I never had any problems with the controls, maybe PC gamers have a hard problem playing console shooters but i don't.  Having 16-24 players in TF2 would not of increased the fun of the game, for me anyways, and i never played the game for more then an hour, so i never noticed much lag, and no bugs.

 I've also played CoD4 on a PC and the PS3, and there is no difference for me between the games for the controls.  I have also played Unreal games on the PC's and on consoles and the controls come off as the same.  I have also played doom3 and BF games and there is nothing special about the controls for the PC.

I've played Planescape. 

It's very linear, though. Of course there are choices to be made, but much less than a game like Morrowind, or even Mass Effect.  I don't think you entirely understand the point I'm making, because all of the games you've listed here vary wildly in how interactive they are.

Yes, open endedness clearly sacrifices story. It's simple logic: if the player is making a story (by making choices) then the developer is not telling one. Storytelling is when a person or persons tells the audience what happens, while interactivity is the exact opposite of that -- it's the audience deciding what happens. If the audience is deciding what is happening, that means the developer is not deciding what is happening. 

Again, this isn't rocket science.

Correct. Even Oblivion has a ton of limitations: you can't grow older. Or younger. You can't marry whomever you want. You can't divorce whomever you want. You can't build a house. You can't say whatever you want to whomever you want. You can't be a dog. You can't fly. You can't speak other languages that other people can't understand. You can't be a chair. You can't decide the setting or time period in any way. 

In fact, all you pretty much do is kill stuff and talk to people who say predefined things, and yet, it's still one of the most open games ever. Think about that for a second, and realize how restrictive most games are. They're hardly interactive at all.

Now imagine a truly interactive game, where the choices are almost all the players. Imagine if I could choose to be a dog instead of a human in oblivion: I couldn't speak to anyone else, and the whole story would break down completely.

Interactivity is at odds with story telling.

For those who still fail to comprehend the truth of the matter, consider the extremes.

Imagine something that is 100% uninteractive. In that situation, the storyteller can decide every single thing the characters in the story do -- he can decide what they are, who they are, why they are, where they are, when they are, and what they do. That is pure storytelling. Examples of this include movies and books.

Now imagine something that is completely 100% interactive, where the audience gets to decide all of the above mentioned criteria. Obviously the storyteller can't tell a story in that case, because he doesn't decide anything. All interactions are made by the audience instead. There's effectively no real world examples of this, although Second Life comes close, and one might say "your imagination" is an acceptable answer, too. 

Games today are incredibly, amazingly limited. Even morrowind. Even Oblivion. Even The Sims (Which I actually believe is the most open ended game in existance today). The number of actions you have is amazingly limited (in most games it's usually limited to "kill it" or "have a predefined conversation with it"), the number of things you can be is limited, and the location is almost always fixed for you. People don't really understand what true interactivity means, because we're so distanced from it by these incredibly linear games. 

Having played all of those, I can reply with experience.  FF Tactics is an average game, and I like those types of games.  The other three are horrible.

Yes the other games have a bit of linearity in them, but alot of the stories in those games are not presented linearily: they give you certain points the player has to go/do in order to procede in the story, but what you do in between (and even in those points) is up to who plays. That is exactly the scheme PS:T used since not only you could do whatever in between those 'checkpoints', but you also could change how those same points were done. And most of the story is presented in sidequests and the character interaction is amazing, especially with your party: it truly helps the player have a more immersive experience.

Btw, anyone who played Planescape: Torment without checking the side-stuff should be shot, buried, revived and forced to play it again.

I've not played all them (nowhere near that), but I have played almost all of the so-called great jRPGs, so I have a pretty good idea. I love all types of RPGs, but from my experience Western RPGs are mostly superior to the Japanese counterparts. I don't think there would be a jRPG in my modern top10 (I mean despite the year it came out)

I've actually started playing RPGs because of jRPGs. My first experience was on Megadrive playing one of the Wonderboy games, and FF8 was the game that trully made me a RPG fan and was my favorite RPG for awhile until I played Diablo 2, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum. Western RPGs easily took over my favoritism and jRPGs just seem flawed by design.

I'm a firm believer that a non-linear RPG can have a better story than a linear, because interactivity has a serious hold on immersion.

As for the Witcher, there's a update coming out in may/june that will fix and re-write over 5000 dialogues aswell as voice-works, add 100 new facial animations for a more natural look, and a couple new sidequests, fix loading times and improve combat precision.

@Bodhesatva

The developer's role in a non-linear fashion is to create a consistent gameworld where there's as much choices a player can take as possible. Basically it's just a bunch of linear paths entangled together. The developer still has full control of the storytelling because every single path has been envisioned already by him and he knows how the gameworld will behave from the paths that can be chosen, only leaving to the player which linear path go to. I can't explain it simplier than this.

And yes, we want as much interactivity as possible, as long as it doesn't break the games' world, immersion and believability. That's why we, thankfully, aren't able to turn into a dog in Mass Effect.

As for Planescape, I explained above.

And Oblivion is a Terrible example of an open-ended game:

1-The main story is 100% linear and is a crap story.

2-The side-stuff are also mostly linear (meaning there's only 1 outcome/path), and have crap/boring stories.

3-Add 1+2 and you have a free-roaming game with almost NO real choices. Hell, you can even kill as much NPC's as you want, and you only need to bribe a guard to get the bounty off. "A choice without consequence is not a choice"

Basically, in Oblivion the only tangible choice you have by design is from which order you do the quests.

TF2 is a game where the speed and precision of a mouse are paramount to your success and enjoyment of the game.  With analog sticks, you can't quickly check behind yourself for camping spies or pyros, you can't step out from behind a corner, aim at a far-away sentry gun, fire a rocket at it, and step back before it shoots you, and you can't rapidly zoom in and pick someone off from across the map as a sniper.  The fact that no one else on the server can either prevents things from being too unbalanced, but the fact is, these things and others are part of the gameplay that simply don't translate well to analog sticks.  And 12 people on each team vs. 8 makes a whopping difference in the level of excitement, especially on the larger maps.  16 players is really only enough for 2fort.

Really? Damn.....   Really? Seriously?

 Nintendo is now (didn't used to be that way)

FF games hardly consititute the greatest JRPGs, and they certainly don't constitute the best stories. Especially not FFVII or VIII. If you really want to see a great RPG plot play Persona 3, Breath of Fire 4, Fire Emblem (GC and Wii games), Xenosaga, Odin Sphere, and Xenogears. Out of the FF-style games VI, IX, and Chrono Trigger have the best plots. These games excelled at creating atmosphere, style, and storytelling.

Ahhh see, but I LOVED the classic feel of what originally pioneered and basically maintained lock down on the particular genre. The ONLY metroid I played before prime was Super Metroid, and I LOVED it. It was like my 5th or 6th favorite game on the SNES. But I didn't love it because of the guns, I LOVED it because of the tools. No other game had anything as badass as super metroid in that aspect, I LOVED being able to screw attack with the moon jump through narrow halls with precise timing, I could run down a hall and plasma blast everything OR I could gain some serious speed, stop, and do a horizontal jump crashing endlessly through wave after wave of enemy. It wasn't the guns AT ALL. So the first thing Nintendo does is take it and turn it into a generic FPS. It didn't feel like metroid at all! It took everything I loved from the series and tossed it out the window! Metroid used to be in a genre of it's own, then bam they ruined it for me.

And honestly, do we even need to talk about Star Fox? Adventures was terrible :/

Nintendo did NOT make that leap very well at all, they're entire lineup changed, and it changed for the worst in my opinion. The feel of what made Nintendo gold disappeared and let company's like Insomniac, Naughty Dog, and such win my heart over. I have very fond memories of that one stage in super mario world where you can run/dodge past almost all the enemies on stage till about 3/4th's in, grab the gold P block, slam that shit, make all the enemies turn into silver coins, and just collect life after life after life. It was something you couldn't do in any other game, and it definitely made it feel like mario :P

I guess with the competition being so fierce, I just don't feel like Nintendo has it anymore. I feel they've gone way off the deep end and really lost touch with home, they're games seem to be getting better on the Multi-player front, and honestly that's the only place that feels right for me when it comes to Nintendo.

Part of it might be about vanity :D But I don't have to show off to my friends ;) it's just what I enjoy. Games like Metal Gear solid and Final Fantasy 7 showed me that video games can bring a massive dosage of epic and fantasy at the same time. And after those games I've grown to WANT it, Nintendo does't supply that want anymore, they're still creative and innovative, but that's not what I'm looking for. It's like I said ealier, it feels like the cards they're playing with are amazing, but they just don't have that full deck anymore, I've played many a game that do new things, that are creative, that look better, have more engaging stories, and in my opinion play just as well if not better.

I am still looking for something to fill that void that super metroid has left though ;/ I miss my side scrollers ;-;