I’ve played some old Silver Box Dungeons and Dragons games (Heroes of the Lance, Dragons of Flame and Shadow Sorcerer) I got from a GOG promotion who knows how long ago. Stuff from 1988-1990. My god, those games suck HARD. Granted, PCs didn’t have much in terms of “good real time action games”, but those just feel awful from start to finish. The fact that increasing cycles or adding frameskips in DOSBox doesn’t speed up the games doesn’t help, either.
Shadow Sorcerer isn’t as bad as the previous 2, no longer being a side scroller and being real time tactics, but it doesn’t quite cut it.
If you want Star Wars with actual saber combat, try the old Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy games. Neither should be too long, but I think JA is easier overall, as levels tend to be pretty straightforward and you start as padawan with a saber. Fighting against multiplayer bots in both games can be fun, too.
Spyro and Crash trilogies on the PSX, as well as the Quake 2 port, would definitely merit being called technical masterpieces
On the original Xbox, Phantom Dust would fit that bill, despite being a commercial failure at the time. The tldr is that you create a collection of spells (attacks, traps, dodges, curses, buffs) and try to grab them and the “mana” during the real time duels, in order to beat your opponents. Terrain is semi destructible and you have to take into consideration the trajectory of your spells - www.xbox.com/games/store/…/9PCDNBHR11MR
Mothergunship is a FPS roguelite, where you get to build awesome-stupid looking guns between runs, getting temporary upgrades while blading everything. It often goes on 80% sales on GOG and Steam
Others mentioned brotato and vampire savior, there are several similar games like them nowadays, you can check their tags to look for more on Steam
Elder Scrolls Morrowind has janky as fuck combat (hidden dice roll to check if you actually hit) and the only way to get better is with higher numbers in your skills and attributes. You can use magic and potions, both of which you can make yourself, to boost yourself to godlike levels
Dynasty Warriors 8 offers several weapons for the characters, plus it lets you equip skills to make some actions better, like higher attack and higher attack while mounted. As soon as you learn how to block for quick camera turns, you’ve mastered the game
For Palworld, a new island takes 6 months, per the article. Probably talking about Sakurajima and the big southern one. That makes sense, since it’s not just putting stuff there and calling it a day on the first finished thing, some level design has to happen so the place makes sense and doesn’t feel super boring to explore.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of “You think you want it, but you don’t” and “We don’t have the code to roll back”.
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being “dead”, thanks to private/pirate servers.
The original Crash played fine, controls were very responsive, but the platforming was unforgiving. To give you an idea, the japanese version of Crash 1 is easier than the USA release, with some levels considerably shorter. Crash 2 and 3 are much easier compared to 1 (my personal favorite is 3, with all the powerups you get after beating bosses and the level variety)
Rayman 1 was similarly hard as fuck, even more so to get a 100%. Absolutely gorgeous 2D graphics that hold up even today. Rayman 2 is worth checking out if you want 3D platforming, there’s lots of that. Can’t talk about Rayman 3 tho, but it does look fun.