They promised the best D&D RPG ever, and they delivered it, which, for me, is the fundamental promise. Now, the claim of 17,000 endings was indeed ridiculous, and I never believed it. You can barely interact with Gortash, and overall, the evil route is not fleshed out. But these are minor points compared to PoE. I have a friend who played PoE for just 10 minutes and then discarded it forever, never touching it again. That speaks to how uninspiring it was , probably due to the combat system and the character building alone.