>>723490404
Because those lists are dominated by contrarian reactionaries who engage in agenda-based review/critique. It's perfectly fair to point out that VTMB is better than its mainstream reputation; it did a lot of novel things despite its flaws particularly in the roleplaying department. You'd certainly expect an RPG forum to have a higher opinion of it than everyone else. It's definitely a more interesting game than it's given credit for. But one of the top 3 fucking RPGs of all time? You can't just insist that the nonfuctional combat systems that comprise at least half of the total game interaction don't matter.
The reality is that a lot of these forums are frequented and even controlled by seething nerds with a vendetta against the mainstream gamerbros. Which again, it's completely valid to express frustration that larger developers tend to chase mainstream appeal at the expense of niche genre preferences but being a good reviewer means not letting those frustrations cloud your judgement. And we're obviously well past that with most RPG forums. They make it a point to overrate small janky niche games and underrate polished mainstream games because fundamentally they're not interested in objective critique, they're pushing an agenda. If they lie to everyone and say VTMB is one of the best games of all time while Skyrim is unplayable garbage, they hope they can force the industry to bend towards their preferences.
But then you get shit like VTMB2 and Piranha Bytes whole post-Gothic output because it turns out counterculture cred alone cannot overwhelm supreme technical incompetence. Fortunately studios like Larian actually fucking realize this rather than spitefully contradicting mainstream criticism so starting with DOS their games were just unequivocally good on their own merits while still maintaining RPG design principles.
