[Mighty Midget]

As for the freedom in DF/MW/Oblivion, it was the freedom to create any character in DF that struck me as the greatest freedom. I never, ever, walked to the next town or dungeoun, but alwasy used the auto travel feature. Honestly, I had no idea you could walk there. I thought the only way to get to another place was by using the auto travel. Only later, when I had stopped playing DF did I read it was possible to walk all the way. Anyway, the freedom in character creation is what (in my eyes) makes DF a better RPG than MW, and what makes MW an role playing game and Oblivion a straight 3D "shooter".

The small world in MW never bothered me really, but I had this feeling when playing Oblivion that I was walking around in all these theme parks. In MW, all the out door locations were sown together while in Oblivion they were on different maps altogether. I believe that is one reason for the crippled magic in Oblivion: You can't levitate because outside the city walls there is nothing, just like Mournhold in MW. What saves MW is that Mournhold is the only place that is cut off from the rest of the land. I choose to see Mournhold as a warning from Bethesda of what was to come in Oblivion.
Neither does a 7 man army really get to me. Let's face it, they are at least 7 and they are living beings. In one RPG I saw, an army would be a single capitalized letter A....