer not offer to make you their main supplier, if you've provided 20 sets of chainmail in the last year?
More interactive environments. The best in this regard were the Ultima VII games, and their pair of spinoffs. You could actually gather the ingredients to make third level products--meaning that you harvested/bought first level raw materials to make second level sections, then combined several second level sections into a finished product. If there were clues provided, they were offered subtly, in libraries or occasional NPC comments, spread out over the continent. And there were many things you could gather or interact with. Divine Divinity has some of this, as well, but it's only the second title I've seen in nearly a decade which furnished this degree of attention to the environment.
Don't underestimate our collective playing intelligence. Give us puzzles that involve something more than the silly and inappropriate Towers of Hanoi in KotoR, the random-solved pathways in IWD2, or the silly riddles in the bridge crossing of BG2. In this regard, Betrayal at Krondor was the best yet seen. No puzzle was a quest breaker, but all of them really taxed your ingenuity.
Better writing. If we're given party members, make them genuinely interesting, with extra bits of randomly intruded dialog and their own quests, like BG2, rather than the generally dull dogs of NWN. Like the original Jagged Alliance and BG2, make alignment and "inner states" important enough to cause party NPCs to argue and leave, or attempt to kill one anothe. And like JA, and very occasionally BG2, let your party NPCs interrupt your party selections for activities and briefly usurp your authority to make their own quirky decisions that impact events.
In addition, I'd like to see plots where you aren't some nobody with a grand lineage, and quests that are more than FedX or "kill 5000 orcs and bring me the Golden Trinket."
Imaginative settings. I was tired of the Tolkien Thing long before every two-bit author and publisher thought it was the only method of selling a book or game. If you're a game developer in Russia, write an RPG that arises out of the Kievan Rus mythos which you learned about all through your youth. From Scandanavia? How about setting your RPG in an alternate world Skane, or the northern woodlands of Finland? Use the Kalevala, or the Norse mythos in elaborate detail. Avoid putting in place the same old races, monsters, spell system, etc, just under other names.
One of the most brilliant RPG adaptations was that of Microprose's Darklands. Based on Medieval Germany, it turned witches, demons, kobolds, dragons and Templar knights--all evil or nearly, according to folk tales--into your enemies. It substituted an elaborate alchemy system for normal magic, and included ingredients and recipes named after famous alchemists of the early Renaissance. A vast network of saints, who could be prayed to for brief, specific advantages, replaced the cleric, and character development was actually based on giving your 4 PCs each an entire history of training/background tradeoffs: a PC who spent 5 years becoming a sergeant-at-arms might have many skill points to spend on various weapons specializations, but they'd probably lose a bit of charisma and wouldn't have many skill points for intellectual pursuits, etc.
That's my say. Want to bet none of this occurs?
