| Well, there's "Gothic".
Although it's 3rd person and not 1st, the graphics are *almost* the equal of MW. The lighting effects, day/night cycle and weather effects *are* just as awesome.
Gothic even surpasses MW in one respect - the world truly is 'seamless'. Apart from the 2 mines which do load as separate levels, the world in Gothic is one big level. Now, granted it's not as big as Vvardenfell, it's still a sizeable area. Imagine leaving your camp on one side of the map, running across to the coast, jumping in the water, swimming around to a cave in the seacliff, working your way up through the cave to its exit on the clifftop and, then, running around to all 4 corners of the map and climbing up the mountains so high you can touch the Barrier- ALL WITHOUT A SINGLE LOADING BAR!!! Going in and out of building without a black screen/loading bar. You'll be scratching your head and wondering 'howdedodat?'. It really is amazing.
As an added bonus, EVERY line of dialog in the game is voiced, and quite decently, too, although in as a bizarrely wide range of accents as in Wizardry 8.
The story, while not earth-shatteringly SoA/ToB epic, is pretty interesting and engrossing enough to hold one's attention. The game is stuctured similarly to MW - you spend the fairly open-ended first part buffing yourself up, then you must join one of the three camps to continue. (If you save at this point, you can go back and play the other camps' storylines without having to replay the whole first part again.)
The only real drawback is the interface - the game is entirely keyboard driven, the mouse is only used for guiding your direction. There's an awkward default keymap and an alternate (and customizeable) FPS WASD keymap to choose between. It actually works pretty well and comes to feel fairly natural, ONCE YOU GET USED TO IT, which can take a few days. So don't be put off by that aspect of it.
There's an English-language demo available around (gamesdomain, for one) but it's a whopping 271MB - hope you have broadband.
Price should be down in the $20-30 range by now.
I really enjoyed Gothic but, remember, I'm the guy who liked PoR, too.
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free_fall
... and when I look at you I think, if I were a psychopath and we were standing on an extremely high cliff above a pounding surf that would drown out your scream ... well ... you know ...
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