Codexers are ungodly old, and as such, ungodly set in their ways, which makes them blinder than bats when it comes to recognising their favourite games' objective shortcomings.
No, that's wrong, and at this point that's a meme, of course we recognise our favourite games' shortcomings, that's just a meme and you know it, absolutely nobody likes the towns of Blade of Destiny, the combat system of Quest For Glory or Ultima and people here keep criticizing the slowness of fights in Wizardry 8, the overall easy difficulty of Fallout, many fans of the IE games still think rtwp sucks, you're wrong, period.
You want to know why I prefer old games? Right, here is a short list :
- First, not typical modern game journalist "RPGs are about dialogs and combat" mindset, who could state Dungeon Master is all about combat while being constantly stuck at the next puzzle. Meanwhile they consider Mass Effect not all about combat while everything else that's in the game is fluff and pure narrative shit, which breaks the game much more than it enhances it and that's without saying that even the combat is just typical shooter thing, if you just want to play a bad role playing game with pregen dumbasses in their annoying heavy story you may as well play Return to Krondor (the game even has some very cool encounters). You've got no idea why we like these old games so you just say "hey you don't see their flaws", no it's the exact opposite, we see their flaws while
you don't see their qualities.
- The notion of fun challenge. A game with a fun challenge is fun, a game without a fun challenge is not fun. Some games are fun just because they are hard and basically nothing else, typically Rage of Mages, Drakkhen, Ishar and such. These games suck, these are the bad ones, they are technical turds, with tons of bad ideas and things done wrong, but the games also spend their time killing you, and that's what make them somewhat fun, seeing how the game will kill you next, and overcoming the challenge. So yes these very shitty games can be fun for a while while Neverwinter Nights or Kotor are boring from the very first second. And I mentioned
bad old games, of course many
good old games also have this fun challenge without being wrong in one million other areas.
- The "What's an RPG" meme. I have absolutely 0 interest in Kotor or The Witcher, to talk about games I've actually played, they are just action games, so that they're bad action games and labelled as RPGs makes them even more hateful to me. I have been playing mostly RPGs since forever, and I like them, don't bother me with that kind of shit whose target audience has about nothing to do with classic RPG audience. The character creation part and the very beginning of Megatraveller are cool, the game is still shit don't play it alright, but at least they certainly like PnPs and they tried to adapt one. You know party creation, stats and so on, I like that.
- In the details I could swear modern devs sometimes have even less of an idea of what they're doing than old ones, which actually had the excuse of trying new things. Modern questing is very symptomatic. Giving you some stackable objectives is alright, especially in an open world game, but I don't need someone to ask me to go and kill any important monster I'll kill anyway because it'll be on my way at some point. Just stack tons of quest, then add a log, stack more quests and just add quest markers and don't even care anymore about text and such ; honestly when you're at that point you should question yourself (of course money tells otherwise, but we're talking about what's good, I don't care about what sells). Modern devs seem to find all the possible ways to break the sense of adventure. Did I talk about Ishar? Well the open world of Ishar is some small compact open world and it is better than most open world out there, and it goes with challenge point above, you need to put things together at some points, it's not a racing game with marked checkpoints.
- Finally quantity, SSI or Origins alone released many games and there was tons of other games released then, and there was some actual variety between small scall puzzle-heavy ones, tactical combat focused ones, open worlds to explore and apprehend without any handolding, even if you think most of them are shit there's a chance your favorites are among them, that does not mean every old player likes every old game.
EDIT : fixed some typos.