Fair enough. However in Metal Gear Solid V you can go full guns blazing at the enemy and it's a viable strategy. A brennan rifle can wipe a whole outpost in minutes.

This probably will make me look very weird

Any Mario games
Any Pokémon games
Any Sonic games
Resident evil series
Gta

What really turned me off in Gothic 1 were the fetch quests. So to get to the mages of fire, i need to do a series of fetch quests for people at the Old Camp which aren't particularly enjoyable.
For instance one guy requires me to learn stealth so that he accepts me. But i don't want to be stealthy. I want to pracrtice combat.

According to my review at the time, I also disliked how much running to and fro there was. Old Camp, New Camp, Swamp Camp, go to this guy, come back here etc. Traveling through a world without load screens is immersive at first, but at some point it can get very tedious if you just need to get from point A to point B quickly. And yeah, I'm not really sure I like the quest design in the Gothic games either. I mostly enjoy exploring the wilds on my own. Which in Gothic 2 once led to me clearing out a cave of monsters before I got the quest to do so and then the quest giver refusing me a reward, because there were no monsters in the cave to fight anymore and he claimed I hadn't done anything to deserve a prize. The good thing about Gothic is, you can beat up everyone at some point, if you like, and that guy really had it coming. XD

Now that is some developer foresight. Might not be the best gameplay mechanic, but it's certainly realistic!

As frustrating as the whole thing was, it *is* pretty consistent with the Gothic world, too. I'm pretty sure, even if that guy had known it was me clearing out the cave, he would have taken advantage of me not being able to prove it.

Does the game prevent you from killing essential NPCs (that is, assuming the game has such a notion), or can you make the game unwinnable this way?

No idea. I would assume there are always ways around that, like the killed characters having something in their inventory that allows you to continue without their help. But I don't know if the system is completely foolproof in each and very case. It's not really encouraged either. When I said you can beat up everyone, I actually meant beating up, not killing. Unless you do overkill damage, NPCs just drop to the floor, and you can take their weapon, gold and items, but they'll get up again after a short while, and will then resent or fear you. To kill them you'd have to deal them a death blow when they're down, and everyone witnessing it will scream murder and attack you, and the odds of you surviving that aren't great. If you go around killing people that did not attack you first, the game will become even harder, by a lot.

Stealth genre is ok with me, have fond memories of the original 2 Thief games, and played Metal Gear 1 & Metal Gear 2 without issues.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes was my intro into the MG:S series, turns out I can't stand the overblown Kojima flourishes that other people really enjoy.

Kenshi, I'm sure its a great game but I just wander around the village and leave it on hold.

Elite dangerous. Kickstarted it, bought some season pass 2-3 years later, and haven't even gotten past the docking tutorial.

Battle brothers, I think I've gotten into day 5 or 10 and I end up restarting months later. Saw lets plays, but some how it don't excite me much. But I have checked out the wiki. Just don't get my attention.

Baldurs gate, played 1 in 2002, finished a game in 2012, then restarted twice. Bought BG2 CDs, then EE maybe 2 years ago on a special gog cheap package. I really think I'll just start BG2, might as well.

Twin Snakes (never played it) is often said to be way overblown compared to most games in the series.

For instance, let's compare the first boss fight between games. In the original Metal Gear Solid, Snake hears a gunshot and dodges it. In the Twin Snakes remake, he makes a backflip for some reason.

So yeah, Kojima does have his oddities, but Twin Snakes really isn't the best example.

I am one of those people that doesn't like the overblown, Japanese stuff with 5 metre swords, women in scant clothing, and weird monsters, but Kojima actually has that in a reasonable moderation imho

I bought Yakuza Zero now. Have not gotten around to playing it yet, but my understanding is, that this is its spiritual successor, which improved on the formula.

Oh God the list is endless in terms of popular ones and genres

Metal Gear Solid
MMOs like WOW
RTS
Call of Duty
Overwatch
Left 4 Dead
Half-Life Series
Elder Scrolls
J-RPGs
Diablo
Visual Novels
Starcraft
Civilization
The Sims
Sonic

Oh, yes, you have to. If you want to make any progress, yes, you have to.

The Paradox Grand Strategy games. I love 4x games, but the EU (etc) games just abstract their abstractions into other layers of abstractions and leave nothing fun to play behind. Sadly, I keep trying them. (Imperator Rome...) because I'm a schmuck.

Persona. Many of my friends rave about it, but when their primary element from one of the games is kids shooting themselves in the head? I shied away from that. It also looked like it was a very action-heavy combat system, which is no for me in my jRPGs.

Disgaia. Like Persona, tons of friends rave about it and enjoy many-a-sRPG. I've watch them and, meh. The "pick up and toss" mechanic. The weird color tiles thing. The "grind dungeons inside items to level them up". It screamed "arbitrary" and "padded".

Pokemon. I'm a hair too old (well, at the top end of the age demographic, but grew up poor and rural, so cut off). But looking at it, they seem far too mechanically shallow to enjoy.

The 3D branch of the Mario series. Platforming does NOT work in 3D.

TES, Ultima (and generally most WRPGs). They're just wandering messes of jumbled-together content. And most of them have crap character progression schemes (like "cast a spell to level it up", which also made Dungeon Siege rubbish).