Have you played Divine Divinity? It's more action-y, but it has a very expansive world and I thought it had a really good element of character building to it. There's a sequel Beyond Divinity that I think had a better character creation system, but I didn't much care for compared to the first. There's another game in the series Divinity II that is a bit more 'modern' in how it plays, but is a fun game all the same.
Also, if you're looking for something more along the pen and paper lines, Temple of Elemental Evil is pretty good once all of the community patches and updates have been applied to it. The big fix/mod pack for it is by Circle of Eight and can be found here.
If you don't mind graphics, the Avernum games by Spiderweb Software are excellent and they all feature open worlds with fairly decent character building. The stories to them are pretty fair, as well.
Along the lines of Avernum are the Eschalon games (Book 1, and Book 2). They're single character games, but they feature solid character building and pretty good stories, as well. There's a third game in the series that is expected out sometime this year. I've played the second game in the series and I consider it one of the better RPGs I've played in recent memory. If you're interested in seeing how it plays just poke around on YouTube and I'm sure you'll run into my blind LP of the game and you can see how it runs.
There are some older series that are more 'classic' in how they play like Might & Magic or Wizardry, but I think they might be a bit too archaic unless you don't mind games where the majority of time is spent cutting through hordes of enemies.
I remeber that I played a game called "Divine Divinty" (or something along that line) a long time ago. I didn't play it that long, but it seemed a bit... empty? (as in there are very few characters and monster). But if I find my copy of the game, I'm gonna give it a try.
From what I read about Temple of the Elemental Evil it seems to pretty much like Baldur's Gate and NWN, at least rule-wise, which is pretty good.
I also tried out the Demo of "Eschalon: Book II" and it seemed pretty old-school. I'm definitely going to try it out.
So thanks for the suggestion, they were pretty good.
Have you tried the various mods and patches for KOTOR 2 that try and hack some of the unused content back in? It doesn't look like anybody's ever going to actually finish that game, so there's been various efforts by the community to try and cobble it back together from the pieces. I haven't ever used any of them before, so I can't speak to how well they do this, but I think it might be interesting to check out.
By the way, did you manage to get KOTOR 2 running under Win7? I've tried it and it just won't work.
Haven't tried out those mods myself, but now that you mention them, I probably should. Are there any other good mods for KOTOR (I or II)?
Call me insane but Two Worlds 2 (note TWO since it's the sequel) is actually enjoyable... especially once you get a mage character going.
You can do some seriously crazy things as a mage with some experimentation.
I have played both the first and the second Two Worlds. While the first was quite enjoyable (it had a pretty big world), the second was not so much. At low levels the game was so friggin hard I had to lure enemies away from their group and kill them one by one. In the later stages of the game, the enemies were ridiculously easy but it took still some time to beat them. I don't say it was a bad game, but the fights were a bit tedious. Also, the size of the world was kinda.... 60kmē? And you could only enter like 1/3 of that, the rest was either inaccessible or water.
Still, thanks for the suggestions. Especially the first Two Worlds is worth to be mentioned.
Alpha Protocol of course.That game is so underrated.It's fun as hell and the choices you are given are pretty interesting.
Admittedly, I never even heard about that game. But the general consensus in the thread seems to be that it's a rather good game. Definitely giving it a try.
Jagged Alliance 2. Open-world stategy-RPG hybrid and one of the best games ever made. Not sword and sorcery though obviously.
You've got Crawl on your list, perhaps you should try some other roguelikes? ADOM, Brogue, Nethack, and DoomRL are all excellent. If you want a more open-world quasi-roguelike similar to Unreal World and DF adventure mode you could try out Cataclysm or Caves of Qud.
Are you averse to older (pre-Fallout) games? If not I could recommend several goodies.
*Oh and it doesn't really fit your open-world condition, but you should play the NWN2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer if you haven't already. 100x better than the base campaign.
**If you liked Gothic consider trying Risen
I played JA2 and enjoyed it. Although I wouldn't really consider it an RPG.
About rouge-likes: while they ARE very complex, I don't really like their scope. Or at least the scope of Crawl (you're "confined" to a single dungeon. I'd prefer a more "living" world). But if I find the time, I'm going to try Cataclysm. From the thread here on the forums it looks rather good.
I'm not really "averse" to games older than Fallout, IF they are good. I'm aware of the game Wasteland, but haven't tried it myself. But as long as the games are playable on modern computers (Win7) feel free to suggest them.
And I played the add-ons for NWN II (and NWN I). They were great, even if the second ("Storm of
") was rather shallow.
And about Risen: wasn't that the BAD sequel to Gothic? I know Gothic 3 had two "sequels" and one was pretty bad. Or was that the other one... can't remember the name.
As for the rest of the suggestions: I haven't had time to find out more about them, but still thanks to everyone for their suggestions.