I have to agree with the mention of Dragon Age: Origins. To be honest I love Bioware games but to me Dragon Age felt like its gameplay was impenetrable and sluggish and really really hard. It didn't help much that I had to associate the game with a single core of my processor to prevent memory issues and lowering loading times from almost literal hours to 'mere' minutes, but that may just have been a personal issue. You'd expect a game this recent to have proper multi-core support, yeah? Anyway, I played a human warrior and switched her to a damage dealing spec but not before blundering through the skill system and wasting a few points on shield skills partly because the game has the habit of not telling you anything you actually need to know when you need to know it, and partly because one of the first allies you get is a knight sort of bloke that seems to come specced for tanking. Still, once she finally gets to the fighting she swings her two handed sword around so unbearably slow and ponderous it's like she's lugging a fridge up a flight of stairs and even a retard in a wheelchair could wheel out of the way before it struck. Naturally in the space of one swing the much faster hitting enemies can and will hit her like five times. It progressed to the point that almost every encounter of more than three enemies was an exercise in frustration. There was this room full of attack dogs pretty early in that kicked my ass like a million times and I had to carefully bottleneck them at the door opening to finally beat it. The wound system upon going down in combat didn't help either, as it only ensured I'd perform even more shit come next encounter. I couldn't afford buying better gear for my party because most of it was squandered on the many, many healing poultices needed to stay somewhat alive, and when I got to the big city and encountered my first magic wielding enemies, the difficulty went from being insanely hard to impossible.
Of course I was annoyed by my crappy performance and consulted the internet whereupon I found out that one of the characters you could find in you travels was a healer. Oops. Maybe I simply went to the big city to early, yeah? I didn't know, because again, the game doesn't tell you anything. In Mass Effect I also clumsily blundered around and got killed a lot during the first hour of play, but after that the combat system grew on me and I nary ever died again. It was simple and succinct, and became intuitive through repetition, but Dragon Age's interface and skill tree is downright impenetrable. Also, your squadmates in Mass Effect didn't turn into retards the second you stopped controlling or ordering them, and Dragon Age's pre-programmed behaviour editor just went to show that this game was too complicated, and having to micromanage at every turn kind of breaks flow, and anything that breaks flow is bad for a roleplaying game. I played The Witcher too and the facets of its gameplay were actually far more intuitive.
