Originally Posted by
Yeargdribble
I can't really say. It's hard for me. It's almost an apples and oranges (and bananas and pineapple and...) sort of thing. They are all largely so different. Almost anyone here is just gonna call out one recent game they've played and say it's the best series, but that type of answer defeats the spirit of the question.
I have enormous respect for pretty much all of them. I've not played them all, but those I haven't, I've read ridiculous amounts of articles about. I've made a point of digging up really old CRPGs to play sheerly for historic value. By today's measure they may be nothing special, even more so, they might be thought backward, but they are so revolutionary honestly. Think about the things they brought about.
This is a good and a bad thing though. The devs back then wanted a more free-form D&D form, but programming restricted them from making a solve-it-with-any-scenario-you-can-dream-up game. Their limitations and the decisions they made based on them are the entire basis for modern RPGs.
When I was young and playing games like Dragon Quest I (Dragon Warrior) I was annoyed by the limited range of vision. It didn't even occur to me that part of the fun would be to map it out yourself and feel like you're really exploring. In games like Wizardry that's part of the fun. Most people now would see that as a bother and complain there is no mini-map and an arrow telling them exactly where to go, and I once would've agreed with them. Now I understand and respect near-aimless dungeon crawling without having my hand held.
Now that the technology is here, I wish modern devs would look back to the ideas that some of the older designers had in mind but couldn't truly accomplish.
We're so wrapped up in what has become the norm, we forget that some of the ancestors of modern CRPGs had far more original ideas and some brilliant concepts that have been left untapped. We have the technology now... dig back into some of CRPG history and use some of that awesomeness to actually innovate instead of sticking to the status quo of regurgitating a new FF-style or DQ-style JRPG all the time.
Stop taking the route Bethesda is taking with TES and retreating backward. Oblivion is fantastic, but if you took it's graphics and concepts and applied them back onto the bones of Morrowind, or better yet, Daggerfall... you'd have an incredible game with incredible scope.
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