The quality was more consistent. First, the technological limitations were pretty uniform across the industry. It put a cap on what could be attempted, innovated, and what presentation was possible. Second, QA was more efficient and effective. The smaller scope of games and greater necessity to have something ship intact reinforced this consistency.
It was more consistent and the teams were smaller. Star Command(SSI, 1988) was made by two people. Also, the tech limitations weren't that uniform considering you had multiple platforms back then which has recently reared it's head again with consoles. Even with consoles, though, the power of them is on par with a lot of the PCs these days. Back then, you had Amigas and AtariSTs along side CGA/EGA PC clones, computers like the MSX or the BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum and so on, all having different ways of putting graphics on the screen. The amount of sprites each system could display was different, the size of them, and so on. The number of colors per view mode wasn't consistent, some systems were 8bit and others were 16bit. Each computer had it's own set of languages that primary development was done on. OpenGL didn't start development until 1991 and was primarily just for high end workstations.
They really think they can dictate what the audience should like. That's why there's this cycle of "Movie/Game/Show/Comic isn't FOR you, we don't want you as our audience, you're bad people," followed by sales bombing, and then "Why didn't you racist pieces of shit buy our product? This proves we are needed more than ever!"
Anyone remember that old, old interview with Michael Jordan when they asked him why he didn't talk about politics? His answer was, "Because the other side buys shoes too." There was a time that people and companies understood this. And oddly enough, things were much, much less polarized than they are now. Now that things have gotten polarized, companies and the people within those companies can't help themselves from spewing their politics whenever they can, even if it's not relevant to the discussion at hand. And let's face it, typically the side that always pushes this shit is no limit on the amount of crazy shit they're willing to push. They've adopted things that would have been considered universally crazy ten years ago as though they're not crazy today.
Oh yeah, because Arcanum, the very game this one tries to emulate, totally wasn't political at all
This is kind of like how people point to Star Trek today and say that Star Trek was always political. It was, but there's a HUGE difference between the way they handled it back then versus today. Not to mention the writers were a heck of a lot better then than they are today.
I don't think this is just about people becoming more snowflake-y. The narratives are way more hamfisted than they were before, too (because most writers are hacks who can't handle what they're doing properly). They are also very often 1:1 parallels to our MODERN times, even if the setting is completely inappropriate for that. Of course, this caused people to become much more sensitive to any kind of "strong woman" or "diversity" occurrences, but this is to be expected - when you try to shove that kind of crap everywhere, people are bound to get more prone to seeing it everywhere.
Since I mentioned Star Trek, I watched half of the first episode of the second season since it was free on YouTube. I stopped watching it in a scene where they had four people, each in their individual pods, flying through an asteroid field at full speed. In the middle of this, the Strong Female Character decides to argue with the white guy over what he was doing. So, tense, deadly situation, and she picks a fight with him and in the middle of the argument as it's getting heated, he hits one of the asteroids and gets killed. I'm sure the writers were going for, "The black woman is smarter than the white man who died due to mansplaining" angle, but it honestly came off to me as the stupid bitch couldn't help herself, distracted the white dude in a critical situation and he died because of it.
The writers probably patted themselves on the back over this, but I'm pretty sure that in a real world situation in a serious universe, the investigation would have concluded that her argument with him during this was at least part of the reason there was a fatal accident during this mission that resulted not only in the loss of an officer, but the loss of that pod and the equipment it contained.
