This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
I don’t think you’d gain much enjoyment of 3 by replaying the originals. The characters that come back are basically just for fanservice and the story kind of acknowledges the premise of the originals but conflicts heavily with Throne of Bhaal. Other than that, there’s just a few written jokes referencing various old characters. So if you want to play 3, just go for it.
All right, I’ll skip the old ones, thanks