10 Botched Features That Almost Ruined Iconic Video Games
3. Oblivion's Dialogue Wheel
While modern Bethesda RPGs have a speech system that works on chance percentages, increasing your persuasive abilities the more experience points you put into the skill, it wasn't always so simple.
Oblivion in particular had a completely different approach to its speech system, and it was infamously terrible. Instead of working purely on the law of averages, the title had you enter a mini-game where you had to game an NPC by choosing traits in a conversation that they'd be most likely to respond to, in the hopes of getting them on your side.
Also you could just outright bribe them, which most players resorted to when they couldn't get their own way.
It was a needlessly convoluted system in its own right, but it didn't help that all of the NPCs stared at you with their cold, dead eyes, with their robotic faces faking different emotions with every success or failure. It broke the immersion of the world that the game so effortless captured everywhere else, and was fortunately ripped out entirely for all future sequels.