Baldur's Gate 3 - the modern 90s game

[UnderwaterFunktown]

Pemalite said:

UnderwaterFunktown said:

TBH I don't fully get the glorification of 90s games. The 90s had some bangers for sure, but many games were unpolished, unbalanced, buggy (back when most games didn't get patches so you just had to live with it) or just made the weirdest design choices.

And some games from the 90's are still online, still receive patches, updates and content... On PC at least.

StarCraft: Brood Wars comes to mind... As does Age of Empires 2.

I would argue... Games in the 90's were less buggy than today... You only need to take a look at Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 2042, Redfall, Golem, Anthem, Last of Us PC, Fallout 76, Batman Arkham Knight, GTA Trilogy remastered, No Man's Sky, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Marvels: Avengers, various Assassins Cred titles and so many more to see how feature incomplete, unbalanced, buggy and unpolished today's games are.

Back in the 90's games generally didn't need any patches, we could play them as soon as we dropped the cartridge in.

The fact that games like Baldurs Gate 3 is being celebrated DUE to how playable it is on release day is a testament to how quality control has slipped in gaming and highlights a key market issue.

Well I do think it's a bit weird that BG3 is being singled out for being a finished product on release, I wouldn't really consider it a rarity, sure you can list many examples of games that were in a bad state at launch, but there are also tons that were perfectly fine. I guess the scope makes it more impressive to be fair, but I certainly wouldn't say unfinished games have become standard even if there's more of them than there should be for sure.

And I don't really agree with "90s games didn't need any patches", it's true in some cases, but like I said in others you just had to live with it. I've encountered plenty of cases of unfinished content or bugs and if you look it up on the game's wiki it's just sort of like "oh yea that's just a thing".

I do think some modern games have a more lax idea of what a game should look like on release than what was common in the 90s, but far from all of them and I would also say some probably put more effort into polishing the game up than what was standard back then.