I remember following my dad around a convention center in Fort Wayne, Indiana (I'm pretty sure this was at Hamfest & Computer Expo), looking at cases, hardware, and software for my first PC. We poked around & haggled until we had everything we needed to build it, and I came away with a monolithic gray beast of a Windows machine.
My dad had a PC game subscription where some company would periodically send him titles packaged up in brown cardboard, and he never seemed to have much idea what he was getting. After we built my PC and he had a game come through that he had no interest in, I'd ask REALLY nicely if I could swipe it. The ones he'd toss aside were often RPGs, since he was more of a flight simulator or first-person shooter guy (he kept Half-Life).
One of the earliest ones I was able to snag was Icewind Dale, Black Isle's magnificently crunchy RPG based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rule set. I was locked in. It came with a cloth map of the Ten Towns of Icewind Dale and the Spine of the World, plus a spiral-bound rule book detailing every attribute, spell, and class. I was already an avid reader of fantasy novels like The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore, but I was still totally unaware of its connection to Dungeons & Dragons or CRPGs like Baldur's Gate. Icewind Dale was my entry point into that universe, and it ultimately spelled my doom - I was a D&D and role-playing game dork from then on.
Icewind Dale is wide open, but not in the modern sense of an open world. You're given six character slots in your party, which you can completely flesh out or run with only a partial group; it's up to you. Each character can be any class, any race. An Elf Ranger, a Dwarf Fighter, a Human Cleric. Six Half-Elf Paladins, maybe! This was my onboarding to what I've come to know as foundational tropes of RPGs and adventuring parties. You could even multi-class, becoming a Fighter-Thief or a Ranger-Druid (the latter of which was quite busted in the original release). There are no companions that you meet and pick up along the way as in Baldur's Gate; instead, the group you create and start with is who you'll carry through to the end.
The game has strong writing and a story carrying the player along, but the spaces the characters fill in that story are emergent. I remember desperately trying to keep my feeble Wizard alive, scraping together gold and backtracking to a temple so I could resurrect him a dozen times. During one playthrough, I had an absolutely murderous Terminator of a Ranger, so I exported her as a template and had a party of six snipers, making hay of every threat in their way.
I found the world of Icewind Dale so unique and strange. The icy fishing village of Easthaven, populated by drunk fishermen and scrimshaw carvers, even a Sea Elf singing songs on the shore. Kuldahar, a hamlet nestled in the roots of a giant tree, beset by yetis and the undead. Lizard men, Yuan-ti, and other reptilian denizens worshiping strange gods underground.
The journal-reference nature of the game made for good exploration and discovery. I had to learn the hard way that to kill a troll you need fire, and that a cloud of yellow gas would cause my characters to make "saving throws" (dice rolls) against death. It was a difficult game, but knowledge was power, and reading the rule book, journal entries, or in-game books netted information that increased my party's survivability.
The isometric perspective of Icewind Dale, and more broadly CRPGs, seems to serve exploration and combat as primary interests. But the handcrafted backgrounds and fog-of-war exploration that slowly uncovers them immersed me deeply in the world as I peeled back its layers.
Games in this style are still here, of course. Pillars of Eternity, Baldur's Gate 3, Pathfinder. I'd extend the definition to include Disco Elysium and games in its template, like this year's fantastic Esoteric Ebb. The worlds, dialogue trees, and stories of these games are pre-written, but the roll of dice and how they affect the outcomes of characters' lives ensure an individual's playthrough is utterly unique. There's something undeniably distinct, though, about experiencing a world as erudite as Icewind Dale in a time when access to information and solutions wasn't so readily available. Whatever happened to my characters happened, and sometimes alternative solutions to quests weren't made obvious to me, by design.
Big-budget modern games commonly mistake density and openness for immersion and discovery, key lessons that seemingly just didn't make their way to new directors and designers of some major franchises. Fallout 4, every crevice packed with interlocked systems engineered for maximum immersion, rings hollow for me compared to old Black Isle & Bioware classics built on the Infinity Engine. I could dig into a game like Starfield from the same studio with the same issues, a bigger budget, and even less going on. They feel so gutted of personality, all the edges sanded off and tutorialized - a micro representation of this in Starfield is the whole 'Press Button to Travel To Planet' bit; just utterly abandoning a sense of exploration in space, and then the exploration and discovery provided on the ground of a planet is procedurally generated and inorganic (I think they just patched the space travel in Starfield, as of this writing).
It's difficult to parse whether these shortcomings are inherent to the era these games are made in, or if their flaws run deeper than that. But the secrets and solves for those issues would seem to prove the difference between rote and riveting.
Modern RPGs fail me when they fail to move me to turn pages, and instead have me operating between points of interest. Icewind Dale arrived in a brown cardboard package that my dad didn't want, and it rewired my brain and how I engage with stories in games. I think about that sometimes when I'm standing in a modern open world, parsing a map cluttered with icons - designed to keep me engaged, but failing to enthrall or drive me forward. The best RPGs haven't fed me a checklist. They handed me a rule book and a cloth map, and dared me to figure the rest out.
