I mean the niche best known for Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls III, IV and V.

1. (Fantasy) The setting is a fictional world with fantastical elements, and a comparable level of societal progress as the 1600s or earlier.

2. (Character Creation) You create your own role: character and class. It is a permanent character.

3. (Action) You have direct control over your characters actions in real time.

4. (Open World / Sandbox) You aren't forced to do the main story and can roam around the whole map finding items and doing side quests.

5. (Single player) Not having to accommodate for multiple players, your choices can make a lasting impact on the world.

6. (Alive world) There are events that can happen by chance, like meeting people on the road.

Less importantly, they are first person. This connects you more to the character, but downside is you don't see how cool armor you are wearing. First person combat might also keep it from reaching high action potential, although games like Mount&Blade and Kingdom Come Deliverance features good First Person fencing.

What are the competitors in this genre of single player, open world, fantasy, RPG?

Baldur's Gate is not an action game.

The Witcher forces you into a premade character and thus I don't consider it Free Role Playing.

Kingdom Come Deliverance is not fantasy and you are a set character.

Elden Ring has few NPC interactions, choices and well executed quests. The world is heavily hostile. I don't see it fulfilling the niche quite, but it fills my craving per now.

With Oblivion and Skyrim being real hits, why aren't there more competitors in the Single Player, Open World, Fantasy, RPG niche?

Three moose was seen on the roof of a supermarket. One calf is suspected fleeing the scene while the mother died jumping down, as did the last calf seen on the video.

Whether one looks at revenue, investment or coverage, men’s sports do better than women’s. Many assume that absolute differences in quality of athletic performance are the driving force. However, the existence of stereotypes should alert us to another possibility: gender information might influence perceived quality. We perform an experiment in which 613 participants viewed clips of elite female and male soccer players. In the control group, participants evaluated unmodified videos where the gender of the players is clear to see. In the treatment group, participants evaluated the same videos but with gender obscured by blurring.
Using a regression analysis, we find that participants rate men’s videos higher – but only when they know they are watching men. When blurring obscures the gender, ratings for female and male athletes do not differ.
We discuss implications for research and the sports industry.

*Full abstract

I have some points to make myself:

Immersion

• The map, which is a satellite/god view, rips you out of character. Paper maps keep more mystery.
• The quest icons that it relies on should be changed for better quest directions.
• Seeing enemies' exact health (and name) is also not great for immersion. More visual/audible damaged states is better.

RP

• Very few choices are made in the quests, instead one has to be in character by choosing what quests one embark on. It would be great to have some conversational options with consequences. Relations are important in RP.
• Few people acknowledge you, to the degree you don't actually feel that you are saving anyone unlike in Oblivion. IDK if it's the voice actors or characters or that I haven't got to actively save anyone, except DLC Serana. There's that guy in the web that dies. In Oblivion there are monks fleeing towards you for help and more noticeably the knight in the Oblivion gate. I miss such moments.

When we post to Beehaw communties the posts will become hosted exclusively on our lemmy.world instance and not interact with other instances.

Further info:
https://lemmy.world/comment/205763
https://beehaw.org/post/567170

People denying realities like anthropogenic climate change. I can respect opinions, like applying full human value to an undeveloped fetus, but the straight up denial of what is verified truth I can't even tolerate. It's false. It's lies. It's brainwashed tribalism. And they are gonna dig their tribal community hole and stew in reactionary rage and fear with their incoherent arguments whilst following their strong leaders, because gods forbid they are wrong on anything. No, truth itself is gonna bend around the word of dear leader.

The hateful cult newspeak is also rubbing me, but the denial of reality is the killer. And the mindnumbing memes that try to outwit with one-two sentences on comprehensive subjects. Political memes are a blight upon humanity and should be banned. Thanks for reading my sour micro(?)thought!