In defence of Morrowind, I have to say that it was a miracle of stability compared to the previous Elder Scrolls games. Daggerfall was criminally buggy. What was worse, once you got all the patches so that you could actually play it, you realized you were better off when the game wouldn’t work. Man, I should’ve put Daggerfall right at the top of my Disappointments list. I waited years for that turkey, and it was one of the worst games I’ve ever played.
Star Wars: Rebellion should be on that list, too. In hindsight, it was apparently an omen of things to come for the Star Wars franchise, but before it was released, the words Star Wars on a gamebox was as good as a guarantee of a quality product.
colour wolf: Your disappointments are two of my favorite games. I’ve spent more time on Civ 3 than I have on the first two combined. Easily one of my favorite games of all time. Not really a “Surprise Gem,” of course, because I expected no less from the franchise. And Wizardry 8 ran really smoothly for me. I loved the tactical element in a traditional first person view, party-based RPG. I thought that was brilliantly implemented.
As for Baldur’s Gate, (brace yourself, this is going to be long) I hated it chiefly because it was billed as being 100% accurate to the pen and paper game, but used real-time combat. Dungeons and Dragons isn’t a real-time game. So, false advertising was reason #1. And then there were dozens of little errors that seem like no big deal but added up to what was, to me, an unplayable mess. The way the game unpaused whenever you opened your inventory, for example. Which meant that drinking a potion in the middle of combat would result in half your characters dying. The unbelievably high mortality rate of your first level characters, especially mages. I don’t think I ever had a mage survive a fight in that game. They’d always take a stray arrow from a kobold and get killed. The fact that I could never even get to any of the dungeons, because I’d always get a bunch of random encounters along the way that would result in a bunch of dead characters, so I’d have to go back to town to get them raised. And the way dead characters dropped all their inventory on the ground, so you’d have to fill up the rest of the party’s inventory with their crap, then try to remember who got what after everyone was raised. The fact that, as near as I could tell, there wasn’t a single NPC cleric adventurer in the entire game. The fact that whenever I cast Fireball or anyother area of effect spell, by the time my wizard was done with the casting animations, all the bad guys had left the target area, and usually been replaced by a bunch of my guys. Huzzah! More dead PCs. Also, the way you could raise any character in the game except the player created one. I spend tens of thousands of gold pieces raising all these damned NPCs over and over, but as soon as I go down, they strip my corpse and leave me for the rats, apparently. And the story wasn’t all that great. Decent, I suppose, but not inspired, and most of the NPC interactions were lame.
Baldur’s Gate II fixed a lot of the minor stuff, like letting you pause the game while you hunted through your inventory. I don’t know if it was improved AI or what, but I had a lot fewer characters wandering into the path of friendly fireballs. Also, remembering the lack of clerics in the first game, I made my main character a cleric, and she was high enough level that she started off with Raise Dead, eliminating a lot of my other gripes. Plus, the writing was straight up fantastic. I loved the story, I loved the NPCs, I cared about what happened in the game world, I could make my own decisions about what path the story would take: everything I wanted in an RPG. Still wish they had dropped the real-time combat, but you can’t have everything. I bought it, fully expecting it to suck as much as the first one (the store I used to shop at had a great return policy) and instead got one of the definitive computer RPGs. So, the second one was a surprise gem.
). Now I’m off to download the Kung Fu mod. Thanks Drastic.