For me, the big one is The Witcher. I finished it recently and have been thinking about why it didn't click for me for a few days now. On paper it's pretty much everything I want in an RPG: deep levelling system, interesting world, lots of content, and really difficult decisions that you need to make.
And yet, it just didn't do it for me. There are a lot of reasons for this: crappy voice acting, especially from Geralt; too long and too frequent loading times, even in the Enhanced Edition; repetitive combat; and awful quest design which resulted in more back-and-forth busywork than Halo 1.
But I've put up with that sort of stuff in RPGs before. No, the big problem with The Witcher, for me, was that I couldn't care less about what happened to any of the characters. It's a risk you take in intentionally making the game dark and gritty, and the result here is that all the characters are either dull as dishwater or massive jerks. The only ones I found in any way memorable were Triss and Vincent, the former because she has a big role to play in the plot, and the latter because of a detail I won't spoil. Even then they still weren't as interesting to me as BioWare's weakest NPCs.
The terrible voice acting plays a role here, particularly with Geralt: if you're going to give your RPG protagonist a voice, which I don't think you need to, make sure you give him one that doesn't suck. And, obviously, it doesn't help that Geralt himself is pretty boring as a protagonist. I can't for the life of me work out why they made him amnesiac but don't allow you to determine his personality in any meaningful way. To paraphrase Doctor Manhattan: why should I care about a world I have no personal stake in?
So, what were the games you should have liked?
And yet, it just didn't do it for me. There are a lot of reasons for this: crappy voice acting, especially from Geralt; too long and too frequent loading times, even in the Enhanced Edition; repetitive combat; and awful quest design which resulted in more back-and-forth busywork than Halo 1.
But I've put up with that sort of stuff in RPGs before. No, the big problem with The Witcher, for me, was that I couldn't care less about what happened to any of the characters. It's a risk you take in intentionally making the game dark and gritty, and the result here is that all the characters are either dull as dishwater or massive jerks. The only ones I found in any way memorable were Triss and Vincent, the former because she has a big role to play in the plot, and the latter because of a detail I won't spoil. Even then they still weren't as interesting to me as BioWare's weakest NPCs.
The terrible voice acting plays a role here, particularly with Geralt: if you're going to give your RPG protagonist a voice, which I don't think you need to, make sure you give him one that doesn't suck. And, obviously, it doesn't help that Geralt himself is pretty boring as a protagonist. I can't for the life of me work out why they made him amnesiac but don't allow you to determine his personality in any meaningful way. To paraphrase Doctor Manhattan: why should I care about a world I have no personal stake in?
So, what were the games you should have liked?
