Probaby Gothic 3 and Lionheart.
Lionheart 100%. Kids these days think TTON and Wasteland 2 and Pillars were heartbreaking, and while they certainly did not live up to the extreme hype, they’ve got nothing on Lionnheart: Legacy of the Crusader when it comes to the art of disappointment.
Come closer, children, and I will tell you a tale of crushed hopes and broken dreams. For roughly two years leading up to its release, Black Isle had been promoting Lionheart as a kind of medieval alternate history successor to Fallout. It was going to have the SPECIAL system, skills galore, perks, the whole nine yards. You would be able to fight or talk or sneak your way through most situations. It would take place in the 1500s in a version of Europe that had been overrun by demonic hordes, and you yourself would be partially possessed by a demon, which would function as a kind of companion. You would meet cool historical figures like da Vinci who’d play important roles in the story. There would be multiple joinable factions, including the Spanish Inquisition. They had a whole detailed alternate history mapped out that I remember reading and rereading on the old Interplay website. In short, it sounded fucking awesome, even as we knew it would have Diablo style combat.
The great disappointment of Lionheart is that they actually made maybe 15-20% of that game, and I’d argue this is much worse than if the whole thing had been completely botched. They had enough RPG in there to make a solid demo, not great, but solid. However, once you finish that early content, it turns into a third-rate Diablo clone. Imagine if IWD2 had been released with only Targos as its sole hub (and been single character and had much worse combat and writing)—that’s Lionheart.
But because it started off okay, because it got so much hype, we felt compelled to keep playing in the hope that there would be more to it than a Diablo style dungeon crawl. Surely there had to be another real hub, didn’t there? But every time you pushed through another combat level, you just got to the next combat level. That’s all there was.
Normally when I’m a few hours into a game and hating each additional minute of it, I’ll stop playing. Lionheart tricked me into finishing it. In 2003, it was a dark herald of the decline to come, a terrifying microcosm of where the genre was headed.
The Kickstarter revival RPGs try and often fail to deliver on the promise of their predecessors, but it’s not like Pillars of Eternity or TTON give you a decent RPG experience for two or three hours and then turn into a poor man’s Diablo. Imagine if Pillars had come out with no Defiance Bay, no Dyrford, and no Twin Elms, if it was just Gilded Vale and then the endless paths of Od Nua. Then you’ll have a glimmer of understanding about what true disappointment looks like.
