I'm strongly against the whole "games don't age" reasoning. The thing is, some people are better at coping with the age. I can't cope with Wizardry's slow gameplay, clunky interface, lack of music and sounds. All those things were taken for granted back in the early 80s.
...
Let's face it, people: if games don't age, we have to accept that no activity really ages, and games were born for a reason: people were bored and wanted something else.
What aspects of games age? Your complaints are about graphics, user interface, and to a lesser extent sound, and the first two have been addressed repeatedly.
Graphics --- to be more precise, the
technical aspects of graphics --- are very much of their time, and improvements in computing power and techniques have allowed for
technically better graphics over time. However, as has already been pointed out, 2D graphics in general age far better than 3D graphics, which even if they looked acceptable at the time are quickly subject to becoming too polygonal and lacking in various other aspects (shading, shadows, higher-resolution textures, etc.) that were added or improved later. Even within 3D graphics, the 2.5D type has aged better than the fully 3D type, which is why Ultima Underworld's graphics are bearable and Daggerfall's graphics still look fairly good whereas most fully 3D RPGs from the 1990s and first half of the 2000s look horrible. For that matter, I thought that early 3D tended to look ugly even at the time, in RPGs and many other genres. If we take Wizardry as an example, I could understand someone finding the black-and-white wire-frame graphics of the original 1981 version too dated, but there are later ports of Wizardry with improved graphics, and even the NES version looks reasonable (and the Super Famicom version looks quite good). There's no excuse for dismissing a game because of graphics in the 16-bit era or later, and many of the earlier games like Wizardry have ports with better graphics, even sometimes on 8-bit machines like the Famicom/NES.
User interfaces, unlike graphics, are not of their time --- if a user interface is good when the game is released, it's good today, and likewise if bad. Certainly, there are any number of CRPGs from the 1980s with clunky UIs but the same is true of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Overall, there was some amount of general incline in UIs (though not to the extent that should have occurred), but that was followed by a general decline. As I'm fond of pointing out, Dungeon Master in 1987 was not only extremely innovative in its UI but the vast majority of later CRPGs have UIs that are noticeably
worse despite widespread copying from Dungeon Master. And a simple, menu-driven interface, though certainly not as elegant as the UIs found in Dungeon Master or Morrowind, is very far from being the worst kind of UI found in CRPGs.
Finally, if you want to have a musical accompaniment to these older games, you can always play music separately from the game. A good musical score can enhance a game, but most CRPGs, recent or otherwise, have music that is adequate at best. And music doesn't make sense for every kind of CRPG, for example those where you need to be able to listen carefully to sounds from the dungeon, from Dungeon Master to Dark Souls.
