After so many years of reading books, playing video games & watching movies, certain stereotypes tend to get really worn out, the "save the world" and "amnesiac hero" cliches and the Tolkien based fantasy realms of RPGs started to become boring after awhile. There were always some magnificent exceptions like Darklands, System Shock, Wasteland (and it's direct descendants; the Fallouts) but all in all by the late nineties I had begun to drift more toward Console RPGs; their design was pretty formulaic but at least they took some chances with their setting and stories.