Re: Off topic: How are games failing you?
Some of the 'bands (Angband family of the roguelikes) provide alternatives for stat selection: rolling (with target values pinned to certain stats) or points assignment.
I'm going to have to try out Dungeon Crawl. I've tried ToME (another 'band) before, but thought it was a hodge-podge of too many different themes hacked together - quite unbalanced and quite exploitable.
In addition to overhead view, single-character RPGs, I also like turn-based ones with a first person POV and entire parties under player control. The old classic, Interplay's Tales of the Unknown: The Bard's Tale, comes readily to mind.
To answer the original poster's question, I would like to see more turn-based RPGs that allowed for switching between first person POV (with beautiful, 3D-rendered dungeon-scapes and opponents) and overhead view (2D map with either sprites or 3D models for units/characters). Such games would ideally allow multiple players to control certain characters in the same party, or for one player to control the entire party. (There was once an attempt to make a 'band like this; I believe that is was called mangband.) Also would be good to be skill-based (much like the concept of Dungeon Crawl) rather than class-based, and simply have classes be predefined (hopefully balanced and useful) bundles of skills.
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