Yeah, I get that. Just wanted to mention that it's a good game.
Not everyone agrees with me, even though they are wrong :o)
If your endlessly clicking you are doing it wrong. Setup your mags with some minor and major spell sequences, position your rogue in hips to take out their Mage etc. Ok it might not be most accurate swat simulator 2, but it still has depth. Also try with solo, or different mixes of parties, an all Mage party can be really fun at higher levels, especially with a wild mage. Personally I quite like the pause function when it goes tango uniform. Now action games that you mention, they get repetitive very quickly, mash a or b button for soft or hard hit...

Aren't there other games aiming to recreate those styles? Maybe Lords of Xulima or Star Crawlers or Paper Sorcerer or Elminage Gothic or Might & Magic X or something (sorry if those I picked aren't ideal choices, I'm just not interested enough in this subgenre myself to make good suggestions, but it seems to me that devs are still creating these types of games as well).

Because, I get it, contrary to lots of other RPG enthusiasts, you aren't interested in story-heavy games that much, you don't like the real-time with pause combat system and its implementation in the popular Infinity Engine games. The developers of Pillars of Eternity were involved with the old Infinity Engine games though and they wanted to make a game that's catering to the tastes of their old fans. So I'm not sure why you'd even bring that up when you're clearly not the target audience for it (contrary to the disappointed fans of the original IE games), and it would be kind of absurd to wish that these developers would cater to your own tastes instead when you never liked anything they made in the past ...

Aren't you meant to play a party of 4, not 2?

The game isn't tactical enough to require any of that. Maybe on the hardest mode with self-imposed limitations like your all-mages idea, but meh. I've never been a power gamer like that. I just want a good, balanced experience and Pillars is just trash encounters one after another.

It's biggest problem is the story and world being so bland though. That was the main point of what I originally said, and my main point of comparing it with Baldur's Gate (which, subjective opinions on its combat aside, had a great story and good exploration).

Oh, I don't disagree there PoE was bland on all fronts. I think BG had a fair bit more customisation of characters than PoE as well, especially with the generate all your party option. IWD was much more infinity engine without the story. Even DA:O seemed a bit dunberd down, just keep clicking through the available smiles on the skill hotbar.

I've experienced plenty of gaming disappointments, but nothing can compare to Fire Emblem Fates. It took me from adoring every entry in the series—even Shadow Dragon—to harboring a great deal of contempt for the developers.

Chopping it up into three different games was consumer-unfriendly to the max, and there are huge plot revelations that you still miss out on if you don't buy even more DLC. The overall writing is the worst it's ever been (whoever did the writing for the Gamecube/Wii games is clearly long gone now, as even Echoes had horribly contrived stuff that was inexplicably added in despite being a remake), the characters are all boring anime tropes rather than viable characters, and the developers doubling down on romances added some serious cringe to the end product. I could also write a book about how much I hate the gameplay changes. Unbreakable weapons are implemented horribly compared to Echoes to the point of rendering "better" weapons virtually useless. Dodge tanks are no longer viable thanks to skills granting guaranteed damage even if an attack misses. Maps are filled with arbitrary tricks and gimmicks, and the difficulty is horribly unbalanced and clearly not designed to accommodate the series' trademark permadeath (there's one map in Revelation where an NPC tells you which doors to go through, and she lies about one of them, causing a bomb to go off and a bunch of your characters to die for no reason other than you not being a psychic). I don't begrudge them for including a no-permadeath mode to helps new players, but balancing the game around it was a middle finger to long-time fans.

Eh, my objective opinion is that Baldur's Gate had great combat and exploration, with mediocre at best story.
(Subjectively, I really like BG2 and many of it's characters).

And I agree with you on Pillars of Eternity, it's the game which disappointed me the most.

You can create your starting characters with a perk that grants boosted stats and action points, but reduces your party size by one each.
I went for that route since it seemed thematically more appropriate. Did some reading and it's even supposed to be easier that way.

I see ... But it does seem a possible explanation as to why bad rolls become more critical when you're overwhelmed. I don't remember how turns are handled in D:OS; does it mean that you'll only have two turns vs your opponent's 8, or does it alternate more often when your numbers are lower, e.g. 2 vs 2 or 4 and then it's your turn again, even if there are 8 opponents?

You only get your two turns in that case. However, the combat uses action points like e.g. Fallout and your boosted characters get more of those than they would in a full party. So you don't necessarilly get less "moves" compared to a full party and it should roughly balance out.

To be fair I haven't played Baldur's Gate in 10 years or more, so who knows how rose-tinted my glasses are.

Ultima 9 ...

I don't understand the flak PoE gets... the party member's stories were shallow and short for the most part, but I liked the main story a lot, and also the DLC. Almost up to par to BG2/ToB, and definitely better than BG1 or IWD. (PS:T is another league...)

But on-topic:

I rarely get disappointed by games I buy since I almost never pre-order or buy at day one, so I'm almost always warned by reviews or nowadays comments on the internet.

However here are a few examples:

Turrican 3 - T1+2 having been among my favourite Amiga games back in the day I couldn't wait to lay my hands on T3 finally. Took me 3(!) tries to beat it (for the youngsters: lose all lives and you start over - arcade game, saves or checkpoints hadn't been invented yet ;-)). And they had replaces the cool lighting gun (T1) and flamethrower (T2) with a rope?
Ok, T3 is still a very good jump'n'shoot game with awesome music and it's kind of inexplicable they put the whole game on one 880 kByte Amiga diskette - but it was just too easy. So if you're ever inclined to re-live the history and awesomeness that Turrican is - start with 3 - it's the easiest of the trilogy.

Frontier - First Encounters - I loved Frontier - Elite 2 on my Amiga to death. I don't know how many 100 hours I sank into that game. When I finally got a PC I simply had to have the successor, no questions asked. I mean, it sounded just too good. More factions, a story, events unfolding in the universe, and the Thargons are back!! And textured graphics! Sadly the game turned out to be a broken, buggy mess, nothing worked as supposed and the graphics were actually more ugly than the untextured polygons of Frontier on Amiga.

The Witcher 2 - I loved the first game, then I read the books, and then I loved the first game even more. And then there came Witcher 2. It looked awesome, sounded awesome, played... I couldn't do it. The fighting system didn't click with me at all. It was extremely frustrating. I don't know what it is, since I know enough people who are fine with it - but I couldn't do it.
Gladly, rescue was on the way - Full Combat Rebalance Mod. Using this I could not only beat the game, I beat it on hard because suddenly combat was fun!

I remember playing the demo and it crashed as soon as you tried to interact with someting. From what I´ve heard, the final game wasn´t that stable eihter...

BG2. About 2/3 of the way through I was tired of the save / combat / rest to recuperate / get random encounter while resting / lose three party members because you were interrupted before recovering any spells / reload loop. Happened just one too many times for me. Yes, there is probably some git gud in there. Don't care. It wore out its welcome.

Deadlock, I think(?); ages ago and I didn't play it long. Highly recommended by CGW back in the day so I got it. It bored the crap out of me. A couple issues later they mention, "Oh, yeah. Forgot to mention we liked it more because of multiplayer. Single-player was so-so." Gee, thanks.

Saboteur. The controls felt really sloppy, both in driving and on foot. Didn't get far because of it, game time is short, moved on. Might try this one again.

Titan Quest. I didn't hate it or anything like that. Ran fine, didn't really encounter bugs that I can remember. Expected to be wowed but it simply didn't leave much of an impression.