You're describing most games (although I don't recall Fable requiring lock-on) and Risen would have been better if it had Fable-esque combat if they could figure out a way to keep everything lethal. The combat was one of the worst parts of Risen.
No, just NO.
Please, I was able to complete 90% of the Thieves quests before switching to Order without any meaningful penalty
Which is completely irrelevant, as past a certain stage where you could be somehow neutral, you were essentially forced to take a side, and pushing things you could even have an entire faction moved out of the city. And that's still more than pretty much any other modern RPG around, in terms of choices and consequences.
Plus, all the individual characters who could become ally or enemies according to your behavior with them.
and few of the quests went anything past "fetch this thing"
Which is bullshit. Don't blame the game if you have an unimaginative approach to quests. Plenty of quests in Risen could be approached in many different ways, exactly like in Gothic 2.
Stealth, social, brawler, and when you burned a bridge, there was always another option somewhere. No one in Risen told you how to achieve results, pepole asked for tasks or items and then was up to you to deliver.
For almost any objective you could bribe, fight, persuade, pickpocket, steal from the target's home and so on.
It's easy to claim those were "fetch quests" but at this point you should tell me what other RPG in recent years had better quests, cause I can't think of a single game offering at the same time decent degrees of interaction and freedom, at least in recent times.
You're clearly dead-set on blaming consoles for PB's failings
It's funny because I didn't name consoles ONCE in the whole thread, and in fact if anything I would blame the american press, that ranted a lot for the lack of hand-holding in the game (Holy shit, I read reviews where journalists were outraged by the fact that you could die in any moment even at the beginning of the game or cross opponents that were too strong, as if any of those things was an actual flaw).
but Gothic 3 showed a clear move towards streamlining from G2
Gothic 3 is byfar the worst game made by Piranha Bytes, in fact, and no, it wasn't the "streamlining" the problem, but the poor mechanics and the technical mess.
and Risen again from that. Risen did some things excellently and was praised for it; there's no need to pretend that everything else was equally good.
I don't "pretend" shit, I just don't care for incompetent opinions.
