What Makes a Great RPG?
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Sometimes limitations on what your character can do are just as interesting as what is not permitted. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines offered some very different paths through the game depending upon what clan you choose at the beginning of the game, and what sort of skills you choose along the way. If you play as a Malkavian, you are crazy. Conversations become very tricky, because your dialog options are always... weird. As a Nosferatu, you are so hideously deformed that even being seen in public can constitute a "Masquerade Violation" (vampires have to keep their nature a secret, you know). There is one chapter where the greatest XP bonuses come only to those characters with the highest social skills, because many of the "sub-quests" are only solvable by being a smooth-talking silver-tongued devil. Unfortunately, you'd best put all those extra experience points into the combat skills you neglected, because several sequences (especially boss encounters) were straight-up combat encounters with little or no opportunity to use stealth or social skills to affect the outcome. Still, I played the entire game through twice, and enjoyed some substantial differences in the game each time. While far from perfect, the game did offer a nice breadth of character opportunities - and restrictions.
Obviously, character choice isn't absolutely required for a great RPG. Few could argue with the success of the Final Fantasy series, or its impression on the minds and hearts of its fans. While later games provided more options for character customization, the games let you depart the plot-railroad only long enough to smell the flowers, beat up some monsters, play some mini-games, and voyage on some optional sub-quests. All very good stuff, of course. And the lack of many character options allowed the developers to focus on a ridiculously convoluted but detailed plot with a handful of memorable characters, and that made all the difference.
Baldur's Gate II offered scripted story options for your character to almost a ludicrous level (I had one friend even complain about being unable to keep up with the deluge of optional quests and choices in this game). Its cousin Planescape: Torment, according to many, took this a few steps further. The highly scripted nature of these interactions made them pretty costly to develop, I'm sure --- but also very satisfying to players, who enjoyed the human-developed plot resolutions based upon their (limited) choices, rather than generic calculated responses of a more organic system.
Speaking of which - there's the Elder Scrolls series. I once ran a third-party program on my saved game in Daggerfall to see what my faction standings were at a very late stage in the game. I was floored to see the hundreds of entries, many of which I had never heard of. The game was extremely open-ended, offering a plethora of player options. Unfortunately, the generic, unscripted, computer-resolved nature of these choices wasn't very satisfying much of the time. Still, it occasionally led to some great drama. Later games in the series tightened this up quite a bit, but complaints about the meaninglessness of many game decisions remain.
And then there's Ultima IV. You started the game by making moral / ethical choices for your character in a series of questions given by a gypsy with a tarot-like deck of cards. I wish more designers would go back and play these games. Too many games today offer "moral" choices that come down to choosing between the good-guy response, the apathetic response, and the complete jackass response. That's a choice? Ultima IV (and the other two games in the U4- U6 "trilogy") offers classic decisions for which there is no right or wrong (or good or evil) answers. Instead, the player must choose between responses of different value only in the mind of the player (or how he wants to play his character). Do you keep your promise to your boss, or do you show compassion to a beggar? Rescue a friend, or sacrifice yourself to save the lives of dozens of strangers?
