mystral: The thing is, it WAS a stand alone fantasy game. It has nothing to do with the older M&M games, not even continuity.
It's a damn shame in my opinion that just because it bore the Might and Magic name you couldn't appreciate the game for what it was, and instead condemned it for what it wasn't.
That's just it. I didn't KNOW it had nothing to do with MM. I went in assuming that it did since, y'know, it had it in the TITLE. I played all the MM1-9 games over many many years, so it was well established in my mind what the MM universe was about. I knew what it was, and I cared about it. There was even hope they would resolve an issue from the end of MM7 and hinted in MM8. Finding out DM had nothing to do with MM was a huge betrayal to me, and that hurt.
Further, when you leave the dock with whasserface, you see a map as you travel to the island. I took this to mean that there was much more to the game (as all the other MM games were very large), so I kept slogging through all the tedious island encounters, impatient to get out of the stupid place and get on with the REAL adventure. However, as the island just kept going on and on and on, it slowly dawned on me that maybe this WAS the adventure, maybe all this boring orc killing was the part I was supposed to be enjoying, not the prelude to better stuff.
Lastly, I hoped there would FINALLY be some way of shutting up the atrociously voice-acted Xana. I could. not. STAND. her. I didn't find a way in my first play, so I had to endure her the entire game. Listening to her constant interjections was salt in the wound. GOD I wanted her to suffer.
The betrayal over it not being MM. Xana. My misperceptions that the game was larger and the main course was the appetizer. Xana. Preferring games with deep plot and story and not generally being a fan of FPS and action-RPGs. And Xana. When I reached the end I had long since lost fun in the game and just wanted to hurry up and finish. It's so rare to see any game or movie where you get to be evil, let alone seeing evil win, so I at least wanted that.
Over time I have managed to get past all this and even enjoyed a game or two. As I said, I've gone in and tweaked some stuff to make the game fit my wishes better, but that negative first play really burned me from ever loving this game, or Ubi.
EDIT
Fenixp: I'm of the rare breed which plays videogames to have fun, you know :-P
Freak !