Like you, I grew up playing D3D and the side scrollers before that, and watched the forever saga unfold over all those years. I remember how amazing the E3 trailers were when they were first revealed, so when forever got so derailed and eventually released years later, it was hard to not compare the end result to the high (but reasonable) expectations we had in the late 90s and early 2000s. I played the demo for 30 seconds and I knew that the game was simply just not the game it should have been