Has Modern RPG Design Ruined Old-School Fun?

Games.on.net is featuring a a brief editorial that uses the recently released Inquisitor as an example on how the innovations in RPG design make it difficult to go back to old-school titles, or at the very least, some of them. Here’s an excerpt:

Many of the classic isometric RPGs were, and still remain, rewarding packing their maps with secret locations, encounters and stashes to reward the player for slowly lumbering around, but many others simply used large maps and slow movement speeds to extend the length of the game.

The first mission of Inquisitor – the very first mission takes forever. You can’t go into a town until all of the giant bats in the area have been dispatched. Completing the quest entails slowly walking around the entire map searching for bats, then heading back to the quest giver to check if you’ve killed them all because there is no indicator of numbers or locations.

Character creation is a hit and miss affair that all but entails multiple restarts until you finally work out how to properly min-max a character and you’ll want to min-max, because the difficulty level is such that anything other than Easy inevitably results in death when you meet your first bat.

Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have minded the slog. I would have happily hunted down all of the bats and not batted an eyelid at a single opening quest taking half an hour of aimless wandering and click-to-kill combat but now when the pace and interactivity of even the least ambitious RPG has increased exponentially it’s hard not to look at old mechanics with a mix of melancholy and disdain.

Even the reams of well written, interesting text have begun to grate because I have become so used to voice acting and short, punchy paragraphs and brief snippets of incidental text.