Orv posted:

Let me put it this way. Right at the top of the game, you get the quest from the guy on the road into town about his friend being killed by a bear and would you kindly go look and see if he made it? From the second or third panel of quest text it was obvious that the guy shafted his partner to get the wife and the business, because it's a pretty traditional cliche. On top of that, the game paints the living partner as a very sympathetic guy who obviously could do no wrong. But five seconds of digging and oops, he's actually a giant, murdering rear end in a top hat. That quest encapsulates every quest in the rest of the game. If you're at all familiar with any sort of story telling media, every quest telegraphs its choices, its twist and its endings from the first few lines of each encounter or quest. And there is of course a point to be made for the typical "Well for a video game..." but no other video game has been so resoundingly obvious with every single outcome that the gameplay didn't really push it past those problems. PoE was just so predictable and by the book that I never enjoyed a single story it told.