feels like we waited 30 years for someone to understand that part of what makes Super Mario 64 so fun is that you've got a whole host of moves that you don't need to use most of the time, and if you use them well then you can get yourself into all sorts of interesting trouble

@RUINISM role playing a petty thief who collects near worthless household items is objectively a wildly ineffective way to play the game. Understand that this is not a criticism, this is part of what made these games Holodecks, and turning all of these items into crafting items for upgrades to weapons in Fallout 4 is an example of moving away from the holodeck towards creating a more ordinary videogame

@RUINISM I didn't say picking up objects was a useless mechanic I said picking up spoons was worthless, which it is, there's dozens if not hundreds of clutters items with an atrocious weight/value ratio, it would have been easier to simply only to make some objects collectible by the player and generally this is the model followed by other games where stealing is a mechanic. This oddity of Bethesda games where you could collect countless useless objects was such a weird element that the huge minds at penny arcade deigned to comment on it back in the day

@Scamsley
Absolutely, for all of its very deliberate back steps I think the new AI systems of Oblivion were a natural evolution from Morrowind. I think expanding the ways a player could progress the game without as much dungeon crawling combat would also be really beneficial. STALKER is a really good touch point for Bethesda games that is rarely cited I think, though the narrower scope gives them a much clearer direction in terms of what elements should be simulated in the first place, a mix of more simulation elements and denser RPG abstractions at the same time would have worked best, even at the cost of combat and gamefeel improving less, it would be an easy trade.

@Scamsley you will have 15 companions and each one will almost immediately launch into a monologue about the Traumatic Event In Their Life which has singlehandedly defined them as a person ever since and which you can fix by killing some people and you should because it is the barrier to having sex with them (they will never speak to you again after the sex).
@PELIPOIKA Disco Elysium is a prose story first and foremost, it would be like saying Quake has too many cool gunfights to say it has too much writing.