It was really a recurring theme with Origin at its height... games that simultaneously combined being staggeringly ahead of their times with bizarrely broken mechanics, and at release time, generally code that barely ran on the best computers of the time.

The Ultima 7 games, for instance, are both fantastic role-playing stories with deep adult stories that could stand with anything made today, and are also enormous recursive fetch quests of the worst kind that I could never play again now.

There were many great studios at the time of Origin's heyday, but Origin has to be one of the most interesting. Almost every game they made was like somebody time traveled back from the future and was desperately trying to jam a future game on to the primitive machines of the time. (The Ultima Underworlds also come to mind for that. Graphically more primitive than Doom in most ways, but in terms of the world and what you can do in it, staggeringly ahead of their time.)

UO is very much a view into the world that could have been, if WOW hadn't come along and MMORPGs became driven by addiction mechanics instead of depth. (I do not necessarily mean that as a perjorative... I take my own hits on the bong of grind-based (J/W/T)RPGs sometimes. But it's a fair description.)