RPGs are kinda shit. They seemed so promising in the early days but they never reached where they were going. The peak in the 90s was decent, but still not great. Generally weak combat, the exploration is a boring and pointless timesink, the characters are all stupid and annoying as are the stories and dialogue, they are mostly childish in tone, they are full of stupid aspie chores like inventory management and looting endless shit, filler quests, etc. They are basically just objectively bad games and people don't want to admit it . They were heading somewhere glorious, but along the way it exploded catastrophically and fragmented into arpgs, jrpgs, mmorpgs, rtwp, diablo clones, etc, etc. and they all suck because there is no core franchise driving things forward. If the M&M series survived, and wizardry, and SSI, etc. then by now the competition would have forced them to innovate them into really great games, but they all died so degenerates like EA and Bethesda can get away with plopping out their endless half baked crap. The whole RPG genre stagnated, tragic.
There are only a few exceptions. TOEE, FFT, and one or two I can't remember.
The saddest thing to me is that even what most people want is probably not even good enough anymore. Even if you got a tactical turn based full RPG, it is still only really retreading ground that we already explored thoroughly 20-30 years ago. And it wasn't even that good then... The best people hope for today is something that was just ok 30 years ago. How pathetic is that? What we need is TOEE plus better tech, a bigger budget, and some innovative new ideas, and that is just so unlikely. Maybe some day, but gaming moves too slowly. It took ~25 years to get a sequel to my favorite game (EverQuest) and even that is an oddity. Say BG3 was a big success then maybe other companies will join in and start trying to innovate in the tactical RPG genre again, but it will take 10 years for that to develop into something similar to 90s era games. Then at least 10 more years to develop into what I've been dreaming of since the 1980s. So even if things went my way, it would still take 20 years to get where I want it to get. That's too slow. I'll be trying to enjoy it with cataracts and arthritis.
There are only a few exceptions. TOEE, FFT, and one or two I can't remember.
The saddest thing to me is that even what most people want is probably not even good enough anymore. Even if you got a tactical turn based full RPG, it is still only really retreading ground that we already explored thoroughly 20-30 years ago. And it wasn't even that good then... The best people hope for today is something that was just ok 30 years ago. How pathetic is that? What we need is TOEE plus better tech, a bigger budget, and some innovative new ideas, and that is just so unlikely. Maybe some day, but gaming moves too slowly. It took ~25 years to get a sequel to my favorite game (EverQuest) and even that is an oddity. Say BG3 was a big success then maybe other companies will join in and start trying to innovate in the tactical RPG genre again, but it will take 10 years for that to develop into something similar to 90s era games. Then at least 10 more years to develop into what I've been dreaming of since the 1980s. So even if things went my way, it would still take 20 years to get where I want it to get. That's too slow. I'll be trying to enjoy it with cataracts and arthritis.