My choice is a game I didn’t particularly enjoy, and that choice is The Temple of Elemental Evil.
ToEE promised my personal perfection:
A D&D game presented in the ‘correct’ module format, rather than an epic for the sake of padded epic.
Vast character customisation combined with a large player party, which could be all chosen by the player from scratch or recruited pre-built from interesting NPCs who’d then convert to player-controlled characters.
A combat system which tried its best to really nail the concept of the D&D turn-based structure, providing finite tactical chance-taking combined with moderate RNG dice rolls and dictated entirely by character build choices from long-term strategical considerations.
The town was littered with interesting and engaging NPCs, all with their own story to tell and potential quests and intrigue.
Once out in the wild, it was wild, with all kinds of weird and unusual beasts interrupting your safe passage.
The quest destination was a dungeon-like labyrinth filled with interesting puzzle-like stuff to figure out while the game’s bestiary continued to expand exponentially without resorting to repetition, the further you went the less and less human everything felt. Like walking deeper and deeper into a fantastical dream.
The journey provided much in the way of loot without ever feeling like it was dropping like rain and without making you feel like nothing was worth looting. Every loot pile could be examined with scrutiny with barely any shrugs of disappointment.
Alas, the game was rushed out the door before completion and was not only buggy but felt half-finished in a lot of areas. I played the game straight from a retail disk and am aware of the Circle of Eight patch but have yet to play that version, and, even with that patch, I’ve already lost that magical wonder of seeing the game for the first time, something that’s really crucial for an RPG imo. Yes, the patch will make the game better, but I’ll still never know what it would have been like to play the game with the patch for the first time.
Also, the game is inherently flawed regardless of patching by it being quite a boring module in the first place, something no amount of patching can cure. All imo on this particular point, of course. But what’s important about the game, regardless of its personal boringness level is what it represents as what could have been:
Over time, say one or two a year, plus copycats, the concept of the module-based structure of RPG’ing could have provided so many interesting and varied modules that, combined, they would provide the same sense of epic as a full, traditionally epic RPG, but just delivered in more manageable, selective, chunks, much like what happened with the Neverwinter Nights modding community (modding here meaning module creation).
Had this game not existed then I’d likely go for a NWN game, Hordes of the Underdark, another module-based RPG which was just so utterly perfect in so many regards but was beaten to the punch here because of the rather awful party mechanics. HotU was so entertaining that I obviously enjoyed it far more than ToEE by a more than considerable margin, but it didn’t feel as ‘real’ as ToEE in terms of what I imagine a perfect RPG to be.