too bad that the game doesn't have some sort of common installer, it would be nicer to be able to install and play the whole game without having to switch between episodes. but that's just a very minor concern :)

So the perversion has been ongoing since 1976. (I'm pretty sure a lot of other forms of perversion have an even longer history -- doesn't make them right.)

As I see it, what's happened is that people have ignored the experience games were trying to provide (the important part) and focused on the mechanism games used to achieve it. This is highly flawed because technological changes mean that mechanisms can (and should) be improved/replaced, yielding ever-better approximations of the experiences games were trying to provide all along.

"Colossal Cave Adventure" was trying to provide an adventure experience. It was using really old tech to do it, though, so its mechanisms were a bit atrocious (and as a result actual adventure experience provided was somewhat limited). Choosing to call modern games "adventure games" merely because they continue to use similar atrocious mechanisms (despite advances in technology) while potentially denying the label for games that aim to actually provide a better adventure experience (just because they don't use the old, crufty mechanisms) is perverse.

Similarly, early RPGs were trying to bring the role playing experience (from table-tops/DMs) to computers, and were also dealing with very limited tech. Improvable stats and (generally highly repetitive) combat were common mechanisms by which the games attempted to provide a role playing experience, because that's about as much as the tech allowed at the time. Choosing to call modern games "role playing games" merely because they continue to use the same low-tech mechanisms (despite advances in technology) while potentially denying the label for games that aim to actually provide a better role playing experience (just because they don't use the old mechanisms) is perverse.

The perverse focus on mechanism rather than experience can also be seen in the qualifiers adventure games commonly get: "text-based" or "point-and/n-click"

(At least with RPGs you have some more useful qualifiers like "open world" and "living world" which attempt to describe the experience provided rather than the mechanisms providing that experience. But because of the way "adventure game" is defined in terms of mechanism, a mechanism not capable of providing a truly open-world experience, "open-world adventure game" is an oxymoron -- but it shouldn't be! A world where, basically by definition, a game providing an "open-world adventure" experience can not classified as an "open-world adventure game" is perverse!)

Now it may be true that these mechanism-based definitions for "adventure game" and "role playing game" are accepted/acknowledged/used by many people... but it's also true that a lot of people are perverts! :-P

I don't think "it" (the mechanism) should be considered a genre at all. At best it should be a qualifier, probably just a descriptive term for gameplay mechanics. Maybe use the standard computer science term for that mechanism: finite-state machine (FSM)

(Oh great - I just wasted a bunch of time talking about definitions that I could have wasted "role-playing" a "homeless vagrant lawnmowering the entire world" of Eschalon "in search of things to sell".)

[i]I actually have plans for making such a game (as that appears to be the only way I will ever get to play it). (...) Unfortunately I won't really have time to develop the game until I retire (or at least decide to take a few years off).
[/i]

to TheJadedOne: you don't know how much i understand you! :-)) after releasing and trying morrowind i was disappointed that it's (like in daggerfall case that it was sometimes refered as arena 2) not possible to consider it as arena 3 (or daggerfall 2) but it was something completely new.
i can't say morrowind is bad game, but i was looking forward for new degree of game's random self-creation and even no other game since daggerfall could be refered as "something like daggerfall 2".
i wouldn't expect revolution, just evolution, as i know how exacting task it could be. i would tolerate some repetivity, worse graphics and so on. some noticeable progress from daggerfall would be enough for me.
but there is no such game developing even considering indie scene. one BIG HOLE in games offering list today.

so, if you will develop something like "daggerfall 2" it wouldn't be years off.. because you probably become a milionaire :D
ok, but i dont think it's possible make in one person. let's remind neverending story of luciusXL's developing only mod of daggerfal for XL engine.
developing game is work for team of specialised people - for example for graphics, for programming, for shapes, forms, architecture and textures proposition... 3 people at least i mean - for smaller project :)

$9.99 was not a bad price, but I have such a huge backlog, which includes some "detective-mystery" adventure games - Gabriel Knight 1-3, Broken Sword 2, Resonance, Gemini Rue. There's also the Tex Murphy games, but they give sever motion sickness so I can't play them. In any case, as mcuh as love mystery-based adventure games (the best kind of adventure games, imo), I couldn't justify spending $10 to add yet another to my backlog. Tempting though! I've had this game on my wishlist for quite a while now.

Side note: with the severe and continuing decline of the Canadian dollar in the past few months, the discounts on GOG aren't as great as they used to be. So it's not even $10, it's $11 for me now.

I would say it's one I don't have any real interest in ever finishing (or playing again at all). Besides the small size, the density makes no sense (you can't wander for more than a couple minutes without hitting some monster with loot), and the rate at which you level up is ridiculously fast (making me wonder how there are so many low level entities in the world when it's that quick and easy to gain levels). Then there's the f'ing-unbelievable broken interface where you can only change the amount of gold you are selling an item for by one gp at a time, even when the item you are selling is worth 120,000 gp (which is the value to which the interface will then default) and you are trying to sell it to a merchant for 20,000 gp because that's all they've got and you just want to unload it. (It did have auto-repeat if you held the mouse button down, so I balanced a book on my mouse button and walked away from the game for a while so it could drive the price down over time.) How that issue got by testing, or even any of the developers that actually tried the game is mind-boggling. That made me wonder if that "bug" is purposely there just to hide how incredibly broken the economy was -- how is it that such massively expensive loot is just everywhere (available even to rather low-level characters) such that merchants can't (none of them) afford to buy even one such item? Basic economic laws indicate that such an oversupply of goods (and undersupply of currency) should have driven the price of such items way down. And then there is the level scaling of monsters -- I had almost managed to forget about that smashing-the-suspension-of-disbelief stupidity.

The small size and high-density could be written-off as simply a mismatch in expectations -- as you say, Morrowind simply wasn't going for an "Arena-style" game and was instead playing more in the M&M 6-8 pool (which are also small and high-density), although I would argue it is not just expectations defied but actual immersion lost. All the rest, and other stuff I'm not mentioning, was just unmitigatedly bad.

For me it's mostly not about the "random self-creation", but about what that allows -- a large world with an unlimited amount of detail. There is one small way though in which it is about the "random self-creation" for me, and that is that while a large-enough size may make it likely that I am the first and only player to explore a place, the random creation means even the game developers themselves may have never laid eyes on the place. That adds even more to the sense of exploration.

My thoughts exactly: Incremental improvements over time, enjoying every step of the way. (If Bethsoft had done that and stayed away from DRM, I would have bought every last version they made, even if they were coming out with a new version 2 or 3 times a year. As it is, I haven't even been tempted to buy any of their stuff since Morrowind.)

I'm afraid I'm just coasting too much in life right now -- I've got it too easy. I get paid a lot of money to work from home, taking on large development projects. And I get that payment whether the projects pan-out or not. It's a big risk going the ambitious-game-development route -- instead of adding money into my retirement fund, I would be draining it (some to live on, a lot for hiring artists). I wouldn't be coasting any more, but walking on a high-wire without a net...

Oh, and in case that wasn't enough of a risk, there are the legal risks. For example, go here and about 1/3 of the way into the article you can see a picture of the 80,000+ pages of new regulations the U.S. government created just this past year (which are, of course, in addition to all of the other regulations that already existed). Now I wonder which ones could get me sued, fined or imprisoned if I don't follow some rule some pin-head bureaucrat came up with. (Contemplating running a business really makes me feel like I'm entering Tolkien's Middle-earth -- things may go really bad, really fast if the gaze of Sauron [the federal government] falls upon me.)

I've created a successful commercial game in the past (around 1990) and did almost everything myself (coding, music, art, docs), the only exception being a character for use in cut-scenes that my publisher provided as a suggestion (and their splash screen and the final layout of the docs, though those last two were for their benefit, not the game's). That said, unlike coding, music composition isn't that easy for me, and as for my art skills... well, let's just say that game was based on machines and other easy-to-draw inanimate objects for a reason. ;-)

[I've even thought of making all of the characters in the RPG be robots and making the environments be artificial structures just because that would not only bring the art-work into my reach, but perhaps even allow for a lot of the artwork itself to be generated. Unfortunately, I think that would lose too much of the experience I am shooting for.]

Anyways, my game plan would be to do all of the coding myself, using stand-in assets until it's clear that the technical issues (mainly AI and efficiency) are being handled "well enough". Only then would I start worrying about production-quality music and art, and I would contract-out the artwork (and maybe some of the music, though I would really like the music to be dynamic rather than scored). The one part of my game-plan which many fans of Daggerfall might not like (and I wish it weren't the case myself) is that I would most likely be going for a 2D isometric game rather than 3D first-person. I like playing 3D first-person more (as it's more immersive), but it's just a lot more work to create such a game, and most of the goodness (a large world to explore, "smart" NPCs that actually do jobs and live their lives, an actual history created by such NPCs, a world that reacts correctly -- e.g., successfully robbing merchants trying to get their goods to market will cause those goods at that market to shoot up in price or be completely unavailable, etc.) doesn't really depend on the presentation being 3D. And the efficiency mentioned earlier is the most critical thing for this game -- running an entire (very large) world where every NPC is doing stuff and making decisions all the time, even when the PC is nowhere around? That sucks up CPU. And trying to do that so efficiently that you can support features like "quick-travel" (where time needs to go 10x or 100x) and also so you can (say in a year of real-time) run the game long enough (prior to anyone playing it) to build up an actual history? Those both require the code to be very efficient. That efficiency may likely mean the world has to be grid-based rather than free-form, which is OK for 2D isometric but I find kind of hokey for 3D first-person. (Basically it kills a lot of the immersion that 3D first-person adds, making going 3D even less worth the effort.)