The Shrinking RPG

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So in the past few years we have had the rpg genre of games following two main paths lets call them the bioware (story, choice and consequence) and the bethesda (freedom, exploration and graphic), they both share some common ground such as lots of combat and customisation but overall they seem to be on divergent paths and when questioned on the design of their games or the omission of certain features the developers state they don't have the time, resources or inclination to implement them.
Now about a year ago I had some time off like i'm enjoying now and dug out some old games, it was Ultima 7 that I chose to play because i'd heard of a new platform called Exult that really polished the game and added some reasonable content if you wished. Now playing through the avatars return to Britannia I was struck by numerous features (night and day cycles, weather, object interactivity, npc routines, depth of characters and a reactive world to name but a few) that are missing from one or the other of the above genres and I had to ask why, is the cost and time of production forcing down the quality of our games forcing them to specialise or do the developers want to follow these routes.
This is not a criticism of either bioware or bethesda, I love their games have bought most of them and am currently on another playthrough of origins but I wonder will we ever see the likes of Ultima 7 come again, there were flaws in the game certainly but it stands so high above the competition you wonder how they did it and what must developers do to make this kind of game again.

 

Thanks for the reply Taluntain, it really seem's that no one is interested in the downsizing of what to many is a favourite passtime. Kind of sad that seemingly the era of these games has passed before the industry even started. Cest la vie.

 

The BG series had time in it with Night and Day. I'm not sure if any game after the BG series used time or not.

 

WoW got a night and day cycle

 

Morrowind and Oblivion had night\day cycles. Oblivion also had NPC routines.

Anyone notice, that in Ultima 7, if you pick up a plate or something at a bar, and place it outside the building, the barmaid comes out and brings it back in? Little things like that certainly made the game alot bigger.

 

I think it has a lot to do with the transition of these companies from small groups that just wanted to make games they would enjoy (which leads to a lot of experimenting) to large companies that primarily want to make a profit (which leads to a lot of not experimenting).

 

Wonder if the graphics will ever reach a plateau where people are happy to settle for them and start adding in features again, got nothing against trimming the fat on rpgs I mean look at mask of the betrayer for tight design and perfect execution, but those deeper worlds such as britannia allow so much more immersion.