Re:NWN as a model (Score 1)

Except that NWN2 and KotOR2 were terrible, and significant downgrades from their parents. They not only featured bugs o-plenty, surreally ugly art and lousy voice acting (Darth Screetch wants a word with you), they were filled with cliche after cliche. Horrible "it's time for a fight, so we threw one in", endings that made you wonder what the entire point was, NPCs you tolerated purely out of necessity and continuous segues that went nowhere and yet were unavoidable. NWN2 frequently abandoned D&D rules, yet did so to no actual value. They just did it to do it, apparently. KotOR2 had no ending, and of course would thrust you into situations where the tedious NPC you've been avoiding is suddenly the only playable character, and now the underdeveloped loser is in an unskippable, usually unneeded encounter. It almost reached a point where to you looked forward to what would annoy you next. I don't want RPGs that hold your little hand and explain the backstory 10 times, but throw me a bone here. In both games, the PC never felt important, never felt like anything but a tourist while other people go about their own personal lives that they never bother to explain. Mystery is one thing when you care; KotOR2 half the time felt like someone else's work stories. In KotOR, I felt important, I cared about what happened to those around me, I felt like my decisions mattered; KotOR2 was like a bunch of fight scenes tacked on to the most austere story they could find, and yet your character quickly became so overpowered the fights were only hard when you had to use one of the otherwise-pointless NPCs. The best advice Fearghus needs is "stop doing what you're doing". A single-player RPG needs a story, it needs compelling characters, and it needs to make the player feel like what they do actually matters. Those are the things MMOs can't do well; those are the reasons to play a SP-RPG instead. Asking people to roleplay a tourist is a recipe for failure.