Icewind Dale receives a lot of favor for being a competent fantasy game released in 2000 with the art and writing style that existed in the period between 1996 and 2003. As the Kickstarter revolution proved, you can't go home again when it comes to style, it's just not the same.
I'd kill for more games like Icewind Dale. Almost nobody has the restraint to make them. I can't describe how great it felt to play Knights of the Chalice and see a game that wasn't trying to impress me with its word count. If it had the breadth of classes and production value of IWD, it would be the best RPG ever made.
The Codex darlings are vastly overrated, and the top three games only maintain their status due to nostalgia.
Not true for Arcanum. Others sure, if they didn't exist and were created today, Codex would probably hate them, especially Torment which is basically same shit as Disco Elysium. But Arcanum would be hailed as a masterpiece no matter what. It's a monumental achievement, one of the peak creations of humanity, the art transcending time. It will be as awe-inspiring in 2500 as it was in 2001.
Yes, there are many games that are more fun to play, if we're voting the most fun to play game, then Battle Brothers would be my #1. But Arcanum is so great, because while it does some things badly, it also does some things better than any game ever did, and shows how insanely good could RPGs be, in the right circumstances. It's a proof of concept, showing that pretty much perfect RPG could already be created 20+ years ago, if only Troika had more money to fulfill their ambitions. It's as important today, because it also shows how little love or passion for RPGs still exists in the industry, because evern with budgets 200x higher, top studios are still unable to replicate even a fraction of its achievements. BG3 with their insane budget and time spent on the game, hailed for their "never seen before" reactivity, still doesnt even begin to approach the C&C/Reactivity that Arcanum had. Owlcat with their uber autist over9000 classes Pathfinder games, doesn't come close to the depth of character creation Arcanum offered. Despite the explosion of AAA open world RPGs "See that planet you can fly to it!", no open world game even offered as big and intricate hand-crafted world to explore as Arcanum.
I doubt we'll ever see a company trying to make such a game again. Troika was the perfect storm of ambition, passion, talent, and caring about the right things, they only lacked money. As time goes, even if new companies get money and talent, the market realities will always force them to allocate more and more budget and time to graphics, voice acting, motion capture, and all the other pointless dogshit, hurting the other aspects of the game, so the peaks of Arcanum will probably never be reached again. There was one chance in the history of humanity to make a perfect RPG, and while it failed, Arcanum will forever be a proof that it was not impossible, and serve as an inspiration and a ray of hope to all real, passionate RPG gamers and creators.
