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On the other hand if the game makes all sorts of proclamations about the imminence of a threat and then lets me spend three months picking up herbs to bake into cakes while the Army of Evil waits on the border for me to trigger of the invasion by completing quest no.13 I believe it's terribly designed and would take it as a huge disadvantage. Could even be a show stopper, really. I hope Obsidian does better.

That's not really an issue if the "quest timer" only starts from the point in time you pick up the quest. Which makes no sense. Somehow the gods have decreed that nothing is urgent until hero X hits the 'accept quest' button. I believe I can finally see our problem here - you see one illogical thing/ a product of current tech limitations and take from it that no more logic need apply anymore. I see it and grudgingly accept it as a necessary evil while wishing that rest of the design need not be so stupid. I don't think we will ever find a common ground.

Frankly if they ever manage to design a game that will manage to have events occuring in a logical manner without you ever needing to have hand in them I will come buckets and order thirty copies. As it is until we invent Skynet/Shodan such thing is pretty much impossible and some acceptable breaks from reality are necessary (a slight aside - it's fantasy is not a valid defense againt using real world logic on the setting). So the kidnapping of the elven maiden/sudden fire has to wait for the player to arrive - why we should suffer further breaks from reality by letting the fires blaze for three weeks (while a cult springs around the obviously immortal holy burning child) or having the would be rapists suddenly find religion and wait for the holy just retribution at the hand of our hero is beyond me. Our current technology lets us do this and I do not see why we should settle for less just because some people enjoy their romantic sunsets and slow trips by the riverside. Story is nice and all but it should NEVER be the main and total focus of an RPG. Robust mechanics should. The only thing the devs can be at fault here is when they are unable to offer enough mechanics to reflect your choices and settle for lazy all quests wait for you forever design.

So was BG and it still gave you the opportunity to generate the entire party yourself.

No. Bloodlines did it perfectly.

Or put them through enough rewrites that they seamlessly integrate into the gameworld. Fir3hawK3 indeed.

Aah, the realism argument, is it? What else do you want the game to impose on us sheep? Should someone who takes their time, admires the scenery and spends a few hours chatting with NPCs at the inn fail to even get the burning building quest because the fire occured while he was away? Again, what's wrong with the way BG2 handled the Imoen questline? Or better yet, what's wrong with the way Planescape handled the Carceri questline? I like PS:T but everything after Sigil is mostly **** so my answer to your question is EVERYTHING. Ad your lovable sheep comment - if you feel that way I certainly can't help you, but one would assume that given it is a game the fire wouldn't start until you enter the map and are told about it. If you then decide that right now it's ninja cartographer time and decide to let the kid burn I don't see why the game should wait for you. See for example the dog in Arcanum. If you don't save it it gets kicked to death. No more doggie. My opinion on this essentially boils down to this: if designers want to have an impending sense of doom and a do it now or all shall burn narrative in quests the game should somehow reflect that - by making the quest more difficult or impossible to complete later on. If on the other hand they do not want to limit the player in any way then they should abstain from writing quests in such a way that any reasonable human being would expect some time limit be involved. To take your own example it is stupid to send you to save an elven maiden from rape at the hand of bandits and then have them keep her alive and nonviolated for weeks while waiting on you to come deliver swift justice. That's just poor game design pure and simple.

If a child is trapped in a burning building and you do not go to save it immediately it will either burn to death or get saved by some other means. It certainly won't wait for you for a month to get around to saving him. Choices and consequences. There need not be any "ESP" or some such bull**** to tell you the exact time until quest failure - it's simply logical that a fire will resolve quickly. You can certainly decide you have better things to do like admiring the scenery or visiting a brothel but then you will fail the quest, no harm done. That's roleplaying and not your frankly insane notion that it means to do whatever you want while the whole game gets put on hold. Ad the Imoen example - you just choose a sufficiently large time limit while also communicate the urgency to the player in a comprehensive manner and then you can certainly put a time limit on rescuing her. See Fallout 1 and the water chip quest. They tell you they will all die without it and they do, after 70 days or so. Now that is quest design and not a mayor asking the hero to close the demon gate lest the incessant spawning demons overwhelm his small town in but a few days without any possibility of it actually happening. TLDR - larping is the disease killing old school cRPGs and the sooner it is cured the better.

Actually, if all you really need is have this kind of romance (that was no romance at all IMHO) in PE, then knock yourself out, I think I can stand 10 lines of dialogue.

Will there even be levels?

This is disingenuous as all hell. The TNO's relationship with Deionnara is not what is currently understood as a romance in anRPG game and nor was it treated as romance in PS:T as far as I remember. So using it as an example of how it's been done right before is a ****ty debating tactic.

That's been done too, see for example Albion. Or any jRPG.

Like, say, HL2?

Chobot!=Cruise. Cruise can at the very least at least act convincingly. The Chobot's character was a shallow pandering waste of space and her acting was an embarrassment. I fully expected her to lick some computer periphery at some time, it was so bad and obviously just there to generate interest from the main stream gaming crowd in the quest for the magical 10M sales figure.

Infinite randomly generated levels with 2D hand made backgrounds? I am having Modron cube flashbacks and think I will need suicide watch.

Trouble is that most of the writers we seem to be getting are Hollywood rejects judged by Tinseltown too poor to be even doing reboots of remakes. And then they try to make everything engaging and cinematic. Thank **** for Obsidian.

Bioware poisoned the well with its sub-hentai-VN offerings and now you get knee jerk reactions. Big surprise.

No. No. God no. No.

Post game adventuring really depends on the story they're telling. For all we know it might not even make sense. What is the fixation RPG developers have with minigames I never could quite tell and mounts and sailing seem like something not worthy of a tier by itself. I'd rather they focused on more quests and branching content then a feature like mounted combat which seems out of scope when you only control about 6 guys. In dungeons,

This sounds like something highly situational that would need to be heavily scripted.

1) No. We've been over that. 2) Yes. Very much. 3) Could be cool, but I've never seen it successfully implemented.

If it has some influence on mechanics, why not.

Fatal intestinal maelstrom.

I do declare, we are getting trolled.

This sound suspiciously like the Sims. I'd rather they used the resources to tie the "house" to some quests, if it has to be in the game after all.