The best thing about games like BGDA are the building of your character once you have chosen him/her. I would love to see a new format in the next gen of games to come. Things have worked fine in the past, but it is time to step it up and come up with non predefined character choices.

Here is what I am thinking.

1. A player must pick one of 6 races. These races each come from different areas of the game world and inherit one or two auras that are defined by their homeland and the type of climate it has. It also defines starting attributes, how well you interact with the other races and the information/abilities you will be able to learn from them as the game progresses.

2. Male or Female.

3. You must now choose the path your charater takes, good or evil. Each choice will dictate what options, spells and feats will be available to you as you create your character.

4. Now choose the type of style you want your character to develop in. This will further define stating attributes and spells/feats/auras that will be available further in character creation.

Melee +10 to strength
+10 to endurance

Magic +10 to willpower
+10 to intelligence

Summoning +5 to strength
+10 to intelligence
+5 to will power

Battle mage +5 to strength
+5 to intelligence
+5 to willpower
+5 to endurance

5. You now have available to you sets of feats, auras and spells that have been narrowed down through your character creation. You must pick from these lists what you are going to have for you character. Each list may contain 20 options of which you may only choose 10.

Now this is only a rough idea, and I in no way am trying to say this is the way to go. But I feel that with something along this line, there would be hundreds of way to build your character each with a different spin on the way you play the game. The replay value and drive to bring you player to the top of his game would be excellent, rather then giving the player 6 races with set skills to choose from.

Limited character options has always been my problem with D&D system based games. I also don't much care for choosing an "alignment" during character creation as I think moral absolutes are silly and I hate being pigeonholed.

There are plenty of RPG's out there with very in-depth char gen though, there just haven't been any triple A ones released for nigh on a decade now.. The original Fallouts come to mind, and if you really want options you should try Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Theres 8 races, something like 16 magic schools (each with 5 spells), 8 technology disciplines, each with 7 schematics , 8 prime statistics and a bunch of derived statistics from those, and 16 skills. The game has some balance issues but it's still one of my favorites. The range of characters you can make is amazing.

Play the Champion of Norrath games on the PS2...they had multiple character classes with both male and female options for all classes.

That is exactly what I am talking about. I have played and still do play those game, that is why I started this thread. I would like more in depth and customizable character creations. I know these are not true RPG games, but more "kill anything that moves" games. I still would like to see a method of character creation where I could use the same class with different options to choose from. You could look at the skill tree as that, but in the end you open everything that character has to offer. Now, if there was a set of 100-200 skills/auras to choose only 20-30 from, that would open the window for multiple characters of the same class. For example, in co-op mode both players could choose Barbarians yet have two completely different skill trees. That would aid in both character choices and the replay factor of the game. After all, I am playing a game (DA1) that I bought some 7 YEARS AGO. I have used all three characters and only the graphics and all out hack 'n slash keep me coming back. If there was a better system of character creation, I might still be re-starting the game with a skill tree I have yet to play.....NOW THAT'S RE-PLAYABILITY!! I guess the bottom line is, I love these games and my only beef is that there is no new content to play. If you are going to only make a couple of games from a genre like this and stop, then make it deep and give the buyer the option to play it over and over in different styles.

The only action rpg series I've ever gotten into has been diablo, the undisputed king. Every ARPG I've tried to play since Diablo has felt like a poorly done clone that hasn't kept me interested past the first dungeon. I'm very interested to see what they do with Diablo 3, looks pretty promising IMO.

Your are right on, but for consoles there was no Diablo 2 to play. If you want to play an ARPG for the ps2 or xbox, give DA or CON a shot, great games.