For example in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was not a D&D3 game but a d20 game, aka a very simplified D&D3 that doesnt cost licensing, it was completely pointless to invest in defense. No matter how hard you tried to maximize your armor class, the opponents would always hit you anyway, because of the riddiculously high attack bonuses they would get from their warrior class.
That is completely untrue. Maximizing defence made most attacks miss in KotoR and KotoR 2. As I noticed when I recently replayed them and went full defence (While playing on the hardest difficulty). All my non-full defence characters simply fell instantly while my full defence PC just soloed the entire game without even using a healthpack.
You will get hit some of the time, sure. Blame Nat 20's for that nonsense. But the vast majority of attacks can be avoided.
The game simply offered enough ways to gain defence even with the high scaling of Warrior class BAB (By the end of my runs, I was rocking somewhere in the region of 60-70AC while also dealing more than enough damage to turn anyone into puree because maxed Flurry + maxed Haste for a million attacks is stupid)
This was always a really bad design idea in the first place, and D&D5 thankfully doesnt work that way anymore.
Really, the main thing that such a design fell flat, was it made multiclassing super awkward. Since trying to hit the BAB thresholds for extra attacks was more complicated than simply "I get X level in this class, I get the bonus attack" with of course the reduction in overall attacks as a result (Extra Attacks are mutually exclusive compared to BAB where it simply continued to stack for as long as you could keep meeting BAB thresholds).
Without BAB to worry about it's much easier to put together a build without starting off literally every build with "First, I put 20 levels in Fighter..." and working backwards from there...
