[rsaarelm]

I remember how CD-ROM killed the golden age of the PC computer role-playing game. When people had to make do with text, limited graphics and procedural content generation, we got things like Serpent Isle, Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor and X-Com near the end of the era. Then suddenly you had CD-ROMs to fill with static media files, everything had to look like a movie and now you only had capacity for pretty much one happy path with some half-assed roadblocks put in the way. The mid-nineties ended up being a dark age where people pretty much stopped making games with complex open worlds and many viable ways to interact with things.

Things did start looking up again near the end of the decade with Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, Thief and Deus Ex, only for the XBox to show up to ruin everything all again in 2001.