Not sure about the mod, but the key to Witcher 2 and 3 combat for me was roll, roll, roll. Evade, attack, evade. Once I got in that rhythm it was easy and fun.

The following games were picked because I had quite high expectations for them, but they failed to reach them and were rather meh.

Odd, I was about to list it as one entry as well.

System Shock 2:

- The gameplay wasn't much fun, many of the enemy types were simply annoying.

- I recall being annoyed by the "levelling-up system" as well, but I don't quite recall anymore how. I think it was something about the points or currency with which you improved your skills or something being quite rare. Deus Ex had a better balance there.

Thief Gold:

- Very poor level design at times. Many of the levels didn't just make much sense, how the corridors went and this and that. Thief 2 was much better in that respect, the levels felt like real houses or real places.

- As in System Shock 2, some of the enemies were annoying as hell, the ones that you couldn't really avoid by sneaking or club from behind, and needed some rare object to get rid of them. This included zombies and some of the undead knights or sorcerers or such: most suggested using water arrows dipped into holy water or flash bombs against them, or sometimes other explosives, but all those were pretty rare and/or cost quite a lot if you tried to buy them between levels.

The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall:

What I usually like the most in old-skool RPGs are the statistics, levelling up etc., so I was expecting Daggerfall will be perfect CRPG for me. Ha, far from it.

- There were just too many different skills, like what is the purpose of swimming and diving being two different skills that you can practice?

- Levelling up and advancing your skills was somehow... oddly complicated. I think many of the skills were practiced by overdoing them (like you should run and jump all the time wherever you go, just so that you keep practicing your jumping and running skills all the time), but then you also had to complete guild subquests in order to... something, I don't even recall anymore. Maybe I just lost interest trying to understand it.

- Most of the subquests meant you need to find or kill someone in a random dungeon, but the dungeons are very hard to navigate and the automap system is completely useless. In my last DF save, I am supposed to find some person in one dungeon, but I have wandered around in the dungeon for many many hours in real time, not finding him anywhere. That's where I stopped playing the game.

- Far too many bugs even with the latest fan-made patches, you falling through stairs in dungeons etc.

- The gameplay, combat etc. is very bad. The way you swing your weapon... aargh. I recall people have complained about Gothic controls, but at least Gothic was playable and its combat was semi-interesting, with timing, combos and shit. Daggerfall's combat is... I don't even know what it is. Shit probably.

I liked even the archaic TES: Arena more because at least it was easier to comprehend, including levelling up, navigating in dungeons etc.

I actually found Ultima 7 to be disappointing, because of the horrible combat and the combination of a bad inventory system and being forced to interact with it to feed your characters.

You see, Ultima 6 did the right thing with food; made it so that you can ignore the mechanic except when you need to rest. In Ultima 7 you can't, and you can't even take the approach of buying a lot of food and forgetting until you run low, as you need to manually feed your characters.

Ultima 8 I didn't even attempt due to the fact that you can't even play as a female character.

Role play as a man who hasn't transitioned yet.

Edit: that's not a joke or a dig. RPGs leave room for our imagination, so imagine you're playing a female in male form.

To alleviate this issue maybe try out the patch GoldToDark which removes the all the new levels added in Gold (The Thieves Guild was where I quit when I played it last)

Prince Of Persia (2008)

- THE most repetitive game I have ever played. They simplified the game way too much, there were less platforming moves than in previous games, you fight only one enemy at the time, couldn't move freely and it WAS ALWAYS THE SAME THING over and over again, you couldn't die, there was no challenge. The game was supposed to be like open world, but you just run around in circles, in 4 circular areas, repeating the same stuff, then you have to go through the same areas with different textures to collect those light orbs. The story was also totally forgettable.

F.E.A.R

- To be clear, it is a solid shooter, but my expectations were much, much higher. I waited since 2005 to play this game and finally played it this year and was really disappointed. It's not a psychological horror in any meaning of the word, it's just a collection of lame jump scares. The only good scene was with Holiday, that was disturbing to watch. Shooting was great, great special effects, AI was good, but with the slow motion I felt too powerful even on hard, and it was supposed to be a horror game, IMO I shouldn't feel like a bad-ass in a horror game. The level design was also EXTREMELY repetitive, office buildings and storage rooms, over and over again... I felt I will never get out of Armacham, spent two days in there.

My top five disappointing games. This is my list of games, I had hopes would be great, decent, or at least a distraction for a bit and turned out to be flat for me. While I'm sure some, maybe you dear reader, enjoyed one or more of these games, they just didn't do it for me.

5: The end of left handed Link in the Zelda Franchise.
- I liked left handed Link.

4: StarForge
- I knew getting it it wasn't going to be the best, I figured it may just be something.

3. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
- Was expecting more stategy, eventually devolved to just run and gun, which wasn't what I was looking for. I hope those that enjoyed it had/have loads of fun.

2. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
- was hyped for this, Figured there would be amazing controls, decent ai system, and the whole map open world like arma. wrong, wrong, wrong.

1. EA's purchase of Bioware.
- Before EA purchased Bioware, I always figured Jade empire their weakest game developed. Now Bioware has made some decent games (I'm sure some will say great) after the purchase, but a lot of them didn't feel as strong as they could have been. I loved the original "Neverwinter Nights", it was delayed a year and well worth it. Of course, if this doesn't count as a disappointing game, then I leave 1 open to the future.

Counter strike - that was the game that destroyed my interest in going to LAN game parties. The reason for dragging your computer to a LAN game party is usually to , i dunno, use it to play games! Not standing around all day waiting for other people to finish the game where you died already. I just stopped going, because why bother? Fxxxing CxxxT of a game.

Civ5 - because of the 2 unit tile limit, that one little thing pulled down a brilliant game into the a black hole of suckville. And 2 unit tile limit dragged beyond Earth into the same black hole along with it - thanks!

This has always baffled me, so I have to ask. What exactly did you personally like about the first game?

Hopefully, it's the LAN/skirmish part, which I can at least imagine generating the type of nostalgia people seem to have for Empire Earth. Because, I found the campaign to be the most generic and boring campaign I've ever experienced. Except for the Russian campaign which, to avoid spoilers I'll say, is just unexpectedly weird. However if you actually enjoyed it for the campaigns... I guess I should give it a second chance, maybe I just wasn't in the mood when I tried it.

As a surprise I actually enjoyed the Chinese campaign from Empire Earth 2.

Final Fantasy 13.

I know that my experience is/was limited, but X & VIII were substantial parts of my childhood. Being able to borrow (but not own or complete) 12(?) & Tactics kind of convinced me that I'd love the series as a whole. I was excited for 13.

The game's opening seemed strong. Incredible-looking world. Beautiful characters. A seemingly deep story that's intentionally frantic & puzzling. I made it to disc 2 or 3 before I realized I didn't know what the hell is going on. I wasn't sure even how to properly "fight." It came to me that I just lucked/blundered through every conflict up to that point because for some reason, I couldn't beat whoever I was up against. When I tried to "change my strategy," I realized that I didn't have one.

The story was still convoluted as hell & I found myself wanting to like & care about the characters, but I never did, really. I quit the game & never went back.

Then they made 2 or 3 sequels? I'm scared off of any newer titles.

Well, I definitely loved the whole vibe and atmosphere of the game, and several of the campaign levels I thought were great fun. But, those campaign levels were specifically from the demo. When I tried to play the full campaign years later I wasn't that impressed. Seemed too slow and the cheating AI often proved to be a pain in the ass. You just couldn't win a war by attrition.
So I mostly played skirmishes, often with a friend, and these made for my fondest memories of the game (even with the cheating ai). It always felt great starting from stone age and working your way up to modern times, but somehow EE2 just didn't manage to make that process feel special.
What I was looking for was an expanded upon and improved Empire Earth, but instead it felt like a completely different game.

Oh yes. Pretty, but so boring. With a forced, illogical bad ending attached to it to disappoint even those players who managed to play through in spite of all the repetition. A huge let-down after the Sands of Time trilogy!

Diablo 3: How was it possible to have the template of Diablo 1 and 2 and just destroy the franchise in every way? This game got nothing right

No Mans Sky: Because shooting rocks and trees endlessly is fun.

Destiny: Buying this game was my fault as Bungie is an awful developer (and I knew this before I bought Destiny The Taken King - the only Destiny game I have or ever will buy), but I have played through Borderlands 1 and 2 several times and I was looking for another Shooting RPG. How do you spend $200 million and make such a small and worthless game? I didn't have very high hopes knowing Bungie, and yet the game still was worse than I thought it would be.

Prince of Persia Two Swords: After how great PoP: Sands of Time is, the sequel was a massive failure. Horrible design, combat, broken levels (yeah if you triggered and event by level 2 by mistake it became impossible to advance and you had to start over). This game was the beginning of the end for the PoP franchise.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that darker themes even have a place in such a series.