Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat What's the worst RPG you've ever played?

Thanks gods I'm not the only one good to know, BioWare fanbase it's just like all fanbase, every games are good for they..
In any case, I must think about the second not worst at all, but even not a so good title, Fable, I see that title more an action than an rpg, played and ended, but wasn't so much good as the review said, a pretty game and nothing more.

Sacred..umm that game was good, I'm still playing, even if the concept is simple I found more funny than Diablo, too bad that the original concept of Sacred was deleted (class hybridization with a multy class system just like Titan Quest, more reactivity of the world space etc..);
Sacred 2 it's a good game now, at the launch there was a lot of bugs that make the game impossible to be played, some correction patch removed the horse armor, a good point of Sacred, but not necessary, what really scares me is the future third chapter after the change of the brand in relationship at the H&S that they made, Sacred Citadel, I hope that they don't waste a good brand.

fable 3 and sacred..urgh..
Kings bounty was ok but the tb in combo with WAY too much encounters made me give up

-> most dissapointed i mush admit= ego draconis (before dks) was waiting so long on the new game, then it came, and the combat system was ..uergh..luckilly when dks came out i tried again and now it's easily one of my fav games (muchos gracias larian )

The worst RPG I've played in recent years would have to be Skyrim. My main problem is that there is minimal roleplaying. Most of the time it doesn't matter what you say or what you do. The end result is almost always the same. There is only one way to resolve most quests. There is only one way to resolve the main storyline. You could become the grandmaster of everything in the game and save the world and the guards and most NPCs will still be just as snooty to you as they were when you were a nobody (most of the time). For example, if you become the Master of the Thieves' guild, the bartender in the ratway will not stop saying "So you're Brynjolf's new protege eh? Don't look like much to me." Sure, there are plenty of mods that can make it look better and tweak the combat, but the roleplaying and story are flawed to the core which ruins the game for me.

Basically all fake RPGs, that are actually action games with some shallow RPG mechanics painted over.

Worst of all though?

That would be a hard choice since there are several contestants there...

Ass defect 2 and especially 3, although ive only played a demo of the second game and then lol quit after half an hour. The third was sufficiently processed around the internet to not even require playing. Which would have cause internal hemorrhage and probably permanent brain lesions.

I would still go for Facepalm3 by bethesda.

Although wasteland 2 is getting really close to topple that. Looks like it was written by the same team of writers that seemingly work for bethesda and bioware. Or well, actually EA.
But atleast the mechanics are bit better.

I don't think NWN was trying to be the next Diablo. Virtually nothing about it is like Diablo as it's not loot based or combat based so I disagree with your views. The original campaign was lousy but the mechanics of the game were executed well and it is probably one of the best AD&D games that actually works. For the better role-playing experience, you have the final expansion of the game which gives you a great campaign.

I brought NWN well after release when it released completely finished and with all of its expansions so I'm only rating the entire package here.



Quite untrue. If you've ever read their forums, you'll find that you have people there who hate Baldur's Gate especially in the sub-forums for some of their newer games. You also have a fairly large bunch who hate DA2 and ME3.



Ditto, it's also the most overrated RPG in recent years. Skyrim fanboys are the worst too. If you thought Bioware fanboys were bad, you haven't argued with a fanboy of Skryim yet! They literally think that their depthless and shallow game is somehow superior to other RPG's because of its empty open world.

I doubt many of the Skyrim fanboys even have the capacity to focus for more than five minutes which is probably why they enjoy Skyrim so much, the game doesn't require much thought, it's just senseless action combined with very minimal roleplaying and unlike other action-RPG's, it doesn't do the action well.

The writing is horrible too. You expect better from an AAA team with a big budget. Even Dragon Age 2 had better writing and that game was rushed.

It's no surprise that many people who think Skyrim is the "best RPG evar!!11" absolutely despise Morrowind and can't complete it. That's a game with non-linear quests, many of which required thought as there's no hand guiding. Unfortunately, it too suffered from terribad combat but at least it was a good RPG.

I don't think I'd go as far as describing Skyrim as the worst RPG ever, but I was somewhat disappointed with it: I think I have to agree that the writing wasn't exactly up to scratch either in terms of quality or quantity, the landscape was featureless and empty, and I always felt that the grumpy, charmless NPCs couldn't wait for me to bugger off and stop expecting anything of them. Such as a smile, which I think I only ever saw on a single occasion.

But in spite of all that, I still managed many reasonably enjoyable hours of wandering about. Just not as much as I did in Oblivion and Morrowind, both of which I could really lose myself in. Never played Daggerfall, I'm afraid to say, the graphics gave me a nasty headache. Pity, it's the sort of thing I think I would otherwise enjoy.

Oblibliion was much, much worse. And facepalm 3 worse then then that.

Demonic,



A friend of mine had to do quite some persuading to get me to try the expansions after the dreadful first game, but I finally did. They certainly improve, but they still ultimately suffer from the same basic problem: AD&D is a system designed and balanced for a group of roughly six characters. It was an appalling design decision to ignore that and none of the games ever truly get over it. Even Hordes, which is a pretty good game, falls foul of this problem.

While the loot system and combat system are not like Diablo (Obviously, as they are based on AD&D), the basic aesthetic of one character against the world is much closer to an ARPG than a proper party based D&D game. The comparison is not meant to be exact, but rather to be an indication of how badly the designers blundered in making NWN1.

The owners of the franchise must have realised it, too, as the far superior NWN2 is a proper party based game.

Kinda hard to say, there have been plenty of old RPG's in the past I thought were the best thing since sliced bread when I was younger, but if I played them today I'd be horrified. (Lands of Lore series for example, loved them then, can't play 'em today)

But the truly cringe worthy titles right off the bat for me have been:

Dragon Age II

Legends of Dawn

the reworked JRPG Ancient Lands of Y's book I & II (the originals were quite good and not your standard fair JRPG, so they decided they needed to remaster it and make them your standard fair JRPG)

Those 3 I think all tie for worst for me.

All games that are NOT from the Divinity Universe

And YES, I'm serious, but to be honest ... :
it's because of the lack of Time for gaming I've decided (already for a long time!)
to play only games maked by Larian Studios .


They are the Best
For me, to satisfy
My RPG - appetite !

Agreed! I played quite a bit of it I have to admit, but I really didn't like the story. The idea of being a pseudo-Medival Superman-Savoir Jack-of-all-trades was the opposite of immersive for me. I guess I can't relate to that brand of hero. The main storylines were the least interesting - I preferred the weird little tangents.

The wizard college one wasn't bad however, better than the civil war/Dragonborn stories anyhow.

I also didn't realize for a time what bothered me about the visual style - but then I read a review that pointed out that Skyrim's settings were less interesting than previous games in the series because everything was basically some variation of a snowscape. Got a bit bland after a while!

Currently i would say Drakensang, because of the fighting system, maybe i will change my opinion when i give it a new try.

For hack and slash rpgs, would say definitely Loki.

I think Loki is the game devs need to look at to know how to not make a game. The amount of problems this game had, the poverty of dialogs(even hns have dialogs, those in Loki are awful), the quality of the support...

I don't know. Most "worst" or "bad" Game i don't remember. There are only very Few examples where i really hated an Game - like Final Fantasy 3 (and thats one of the more popular ones) or Dead Linger/Stomping Land(no RPGs). Or Ride to Hell, if you played that once, you will see that complain about Games like Skyrim are laughable.

Most Time, if i read such Questions, and see some Answer, i get more the feeling of most People want rant about Popular Games, for the sake of ranting. I mean Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and so on? I mean i won't talk down that some might dissapointed about this Games and i get even the Reason(even though i mostly don't share that) - but to call out this Games, did you Guys actually really play "bad" Games, which deserved to be called bad? I mean like i said, i hate Final Fantasy 3 - but even thought i dislike it, i wouldn't call it as "worst" - because i still can see the Quality behind it. And even if we argue about Skyrim(as example) how bad it might be compared to previous ones, or Divinity, or Witcher 3 - and even if it would be "true", Skyrim is still far away from an bad Game and even Mediocre would be way to much. It still have an High Quality Standart, only goes an different Route.

But im done with my Argument =) I don't want to talk down your opinions, i only want to share my own Viewpoint if i read about such things =)

That's a good point. I've played some RPGs which have made me go "meh" and aren't all they could have been, but I don't think I've played anything that would qualify as being genuinely dreadful (okay, there's the ending of ME3 whose writing really is that terrible, but that's not the whole game). Although I'm fairly easy-going, I don't have endless patience with something that's actually just rubbish, so I think I've probably been quite lucky in that regard.

Part of me thinks I should experience a truly bad RPG just once just to see what it's like. The rest of me isn't too keen on that idea.

I think the only RPG I ever dropped was Arcanum. Game was just too much of a boring combat slog.

Actually, now that you mention that name, I'm reminded of the similar-sounding Arcania, a.k.a "Gothic 4". I remember writing a review of its supposedly early demo version where I said it looked promising... only to discover that basically nothing had changed between the demo and the full release. It was pretty meh, although apart from some really dubious voice acting I still wouldn't say it was terrible, it was just boring. Though given that it was too dull for me to get anywhere near to finishing, I am starting to wonder what I think would actually qualify as terrible... and it has plenty of company when it comes to games I found too tedious to continue, a recent(ish) example being the rather more highly-regarded Tomb Raider.

I mean, there isn't an Problem if you Guys dislike certain Games. That's all about Tastes and Opinion. That's not what i wanted to argue. I simply wanted to Point out, that most time i get the Feeling of such Topics to only rant about Popular Games.

#Arcania:
I can't say much about it. I'm an huge Gothic-Fan, but i didn't have the time yet to play it. I mean from what i've seen, it is an dissapointment as "Gothic" - but it still could be an good Game if i would give it a try.

To be fair to it, it wasn't junk. The graphics were nice enough and so on, it just felt to me that it was somewhat lacking in substance.

Then again, I like Gothic 3 so what do I know? :p I might've taken a different opinion had I played it before its eventual patch to fix its widely reported problems. The only slight oddity with G3 is the almost total absence of female NPCs: I've seen it suggested that they had to get the game ready for distribution before they'd finished, hence the buggy release, and getting the female characters designed and their dialogue recorded was another casualty, supposedly.

Still trying to think of something genuinely and objectively bad that I've played, but either I haven't played anything that bad or my mind has just erased it. I did find one reviewer's vlog of Big Rigs to be particularly hilarious, though.

I've don't think I've played anything really bad either. I will say that the only one I couldn't get into was Avernum but, to be fair, I haven't tried the later versions of it, just the original, and that was extraordinarily dated in all ways by the time I played it. I think they're (or is it he? Seems like a one-man show for the most part) into the third version of it now. I've played Avadon I and II by the same maker and enjoyed it.

Some stick out; as mentioned prior, Gothic I,II, and III are wonderful games and most seemed not to like the series since the original team was bought out but that (and this was said above too) doesn't mean that it isn't a good game - only that it differed significantly in many ways from the earlier ones.

Another that I feel stands out is (after the user patches like the "True patch Gold" or the latest "Unofficial patch basic" have been applied) Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

--- and, of course, we all know of "Original Sin".

Definitively DungeonSiege 1 for me ... The demo of DS2 was okay-ish, same with the demo of DS 3.
I shudder even today because of these games.

And even although I played Blizzard's D2+LOD, I've grown a strong, very strong distaste of it these days. I just can't stand playing these games anymore.

On a similar level, I don't play Action-RPGs and RTS in general anymore. It's just too boring to me these days.

Plus, everything is becoming more and more like "heavy-metal-games" in art, styling and graphics. Awful, in my opinion.
And that based on the strong, very strong asumption of people nowadays that everything without combat, lighthearted in both story and graphics = childish, immature and what not ...

I've been digging out Drakensang 2 in the recent weeks and I'm having a blast ! I totally love this game ...

I'd like to try out Pillars Of Eternity, but for that I need a new PC ...