This is something I found interesting about the types of games that I really enjoy and if I'm honest the games that I find myself keep coming back to are those games that are easy to learn and hard to master. Or if they do have complexity it's more to do with story choices and interesting level design etc. than whatever stats you pick for your character at the beginning.
Particularly with RPGs, A great example of this comparison would be Fable 1 and Diablo 2. There are enough options in the game to keep you occupied gameplay wise and find a style you like. However it's not so overwhelming and pants on head retarded that you could be an autist and end up making an excel spreadsheet comparing all the miniscule amounts of stats to find out which is the 'best' class or stats setup.
I'm also thinking about this in terms of appearance customisation and all that nonsense. I wonder if the RPG development cycle overall for an indie dev especially wouldn't end up benefiting by deliberately restricting the options you're going to have so that you can focus more on the depth of the classes you have and the gameplay. As opposed to having 30+ different builds with nothing to show for it which is what most modern RPGs are now.
As an example instead of the usual 'le modern RPG' setup where you've inevitably got 30+ options in the character selection I'd potentially just have Warrior/Thief/Mage/Cleric. Something I really appreciated for example even though BG2 has quite a few class options is stuff like class oriented storylines and quests.
As always, you are an agent of the decline.
Please tell me you've played more than a hundred games in your life.
Think about it. A hundred. Should seem like a small number, compared to probably over a million games out there. But, be honest. You haven't, have you?
Seriously. Lethn would probably prefer Guildwars 2 over Guildwars 1. He would probably prefers Borderlands 2 over Diablo 2. He would probably prefer Baulder's Gate over Planescape: Torment or Neverwinter Nights. He probably hates Factorio and Rimworld.
Lethn is the world's biggest Beamdog fanboy. The saddest day in his life was when they fired David Gayder.
He is the inevitable result of a failure to gatekeep.
Is he? I didn't know that Beamdog HAD fanboys? I say that as someone who briefly hung out on their forums when BG1EE was first released and owns most of the "EE" releases.
My impression was the general community feeling was thankfulness for Beamdog refreshing the engines, making them easier to run on modern PCs, tablets, etc. The most positive things I've ever heard said about their new content is that it wasn't bad and that most of it was optional.
Not Lethn, but that's an interesting question. How many games have I played?
And what does played mean? I might be tempted to break it out into categories so that "played" means one of:
That avoids playing some game for 5 minutes and it goes on the list.
For me it would be old DOS games, old Mac games, NES, SNES, (etc), PS2+ (etc), "modern" games, phone games, flash games, etc.
I would guess it would have to be 300+, but I have no idea. I could be way off.
My vidya time really tailed off in my 30s.
Edit: My Steam and Gog collections are ~150, but I have definitely not played them all! I might revise my guess to 400+.