Fair enough. I respect your opinion, though i believe that there are folks out there that sometimes set aside technical limitations / bad implementations / bad systems etc in order to experience a particular feature eg the gameworld or the writing.

Arcanum, which i also consider to be one of the best of its kind, didn't have satisfying combat mechanics as similar games had (ie Fallout), but the gameworld made up for this. Still, a lot of folks won't touch it and that's fine by me.

On the other hand, you get bland writing / bad character progression / half-baked story (but with some nice sidequests) / dungeons that all look too samey, even if that is to be expected in a particular region, yet you end with a overally nice and pretty action-RPG game which can be quite absorbing. I'm talking about Oblivion, a game that i've had lots of fun even with all its shortcomings, especially when it's compared to its predecessor.
Underworld is great; this isn't nostalgia speaking, as i've only played it for the first time some years ago.

Fallout 3! Yeah, boi! Bring the hatorade! =P
Life must be incredibly dull as a meatbag.

No doubt! I played and finished Ultima Underworld 2 somewhere in the 90s (the first one wasn't available).
Choices choices... I started Arx Fatalis this afternoon.

Dragon Age is actually very mediocre, it has very bad pacing and it's filled with trash content, especially in its combat design. The romance parts of the game are probably the most cringeworthy aspect of it, and sadly they appear in Bioware games like a plague. It was only celebrated because we didn't used to get a lot of quality rpgs back then, so it wasn't hard for DA to stand out among all others.

I got lost in all the DLC spam. How hard would it be to have a button to fold them.

Glad to see that Ultima VII is on here - an astounding game that blew me away when I first played it long ago (and also when I replayed it a few years ago). Until I played DOS2, Ultima VII got my vote as the best RPG of all time.

I don't really think the POE series is *that good*, Divinity OS 1 and 2 are far better in my opinion.

Also, you should advertise Ys far more, from what I heard/saw it's one of the best JRPG series.

Straight, gay, lesbian, transwhatever, good, bad: it does not matter when you are a monster with tentacles of unknown origin creeping through the ventilation, and you just eat all of the listed (and also unwary scientists and soldiers) without asking who they think they are.

Sigh... if only some people here were as smart as your average ventilation dwelling tentacle monster.

If you haven't tried a mage, give that a try. The Fade is what sold me on DA:O.

It's really not. POE1 is better with the DLC (the DLC being better than the main game) and I haven't completed POE2, but I dunno... it failed to grab me, so to speak.

Pathfinder Kingmaker seems way more interesting.

With respect to Carrion (which isn't an RPG last time I checked, but I'll let that slide for purposes of this discussion):
* Your character (if that's even a reasonable term, but I'll accept it) is not portrayed as human
* It is not even portrayed as something that is intended to be likable; hence the game isn't presenting a bad actor as being somehow good.
* It does not resemble any stereotypes of real-world marginalized people.

So, the argument I've given before doesn't apply to Carrion.

Also, isn't there some strategy game where you play as an infectious disease?

Edit: Why the low rating here? What did I say, in this post, that's inappropriate?

Do you think we could swap her for a ventilation dwelling tentacle monster? Is there a form we could fill out?

Yep.

I'm a bit shocked that Elder Scrolls, particularly Oblivion, are nowhere to be found on that list. I don't mind personally, because I own them multiple times (including physical copies), but their absence in a list of the best RPGs is striking.