D1 IS as bad as I "think". Played it.
Ye, you could not run. At all. That's not a hugh issue though.
Real problems were:
- in Single Player Mode the quests were randomized, and the monsters did not respawn. People only played the mode to aquire a certain quest-related artifact, then they carried their character to the Multiplayer Mode (you only had to copy&paste your files intoa different folder on your machine). Once you've beaten Normal Difficulty you could donothing with your character normally.
- in Multiplayer Mode the quests were not random, most of them you could not meet at all. So trying out all the quests was a nightmare to do.
In Multiplayer Mode the monsters DID respawn every time you entered a game. Your character, and anything you hoarded into the town was kept.
The magic-system was terrible, the shop-system was crap, and the identification-process was a nightmare, that's why the otherwise lame monk of Hellfire got really popular.
D1 of course at least was not the heap of bugs D2 was, but its sluggish gameplay and bad design-choices justmakes it as bad as UFO: Enemy Unknown if you tried to get all the research and get the best crew.
Heck, I HATED that game when after 4/5th of the playthrough it turned out my entire crew was made useless idiots because the most important stat was the hidden psy-resistance #&@!
Total Annihilation - now that was something.
Btw, anyone knows how the level of the original Command&Conquer was beaten where you were with the good guys, had only a repair-pod, no income, no air-unit, and the enemy had a laser-tower?