Hey, at this point probably everyone has played the game of the year (and if not... what is wrong with you?), but I still think I want to talk about it. Because I think there is an aspect of the game, nobody talks about. And this it, that Baldur's Gate III at it's heart is a 90s game. Sure, it uses modern technology and fully taps into it. For instance the first two Baldur's Gate games used prerendered backgrounds and this limited the interactivity of the surroundings, as they couldn't change too much about it, everything that could change would've been an additional sprite layed over the background. But BG III uses a full 3D environment and can change things and therefore add more interactivity. The team at Larian could rely on the fact that the gaming industry has grown, more people playing which allowed them to support a bigger dev team than was possible in the 90s. They used Early Access, a way for publishing that wasn't available in the 90s. They used industry experience in crafting splitting dialogue trees and stuff like that. So sure, Baldur's Gate III is a modern game, no question about it. Yet it feels different. That lead to this infamous comment about raised standards, but I feel that is off the mark. BG III isn't raising standards, it is very much returning to standards which were common in the 90s.

So let's start with the easy one. No microtransactions, no battle pass, no loot boxes, nothing of these extra payed stuff. You pay for the game once and get the full experience. That was a thing in 90s, because the internet wasn't common adding stuff over the internet was nearly impossible back then. So there were technical reasons, but still, BG III does the same now.

Another thing is, that the devs were content to produce content that the player can miss. In many games you get big flashing neon signs to point to content the devs put a lot of effort into and don't want the player to miss it. But BG III is fine with you missing it. And on the first look it seems counterintuitive: would missing content not mean to experience less content although I payed for all of it? Well yes, but you win something else. You win that each playthrough is unique, you win that your playthrough is different than the ones of your friends. You miss the talks about: and how did you solve that, and did you find this? This very much enriches the experience. In other games you wouldn't talk much about it, because you know your friends experienced exactly the same as you, no reason to talk about it. This is not the case here. In the 90s this was more common, partly because of inexperience, game devs didn't had made out all the techniques to guide players, but also because game devs didn't care as much - and I think still don't do. I think it is a manager thing, they payed for implementing the stuff, so they want the players to see it.

Another fully 90s thing is - trusting your player to figure out how to play. I don't mean tutorials, although they are sparse in BG III. I mean... look at all these icons (I think this is from the early access, the UI has changed a bit, but it is not less complex):

Yes, many modern games would shy away to throw that many icons, options, menus and stuff at players. They would streamline a lot of it, cutting out a lot of the options thinking players would be confused or might make decisions that would hamper their playthrough. Basically modern games want to prevent gamers from making errors. This interface is not. This is allowing you to make a lot of errors, but also a lot of clever decisions, of funny decisions. The game trusts you to make these decisions and own their consequences. It will not patronize you. Again something that was more prevalent in the 90s.

Which leads us to the next point: the game is unafraid to be silly or stupid at times. It actually can lean into it. They made voice lines and animation for a squirrel picking a fight with you or smearing shit in your face. Depending on your decisions. In many modern games the character and their decisions are carefully crafted and they do exactly what the dev team wanted at all times. Can you expect Kratos to run away crying? Or Master Chief making a silly dance? Well, with mods maybe. In Baldur's Gate III you can do silly shit - vanilla (mods will surely come to crank the volume up to eleven). Consider this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmZFxAqZKuU

Also the game puts a lot of effort into it, to make something out of every decision the player makes. That isn't per se a 90s thing, but still something very notable about the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZsaGXFqPw

And there you have it, like 90s games no microtransactions, missable content, trusting the player with many options, unafraid to be silly. Baldur's Gate III is the modern 90s game. Let us all enjoy it toroughly.

I'm waiting for the PS5 version and expecting the controls to be good to play

Sometimes PC games don't play good without a keyboard, I hope it's not the case here

Well, keyboard is not the important point here, although memorizing a few keys may very well improve your life. But using a mouse is very much great. The controller controls are sufficient, you can play the game, but it is not as good as with the mouse. And really it is no big problem. I tend to play stuff on the platform they fit best to, and in case of Baldur's Gate 3 that is the PC.

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.

I can obviously agree that games being more complete upon release is a nice thing, in the sense that there was no content sold seperately (except for the occasional substantial expansion), but on the other hand games were often made on a super tight schedule back then which definitely shows imo. Also allowing the player to make mistakes is one thing, but some games basicly let you get stuck in a loss state (either directly or indirectly) unless you had a backup save, so I'd definitely say there's a limit to when that's a positive.

As for the other points I think they're more genre dependant than anything. I'm playing Disco Elysium (from 2019) right now and it ticks pretty much the same boxes.

Not saying 90s games were bad by any means, there are many that I like a lot (unlike 80s games which I rarely ever enjoy), but on average I'd say games improved in the 00s, 10s and 20s even if industry practices (generally) have gone downhill in the latter two. Guess it's also to some extent a generational thing though, the 00s is where most of my nostalgia lies.

I believe 90s were good when it comes to 2D gaming and PC gaming, but early 3D games from the 90s are close to unplayable. Very few of them are any good. 00s is for sure a great improvement, I remember playing on PS2 and the 3D games were finally viable because devs could figure out how to actually design controls and environments to make the game fun. On PS1/N64 generation the best games were either 2D or 3D games that relied heavily on 2D sections. And even then, it was not uncommon for PS2 games to also be very lucky and unsatisfactory to play, not to say very restrictive as well 

As a kid gaming was always a second tier entertainment for me, it was fun just not my main hobby. 20 years later I can say that I enjoy gaming quite more than as a kid, and this is mostly thanks to the improvements from the 00s that allowed to make the majority of games to be enjoyable rather than a collection of just a few per generation. 

I understand the arguments that the 2000s was the only last innovative generation and the 10s and 20s are just iterative improvements over the 2000s, but I honestly think this is a very shortsigned vision. The 00s was the last innovative generation because it was the generation where innovation had a final lasting impact. Sometimes it takes time to figure out the best design approaches and the 2000s was the decade where design philosophy and gaming engines started to finally be polished and high quality enough for devs to stick with them rather than asking themselves "This is shit, how can I make things better?" Over and over again.

Sometimes the design is just good enough to become the standard for the next decades. It's the case with most of 2000s gaming mechanics. That's why they are imho the best and most important generation. 

Hot take but I believe in 2060 people will remember the 2000s and maybe the 2010s as the definitive decades for gaming, the ones that build the bases for the industry to become long lived and lasting while the 70s, 80s and the 90s will be regarded as "classic gaming" that only the most hard-core gaming story scholars will adventure themselves. Kinda like the movies of the 10s, 20s and 30s are more restricted to academics with lesser broader appeal 

There are few reasons why I think that but they are all related to internet and mobile games taking over. In 40 years we shall see (well the ones who will still be alive) 

Sorry, but Doom, System Shock, Dark Project, Duke Nukem, Heretic, Descent and so on say hello. Console 3D games may have been shit back then, but that is entirely not true on the PC side of things.

I said PC games were good though! 

The 16-bit era was gold. It was an evolution of the 8-bit era, and there were often a great many quality-of-life improvements. So many of those old 16-bit games still hold up exceptionally well. The first half of the 90s is still quite possibly my favorite era of gaming. The fact that 2D games, many of them with sprite-based graphics, are still being produced to this day and doing quite well for themselves is a testament to the staying power of the 2D era, as is the fact that the retro market continues unabated, with new and often high-quality clones of old 8-bit & 16-bit systems having come to market (Analogue's systems are great).

But if you're talking just about Gen 5 games, then I might be inclined to agree to a large extent. The transition to 3D was a very rough one, and few games from that generation still hold up to this day. Developers were trying to figure out something entirely new to them. Certain types of genres that were popular in the 8-bit & 16-bit eras often didn't translate well from 2D to 3D, which resulted in several popular series having their first 3D entries be mediocre to terrible. It didn't help that, with only a handful of exceptions, the industry at the time seemed hell-bent on leaving 2D video games in the past whether they were prepared for the jump to 3D or not, with only a handful of exceptions like Capcom sticking with 2D games with sprite-based graphics for Street Fighter and most Mega Man games.

To be fair, there were some genres where the jump to 3D didn't really impact gameplay much if at all. Turn-based JRPGs like Final Fantasy 7 and Dragon Quest 7 were mostly just presentation upgrades from their 16-bit predecessors. Racing games always tried to fake 3D visuals in the days of sprites, and similarly first-person games were by necessity always emulating 3D visuals even before they moved to fully 3D polygon-based graphics (techniques like vector graphics and ray casting predated fully polygonal worlds), so both genres were already tailor-made for the jump to 3D. But aside from those sorts of games, the move to 3D presented all sorts of new challenges.

For third-person games, the cameras were often quite terrible when they were dynamic cameras, and fixed cameras had their own issues. Poor controls were commonplace, and a good chunk of this was a result of the PS1 starting off with what was essentially a modified SNES controller (tank controls were horrible, despite all the misplaced nostalgia for them). Even after the Dual Analog was released in 1997, controls on PS1 games were often quite rough, as games were still being built with the OG PS1 controller in mind (AFAIK, Ape Escape was the only PS1 game that absolutely required a Dual Analog/Shock controller). Nintendo at least had the foresight to understand the need for an analog stick, though it only had one stick, which wasn't ideal and could pose a problem for some games (the N64's controller was in retrospect quite awkward for FPS games).

Honestly, I always felt like Nintendo and Rare were the ones who, more than any other company, truly understood how to make good 3D gaming experiences in those early days of the 3D era, and many of their N64 titles are still fun to play. Nintendo built their hardware around the games they wanted to make, or at least that very much seems to have been the case.

Of course, over time developers started to get a knack for 3D as gaming moved into the 21st century. Cameras got better. Controls were improved, with the dual-stick setup of "left stick moves your character, right stick rotates the camera" pioneered around the turn of the century by games like Halo becoming the norm for both first- and third-person games (some series took a bit longer to get with the program, most notably Resident Evil). Games with 3D visuals but 2D gameplay have managed to find some life as well, particularly with fighting games and certain platformers & Metroidvanias.

I was talking about a bit of everything really, but I would agree the 16-bit console games (mainly SNES as I have played very little Genesis) were probably the most consistent in quality, and definitely a huge step up from 8-bit both aesthetically and as overall experiences. I do still think a good portion of them had some of the issues I mentioned, but mostly the questionable design choices more so than being unpolished.

Going back to the 90s as a whole I think another thing I forgot to mention was hardware limitations and "growing pains" of some genres. It was probably prevalent everywhere to some degree, but particularly with more advanced genres like RTS. Even if you like them (and I do like a few) it's hard argue that 90s RTS games weren't 100 times more akward to control than later games like Warcraft III or StarCraft II.

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.