The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2).
Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.
But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took.
Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom.
But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks.
And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.
- Ocarina of Time
- Final Fantasy VII
- Baldur's Gate
- Starcraft
- Metal Gear Solid
- Resident Evil 2
- Pokemon Yellow
If only it was as competitive as 2023, in which some of the top games were:
- A Zelda game
- A Final Fantasy game
- A Resident Evil remake
- A Baldur's Gate game
If you had a taste for a certain kind of game in the late 90s you didn't have many choices that were done by a full studio and polished. Most of the games you listed had the same "problem" of being unparalleled at the time.
Now you have a lot of clones of the same idea, plus so many of the classics are still replayable or remastered and rereleased. A good-but-not-great game has many substitutes with a similar scope and feel.
There are a lot of 5/10 games that are successful on Steam because the devs set the right expectations for the experience.
Recently Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10, but something about the balance of no-effort art and masterful game tuning makes it VERY sticky.
That's fighting talk round my way!
There's something they've got incredibly right between the no-thinking gameplay and the gradual progression through the various secrets and unlocks. I thought I'd grown tired of it after finishing the base game and not being bothered about gold farming, but I bought the DLC the other week and I was instantly hooked again.
I get that the art was a no-effort import, but everything else about that damn game is a good illustration of something that only seems simple because it's exceedingly well done.
In fairness, isn't is specifically meant to look like a ported Italian game with laughably incorrect translations?
One of the most enjoyable games this year for me, and it says a lot (given how many amazing games of all kinds we got this year). And yet, it isn’t overly ambitious. Just overall, that’s pretty much the exact type of a game that you are talking about, which I’ve noticed we had an almost complete drought of over the past decade.
