Recently Josh Sawyer made a post about this on Kotaku, about "How to Balance an RPG". He's the lead designer on Pillars of Eternity, a spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate, and that made me sad. BG was extremely unbalanced, and I loved that.
I loved to plan out my party, make solo runs with "bad" classes, to be teased by a weapon that my current party can't equip (and incorporate it on my next playthrough). If you go to hardcore RPG forums, you'll see that I'm not alone. There's a running joke on the RPG Codex that "Josh Sawyer wants to end fun!!1", precisely because of that.
And that's my grudge with modern gaming. Yes, I know that a lot of people don't like that. They don't want to fail on party creation, they want to see all in a single playthrough, they hate cursed items and nasty surprises. But I don't! And for more than a decade, there were no games for those like me!
Take a look at Dark Souls, for example. At people doing runs using only crossbows, at soul level 1, with fist weapons, with silly armors, and all those "badly balanced" choices. They love that! There's a lively community built around that, these are the people that played that game the most!
The fact that most Japanese developers don't adhere to modern design school is why I love them so much. You can still find surprises such as unlockable secrets, New Game+, hidden tough bosses and all those "outdated" things that vanished from western gaming.
That's why I call modern gaming "pasteurized". You say that it became a science, I say that it became standardized. Yes, the designers of yore didn't have unified theories, and that was great; it allowed them to explore and challenge definitions. We had wonders like System Shock 2 precisely because of that.
It was a frontier era, that expanded our horizons to places that we don't visit anymore. And that's a damn shame.
