Vaguely adjacent: having recently replayed some of the older Nival (the alumni from which formed Owlcat) titles (Rage of Mages 1 and 2, Evil Islands, Etherlords 1 and 2), it really is remarkable how they carried the same design shortcomings with them through literally decades. Those were (and still are) great games, but boy if they don't have some things that are seemingly not balanced at all or implemented as a bandaid.
The first two have missions where you either cheese/game the systems or die horribly and spells that were either absolutely useless (such as the equivalent of chain lighting they had) or too overpowered to ignore (petrification that allowed you to have an enemy indefinitely stun-locked), Evil Islands is an incredibly detailed concept with some really deep mechanics (the game's from 2001) that ultimately amount to you spending most of the game crawling on your belly avoiding most enemies and relying mostly on sneak attacks because they are overtuned as all hell (in a game that has a spell crafting mechanic and a variety of weapons and armor to pick from, most of which end up being cosmetic), and Etherlords 1 is an MTG-like turn-based strategy game where you build up your heroes' decks by buying spells and runes to charge them on the overland map, but they didn't teach the AI to do that, which results in most missions having the enemies start with ridiculously overpowered heroes that would bum-rush your castle (losing which ends the game), and once you defeat them (by basically rushing to get what spells you could and getting as many level-ups as you can) all the AI can do is summon starter deck users that would just suicide on your then high-level heroes. As a result they just dumped the strategy layer from the sequel entirely and turned it into a linear sequence of battles with some exploration and deck-building involved.
Still, none of the above were as much of a time sink as Kingmaker and WotR. They had the decency to take 20-40 hours to beat with no artificial playtime bloating. They also had plentiful bugs, though not nearly as many (and certainly less than the later Nival titles, which are great too, but very rough and sometimes very interesting in theory but really obnoxious in execution). They really are an antiquated developer.
