In about 2000, I'd started writing up an idea for a pre-industrial "gaspunk" world - basically take a steampunk world where they'd discovered the internal combustion engine really early on - that was an episodic RPG for the Dreamcast. The whole point of it was that over the course of several games, you could shift the balance of the world toward mysticism/magic, a more nature/gaiaist sort of view, or a hardcore industrialist sort of world, and depending on what you did, over the long term, a sentient mechanical AI would grow - starting out as the main antagonist, and ending up as one of your most useful allies.

It was an oddball concept - had some stuff I really liked in it, like a "machine cult" of albino priests who live below the central city, spending their entire lives essentially maintaining a cathedral of mechanical switches - the brain of the AI creature.

Still, one of those concepts that just blows up into insane content explosion, the product of someone who didn't quite know what they were doing yet. :)

I would have to assume that the story has choke points - meaning that while there may be slight variations on how the game starts, what characters are with you, etc., there must be narrowing areas within the story that you get funneled through, regardless of the choices you made previously (as Bioware often does anyway). Otherwise, you'd start running into the same problems that helava hinted at in the "content explosion" comment.

Still, I wonder how they're going to get past the fact that all your characters are uber powerful at the end of the first game. That's usually one of the bigger problems.

...and why Heroes Season 2 sucked!

You could also argue that that is also one of the reasons why Matrix 2 and 3 sucked as well

You could, kind of. But IMO, I thought they had a *brilliant* solution in the Architect's explanation that Neo was a recurring glitch in the system - had the 3rd movie actually taken that and really ran with it, instead of turning him into Jesus, and the rest of the movie into Action Blockbuster(tm), I think I'd have liked it a lot more.

Because it set up a world where this all-powerful being not only *can* be tamped down by the system but *has* been numerous times before. Then again, I liked Revolutions *anyway* - I thought the whole dialog between Smith and Neo at the end actually did work really well, and was a really nice parallel to explain why the humans who left the Matrix continue to fight.

So while I wish it had been even more (and holy CRAP Trinity's hourlong death scene was lame), I dug it. Take that!

I don't really need a reason to argue that Matrix 2 and 3 sucked.

*trolls*

Haha, I'm not saying the movies were all bad. I'm just saying that one of the reasons that you lose context within the movies is because Neo's journey into Superman-dom was way too quick. Once he became invincible at the end of the first movie, it meant that most action within the Matrix became inconsequential.

(Add that to the fact that the Matrix world, which was supposed to be our reality, became marginalized, thus causing the audience to lose context... there were a lot of great ideas, but they were islands of awesome amidst a sea of mediocrity.)