but still none of them feeled me with the wonder
Really love your typo there.
Well, maybe not the games are different but you are - or we are.
Looking for some kind of feeling that will not return and can not return. If you played a game like Baldurs Gate in your formative years it invoked in you a sense of wonder that completely transported you into a different world for weeks. Now, you are older, you have less time but you have seen more things, you are at a different place in life and you view these games from a different perspective. You fire Pillars of Eternity up and it somehow fails to bring you back to that place in time, that feeling that you had when you were fifteen and would spend the night exploring the wilderness in Baldurs Gate. You'd help a child find its dog and suddenly it turns into a demon and leaves for another dimension and you with a good cuck of xp, you'd think WHOA! that was amazing! If you were to play it today, you're likely to think 'Hm, that was shitty quest design, I didn't even do anything to solve this quest. And why was my character not more suspicious finding this child here at night?' and you'd analyze it like that and probably discuss it in detail on the Codex. And you'd wonder where the sense of wonder is gone and think its the games fault, but really, maybe its just you who has changed, and it is the context you play these games in.
And this is not to say there are no rational reasons to dislike the big KSs for example. All of them had pretty glaring flaws in at least one core deparment. But the thing is, most of the classics do too; yet we look at them in a different way, we are, at the very least, likely to show much more leniency to them. Maybe part of the reason for this is because our feelings are different. Then we try to rationalize our feelings and explain them with objective reasons.
Nostalgia can be a powerful force.
And I notice one thing in the way I play. I don't - because I can't (have you noticed that a lot of Codexians enjoy games with shorter playing time now?) - sit down for many hours every day, every week and let myself get sucked in into a game world, like I used to. Sure, sometimes there is some of that old spark again but in general this kind of stuff doesn't happen all that often anymore. The kind of feeling where you wake up in the morning and think about the game and what you are going to do and you can't wait to get home and play until late night to beat some boss or find some item. You'd think its probably the games fault that you don't get immersed anymore like you used to ('DivOS has great combat but the story is not good, so
that must be the reasion!') - but it happens with me with old games, too. And not just ones I know already but even classics I play for the first time fail to grab me like they might have done a few years back.
Of course I am not trying to say that invalidates any criticism or that the new KSs are really just classics that we fail to see. I do, too, think that we have seen a bunch of great games but
probably not a timeless new classic, yet. And there are reasons for that. Games
have changed, objectively changed, and you can point these changes out.
But also the context we play these games in today has changed a great deal*. And of course that is also going to change how we percieve them and think and feel about them.
(*And with context I don't just mean age or personal life situation, I also mean the historical context, or the context of your environment; like the exsistence of the internet, our ability to discuss games to death on forums, to watch youtube videos and reviews, to find walkthroughs and all kinds of other stuff online that changed the way we play. Or the overabundance of other games. Back in the day, I would read one PC Magazine, go buy a game after a good review, and then be alone with it for I don't know how many weeks. And unless someone else I know bought it too, I'd be completely alone in the game bubble. And it would be the only game I was likely to buy for quite a while, first cause I wouldn't have more money and secondly cause there were no other games coming out I was interested in.)