EGM scores. Some pretty big games.

[OB1]

You start out in the wilderness with a mission that will take most of the game to complete. You go out knowing nothing about the world, find the first town and talk to the people there, get missions and progress, orjust wander around and do your own thing... you do have to do the main quest, but it's got a lot of variablity and replay value and non-linearity. Too much non-linearity in the storyline (like having to search people out and talk to them instead of being given the story) for you or something? I don't know why you dislike it...

I haven't played enough of Falout to see if I dislike the way the story is told. But you seem to compare it to the way stories are told in BG and MP, so I don't imagine it is actually good.

My point is just that books are just as good a source for games to have their stories and style inspired by as movies are...

Who said they can't be? Two mediums don't have to be similar to influence each other. Obviously books have inspired movies, movies have inspired games, and even games have inspired books. But each one is a distinctly different medium.

As for speech, limitations of sound are the main reason, but for some games the volume of speech also is -- it'd just take too long to speak every line in Baldur's Gate... (how does KotOR do it? By not speaking out the lines aliens say -- and there are a lot of them -- and by cutting down the amount of lines somewhat.). But that's really just a presentation issue, not a deep gameplay one.

When I said limitation in sound that included speech.

And everything in KOTOR (except for what your character says), has recorded dialogue.