I'm just the opposite, I love creating my own story. Theme park games tend to bore me pretty fast. Battle Brothers still has a great leveling system and the items are perfect. Start with sticks and work your way up to epic weapons.
It's a bit of a jump to think there's only either BB style games or theme park games and that not liking one assumes liking of the other, if that's what you were even implying.
It's not the lack of story that irks me about BB, that's an attractive aspect, the part that irks me is the constant drain mechanics.
Walking cost money.
It's this one specific feature which infects every other mechanic in the game. It's the part that makes hiring guys unexciting because your party will be based on what you can afford. They cost money to buy and then need a constant wage.
Restoring HP is a money drain. So as well as hiring new guys to replace those who died you also have to constantly buy menial HP stuff that constantly drains from your inventory to keep those that somehow didn't die alive.
And then there's even a money drain on looting, as the 'tools' required to make the loot even remotely interesting also drains away after every battle.
And so starting money is now a difficulty setting.
The rewards you get from quests barely ever pay for these drains and it's not so much an adventure as just some guys working for a living. I don't know about you, but when I get home from working amongst grumpy as fuck assholes who spend the whole day gribbling about money, the last form of escapism I want is a grumpy old men gribbling about money simulator.
People keep going on about it's 'down to earth' atmosphere, but there's not one thing down to earth or un-fantasy about it aside from gribbling old men simulation. The land is pure fantasy, the enemies are pure fantasy, the economics are pure fantasy, but it 'doesn't have elves and magic therefore it's 'grounded' ' LOL, yeah, no.
It would be ok if the combat was even remotely interesting, but sadly its not. It's 'realism' is that people die really easily & you can't resurrect them after combat or heal them during combat, other than that it's just D&D level 1 as if everyone is playing a fighter character, but without the sense of character attachment.
For me, the big appeal of RPGs, and any game that involves combat on an individual party-based level, is that the objective is to try and pass each encounter with zero loses. This aspect is fundamentally at odds with the intention of the game, the intention of the game being to completely dehumanise all your little pixel people. To view them as merely costs, either to buy or to constantly pay.
So it's not a party-based adventure, it's a gribbling old men stuck in the 10th circle of hell management sim.
You don't enter dungeons and discover new and interesting things, you don't get a sense of travel at all, you just get a sense of 'blokes going to work 9-5'. And their work is a non-stop repetition of very similar maps providing very similar combat encounters. As if Heroes of Might and Magic had no magic and all the units on the chess board looked exactly the same. Oop, there goes the peasant stack again, there's a surprise… Maybe my second peasant stack will do something different? Well there's a shocker, they died as well, here's hoping my third peasant stack gets lucky… etc.
It might sound like I'm slagging it off, but I'm really not, I'm just putting into words the things that make it so alien to the kind of game I like to play and why it sits so uncomfortably amongst the RPG community.
It's the ugly cynical bastard brother of Stardew Valley. A specific wing of the RPG fanbase finds itself chronically addicted to it like its crack or something while the majority just look on and say "well, it's not really what I'm here for, but I really cba to have this whole what is an RPG debate for the 1000th time, particularly in this day and age of everything being an RPG so I'll just ignore it and hope the fad passes without infecting everything too much" kind of thing.
The amazing thing is, it is indeed very close to being a truly great game, one that would sit well amongst other great roguelikes, if it just tweaked a few things and changed some mechanics. Like getting rid of the money drain aspect… oh… wait… that's it's primary mechanic…
It could be intereting if it had a quest-based structure instead of a town-based structure, so, unlike Darkest Dungeon, you are forced to keep moving forwards, with no hub to return to. But, alas, the game forces you to keep backtracking and keep walking in the same circles you've already walked over and over. So that the money drain aspect can function…
The game is a really good representative example of why RPGs aren't just about fighting and levelling up, even though RPGs seem to be just about fighting and levelling up. And why roguelikes aren't just about being story-less/lite, even though most roguelikes seem to be story-less/lite. This game seems to have found its place among RPG and roguelike fans without really being either, mostly because it doesn't have anywhere else to go either.
It's a hellish cuckoo gribbling old man management simulator that makes hamster wheel mechanics it's primary design feature.
On the plus side, I can honestly say I've never played anything like it before. But then there's a very good reason for that and I hope I never do again.