I would make a real RPG for a change.
Hardcoded Factions:
Races and factions within the world will have varying love/hate/neutral relationships with each other. The player will affect this with what they do. If you kill some travelling merchants, you could find some entire town will want your blood and attack you on sight. You can fix this by doing things they would like, like killing their enemies.
Have real stats and have them matter:
AC, strength, Dex, Agi, Cha, Stam, Int, Wis, etc. If you make a spell caster you can build him to be a battlemage by improving AC, agi, etc. Or you can make him a glass cannon by just spending everything on int.
Have real classes with real combat:
Instead of being just a generic warrior, mage, or rogue/ranger type, or a generic mixture of the three, there should be a genuine class system. Warriors should be able to leap at enemies from 30 foot away, and stun them. They should have area attacks that hit everything nearby, they should be able to taunt targets, stun, attack legs to slow them down, attack arms to weaken attacks, attack the head to stun and have a chance of blinding, etc. Rangers should be able to shoot a 100 arrows into the sky that fall in an area, snaring everything that gets hit and poisoning them. They should have flaming arrows that cause cloth wearing enemies or treants etc to burn, but do no damage to a rock golem etc. They should have piercing arrows that travel through multiple targets. Every class should have depth and require tactical play. A Necromancer should have pets that can actually be controlled. Attack this, back off, focus this target, don't assist me when attacked, pretend to be dead, etc. Then they should have ways to control battles so they don't have to kite everything stupidly. You should be able to permanently charm a weaker enemy, then buff it up, give it some health regeneration, and have it act as your pet. You fight by letting the pet fight your enemies and you stay behind it and nuke shit, heal your pet, mez, blind, enfeeble, etc. your enemies. Mana should matter, and so should aggro management. Damage over time spells should cost less mana but take a while to do their thing, they also cause very little aggro. Direct damage should cause a lot of damage instantly, but causes major aggro and uses a lot of mana. You should be able to have roots come out the ground and hold your target in place so you can attack them from range, and put others to sleep. But it should be balanced so that doing this is dangerous. The roots break randomly and with direct damage, the enemies should run as fast as you and should kill you in seconds if you are wearing cloth etc. Wizards should be able to teleport enemies towards you and away from you in groups, and great distances. Throw them into the air to hurt or kill them as they fall. Turn the ground into lava in a huge area and you watch stuff fall into it, and then you create a delayed blast fireball trap nearby that blasts enemies into the lava pit you summoned. If it isn't as fun as Dark Messiah, don't release. You should also be able to play as a Druid that uses wisdom instead of intelligence, and has a different set of spells. Can turn into a wolf and have a different set of skills to use, can turn into a bear and get different stuff again and different stats. Should be able to heal as much as it can do damage. Should excel at fighting outside using the sun and moon to aid powerful spells. Sun burns their eyes and they attack wildly without being able to see you or anything. Call for the aid of the forest, treants and wolves come to aid you in battle. Etc....
Have real locations and dungeons:
Dungeons should be huge and well designed for a change. Fake walls, fake floors and traps you can fall into. Some enemies should use stealth and make surprise attacks on you. You should get lost in the dungeons instead of just following a linear path in your shitty McDungeon. There should be special 'named' enemies in each dungeon that are really hard to kill, but will reward you with a unique item if you kill them. Not just special gear like a great pair of leggings or boots or a sword or something, but utility items as well: run speed buffs, invisibility clicky, illusions, etc. If you try to kill a named and die and fail, you should be able to go back later when you are a bit stronger and try again. There should varied locations (and dungeons), a city in a volcano that have a master shaman who controls the lava within to protect his city. One wrong step and you fall into lava, the air should be full of sulphurous smoke etc. There should be dense misty forests with forest sprites and creatures hiding in the trees, etc. A desert with stuff that lives in the sand and weird nomadic tribes people who roam it. Vast green planes. A dwarven city chiselled out of the side of a mountain. Etc.
Have fewer shitty fedex side quests, and focus on having a long and interesting main storyline:
The story should be exciting to play. You should be tasked with assassinating someone who lives in a castle keep within a city, and they are all waiting for you. So you need to use stealth or invisibility to get inside the city and carefully make your way to the keep. Mages will be keeping a watch for you and can see through your stealth. Getting into the keep should be a Thief type experience of clever stealth and then you kill your target without them fleeing or calling too much assistance, then you need to escape. Next objective is to recover an item from a dungeon. Next you must investigate a missing person, etc. It should take at least 20 hours and take you all over the world and should be interesting. Stuff like the Baldurs Gate games should be the benchmark for how long it should take and how intricate it should be. The story itself doesn't necessary need to be complex, but the adventure itself should be, and should take you all over the world and do lots interesting things.
It should have consequence:
Get rid of the savegame and load game mechanic. Have it work as a semi persistent world. You attune yourself to a location and when you die, you will be brought back to life there, but you will be weaker for a while and you will lose experience. Dying should actually matter.
There should be multiple companion options:
Say you pick a Mage and find it very hard, you should be able to hire a warrior to come along with you and help out. You should be able to set up how they fight, similar to Dragon Age. Say you pick a warrior and struggle to chop your way through stuff, you could hire a priest to come along and help you with heals. But the downside of this should be that they take some of your experience and require regular payments. This combined with game difficulty levels should let anyone play it, pros can go solo, consoletards can hire a healer to help out.
There should be a prestige race and class that needs to be unlocked:
Only once you complete the game on Normal difficulty, and without using a companion, will you unlock the unique race and class.
You know, stuff like that... a real RPG. It will never happen. No point spending money to design and test all these intricate systems when you can just release a generic hack n slash with dragons that fly backwards, and 12 million people buy it in the first month. To make the biggest selling RPG ever, you just spend all your money on graphics, voice overs, animation, and paying for review scores. Gut all the complexities
