RPGs with good ideas that fell short

Which games do you guys consider suffer "great concept but incomplete execution"? My main candidates would be two "Elite with swords" type games.

First Daggerfall, a game that has lots of skills (good), diversity in quests and multiple endings to many quests (great), a huge world whose scale is realistic compared to the NPC coupled with a fast travel system that makes sense (great, maybe even unique), mechanics for faction politics (potentially cool), but suffer from buggy random dungeons (yucks), quests that should be unique that repeat themselves (didnt Lord Kavar die by my hand???), lack of presentation of underlying politics (you never really SEE the relationships between factions), skills that arent used, province politics that arent implemented, etc. Frankly a lot of the problems could be fixed by simply improving presentation…

Then there is Darklands which is plagued by more or less the same issues. You roam around in this cool semi-realistic 15th c Germany, but never feel that the world evolves (this merchant wants to find the Tarnhelm TOO?), and for a game explicitly taking place in a historical setting it'd be nice to run into some historical events like wars…

Well, I believe there are always good ideas within games, but these are always only small details in an bigger game.

What i mean is that there are alwys some dateils that - being bundled together - would be great enhancements.

This could mean for example details of he interface. Nowadays, every game features an automap, but once this was a single detail in the sense I meant.

I just cannot recall examples right now, but I vaguely remember that there had been such details in the games I played.

One example would be the "disintegration" of the end boss in Dungeon Siege - which looked quite interesting from a graphical standpoint. It looked as if the demon or what it was was disintegrating itself meanwhile being beaten. Imagine a cloud ceasing to exist … First, it is a thick cloud, then it disintegrates into single streams. That was basically how it looked like, with a "life-force"-centrer still in the middle, which represented what was left of the demon.

Other examples are the horse-riding in Sacred, and the collection of skill books in Divinity : If you collected a series, you got a new skill for free !

An astonishing example was the disappearance of the compass in Lands of Lore I.

Well, that's for now what I can recall.

Alrik

Fable ……nuff said.

Daggerfall is the perfect example. It was the right direction to take The Elder Scrolls, but it was just too big and too buggy. Bethesda had a great idea but didn't hire enough people or take enough time to do it right. It's a crying shame. Bugs and all, it's still one of the very best PC games ever made, IMO.

Its legacy is already being lost, sad to say. I once commented at the official TES forums about Daggerfall being one of the last DOS games how its memory requirement was a headache for new computer users. An "expert" corrected me, saying DOS had no memory issues and that all anyone ever had to do to run Daggerfall was to go to the C: prompt and type C:\Program Files\Daggerfall.

Daggerfall was a great game as far as I could play it. I really barely got into it because it's one of the few games that actually made me physically ill with it's movement design. I rarely suffer from motion sickness, but I wouldn't be thirty minutes into DF before my head would be swimming and I wanted only to lie down somewhere where the walls weren't moving.

AFA rpgs with good ideas that somehow failed to deliver, my entry would be Wizards and Warriors. An entertaining game with a lot of innovations(at least to me) like horseback riding and really unique races, good challenging party-based play, but numerous game killing bugs--like equipping one of the most powerful items in the game causing your game to freeze and cease It was eventually patched but for me it was too little too late.

Dungeon Lords … but 'fell short' doesn't really cover it.

Agree on Fable, very good example - it was 'good' but could have been great.

Sadly, I have never played Daggerfall yet, and never seen it in a shop, not even on flea markets and in second-hand shops.

I guess ebay is the only source left.

Except Bethesda gives it away for free, like Arena.

Ultima 9, with a nod to M&M 9!! Must be something about the number 9, so watch out Wizardry!!

Gothic3 and Oblivion - The ideas, story, graphics and sound are excellent, but both games suffer in their own way. Gothic I thought didn't have a good combat system, and was poorly optimized. Oblivion had a very simple combat system, which made the game boring after a while.

Originally Posted by Squeek
An "expert" corrected me, saying DOS had no memory issues and that all anyone ever had to do to run Daggerfall was to go to the C: prompt and type C:\Program Files\Daggerfall.

I guess he never played ultima 7 hahahahaa.

I finished daggerfall last fall. Its a decent game if you go it through with a walkthrough in hand. Othervice you just get lost into the dungeons forever. Arenas dungeons were much better, especially the main quest ones.

Originally Posted by txa1265
Dungeon Lords … but 'fell short' doesn't really cover it.

I rarely use this particular bit of net slang, but this definitely qualifies as an ROFL

Originally Posted by nameless hero
Gothic3 and Oblivion - The ideas, story, graphics and sound are excellent, but both games suffer in their own way. Gothic I thought didn't have a good combat system, and was poorly optimized. Oblivion had a very simple combat system, which made the game boring after a while.

Well, these games are both on my list of disappointments, though of different severity Gothic 3 is IMHO only innovative in one sense, and that is the approach to nonlinearity. Good looking graphics are nice but really just something you almost always strive for

As for Oblivion, it took the some good (I actually like fast travel and horses) and some of the worst parts of Daggerfall (random dungeons and over the top level scaling), one part of Morrowind (nice graphics for its time, so called "cities" with ten inhabitants), and added some stupidities of its own like childish minigames and a compass arrow that is necessary to find things. It IS better than Morrowind and Daggerfall on some points, but to me it frankly doesnt bring any good unique concepts into the RPG world. I think almost everything has been done before…

Originally Posted by zakhal
I finished daggerfall last fall. Its a decent game if you go it through with a walkthrough in hand. Othervice you just get lost into the dungeons forever. Arenas dungeons were much better, especially the main quest ones.

Some of the hand crafted dungeons in Daggerfall made sense (Shedungent and the royal castles as well as that place where the blades are held prisoner), but the idiotic random generation routine that just combines whole blocks from the hand crafted dungeons (similar to Oblivion) coupled with a lack of checking whether the dungeons were navigable and the excessive size made most of them quite hopeless. I've used teleport cheats for three other games (in Arcanum, Gothic 3, and Baldurs Gate II it speeds up backtracking a lot), but Daggerfall was the only one that I couldnt have finished without them

There's a demo out for Daggerfall. And the great thing about this is the demo comes prepackaged in (or with?) Dosbox, so you just have to download this demo. And then you can try, at least, the Daggerdall demo.

But yes, after playing the demo, I would agree with you about Daggerfall.

Seconds to magerette's W&W vote.

For original thoughts, how about Arcanum? Unique setting with lots of depth, yet hamstrung by rotten balancing. It coulda been a contender…

Beyond Divinity's "Battlefields".
The game itself was disappointing enough, but when I first heard of these levels with "limitless random quests" I was excited. Then I played it and they were just 4 level boring dungeons that you had to retrieve an item from. Lame, lame, lame.

I think "fell short" is putting it lightly for my choice, but it really had so much potential.

Descent to Undermountain

At the time that it was being created there was a big potential for it to be a true classic. A truly "3D" game based on the D&D license, and in one of the most dangerous D&D settings ever… Undermountain.

I remember waiting for it to come out. I was on the official site all the time reading info. The developers were promising to get so many great new features out of the Descent engine, and they were promising 3DFX support (which was the hot 3D technology of the time).

But then the game shipped… buggy, buggy, no 3DFX support which left it looking drab and pixelated, and buggy. It could have been so cool to explore Undermountain and battle 3D baddies… but the game turned out to be such a stinker that I could never finish it. I really wanted to, but I just couldn't do it (and I've tried several times).

Did anyone here ever actually finish this game… if so was it any fun at all?

Fable..its a shame… A good and fun game, but it could have been so much better…

Deus ex 2. Great concept, great ideas, but ION STORM blew it. Aye Ion storm sucks.

Oblivion…I have ranted enough what is wrong with it.

fallout 3

Descent to UM, was for many years THE shining example of a really crap RPG!! I think it may have lost its crown to DL, but it would be a close decision!!

I would probably pay someone to mod the tedium out of NWN2's OC.

txa1265 said,
"Dungeon Lords … but 'fell short' doesn't really cover it."

Amen to that! I'm still wondering how to get to the "Arctic Lands" mentioned on the game's home page. But I won't go there.

Let's see, no one's mentioned;

Mistmare. It sounded like a great concept and the screenshots looked pretty good. But then you started playing it and well, nuff said.