ES games were always basically AAA games (even first two relatively to what was counted as AAA back then), you just can't overcome the asset requirement to make a RPG in 1st person*. Even isometric Baldur-clones do require decent budget, low cost attempts were many any nearly all if not all failed.
What is pretty mindbreaking is that the bugdet required isn't very significantly differing from 1st person shooter, but somehow for every RPG we got 100 shooters.
ES games were always basically AAA games (even first two relatively to what was counted as AAA back then), you just can't overcome the asset requirement to make a RPG in 1st person*. Even isometric Baldur-clones do require decent budget, low cost attempts were many any nearly all if not all failed.
What is pretty mindbreaking is that the bugdet required isn't very significantly differing from 1st person shooter, but somehow for every RPG we got 100 shooters.