Locality and discovery.
I like games where the same characters and localities are reused. I think it's pointles to the story to travel across the entire world. There's only three people outside your party who ever really matter. I like the community I start in and would like to see them prosper.
I'd very much agree with that too. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
I think that my ideal game would have a home base of some kind where at least some of the people did develop and continue to provide ongoing interactions as the story unfolded. Usually, a few clicks quickly exhaust the possibilities of each NPC. Having a base also allows players to collect their loot and trophies, which always seems a popular thing to do.
I also enjoy exploring and discovering locations that have something genuinely different and interesting to find or experience. Too many games just have miles of repeated scenery and randomly generated junk. I'd rather have a shorter game with some real quality than a repetitive one that just had sheer quantity.
So a combination of a 'home town' with interactions that actually developed and changed as the story progressed, plus a variety of surrounding locations that looked interesting and different and had real stories happening in them, would be just great. Too many games now are full of "Go to X, kill Y or get Z, return and repeat". They might boast 300 quests, but it's often more like one quest repeated 300 times. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />
One example of a game with interactions that developed in a way that I enjoyed was Deus Ex. There was no 'party' as such, but lots of characters like Denton's brother Paul, and a heap of others, kept re-appearing and adding more to the story. Endless twists and turns and a real feeling that there were other people involved in the story from start to finish rather than only a row of generic monsters with a boss to kill at the end.
