Horror Stories

So it is the year 2004. I've finally got Baldur's Gate II copy, but it isn't working, due to the bug in the botched pirate translation, and it was impossible to get untranslated original English version in Russia, because Russian pirates hacked and translated all games into Russian, usually including speech, sometimes using automatic translation tool, and always blindly, without testing how it would look and sound in the game. So yeah, Baldur's Gate segfaulted past the first few areas, that pirates have tested after their botched translation, while I learned a lesson that piracy is bad, and instead had to play Evil Islands (or Allods 3, as it is know in Russia). Evil Islands was in originally in Russian, as it is a Russian game, it was somewhat working, albeit very glitchy and unoptimized (framerate was jumping from 5 to 20 FPS), and it was an ugly experience, pretty much summarized by the following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOCtp94TRSI

If you're designing an RPG, you can get a lot of insight on what makes bad RPG from the above let's play video. In a nutshell, Russian game designers failed to properly balance monsters and playtest their garbage. It had less polish than modern asset swapped indie games. I got childhood trauma from that. It was like being raped by raging pedos (and living in Russia I had an experience being assaulted by a pedo as a child).

BTW, two previous Allods games (sold as Rage of Mages in the west) weren't much better. Basically they were Warcraft 2 clones with ugly graphics and without base buildings. Allods 4 (Allods Online) was an outright blatant World of Warcraft clone with worse everything. Now tell me that I have no right to hate Russians.

Evil Islands is a solid game and one of the few things that ruskies did right.
It's somewhat unfinished, RNG-heavy, and not completely balanced, but is interesting mechanically, rather challenging, has multiple ways of solving many quests, rewards creative thinking, and is still more balanced than D&D games.
It's up there with Etherlords as one of those things that came from russia and made the world a better, and not worse, place.

Though one of its major flaws is very typically russian: a big part of the difficulty comes from RNG, meaning that you can make the game significantly easier by saving+reloading a lot. This is very tedious and not fun at all.
Russians are prone to adding menial work to things they design.