I guess it's a matter of what you consider a classic and whether you want the same open-world game type. Fallout 1 & 2? Baldur's Gate? Shadowrun from the Sega G

I guess it's a matter of what you consider a classic and whether you want the same open-world game type. Fallout 1 & 2? Baldur's Gate? Shadowrun from the Sega Genesis (my memory's a little hazy on that one, I just remember it being pretty good :), even the old SSI D&D games weren't terrible at this for their day. When you went somewhere it was for a reason or when you got there there was something interesting to do. In FO3 in particular the cookie-cutter nature isn't so much that everything looks the same, it's that while there might be half a dozen emails to read on terminals in a ruined building, there's barely any context and almost never any resolution. With a lot of the open world RPGs now we have the illusion of depth in that the scope for exploration is vast, there's a lot of variety in the visuals (because we have lots of memory and storage now), but limited variation in flavour. If we had significant effort invested we wouldn't have stuff like the 'took an arrow to the knee' meme. Obviously we can't hold everything up to be something which it isn't here. Even Fallout 2, which I count as being one of the best games ever I've played (once they worked out all the bugs anyway), had lots of repetitive wilderness encounters along with all the great special stuff. I think the key differentiator here is that didn't try to give the player a massive world with relatively little content, they gave enough to make you feel like you were exploring, but not enough to make it tedious. On topic, I'm glad people are putting themselves out there to pitch game ideas to the public. Even if of the half dozen games I've backed on Kickstarter none make it to production I can't say I'll regret having put money into them. I've gotten my money's worth just from the updates which have come out of some of them (particularly Project Eternity and to some extent Clang).