Back in 2023, the Game of the Year conversation felt like a fork in the road. On one side stood The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo's massive sequel to Breath of the Wild. On the other side waited Baldur's Gate 3, Larian Studios' crunchy, choice-drunk Dungeons & Dragons epic. Fans argued, critics swooned, and the two games became symbols of something bigger: the rise of systemic games, the kind where the most interesting stories emerge from the push and pull between player and mechanics. By 2026, looking back, that showdown looks less like a one-year spat and more like a turning point.

What Made These Games So Systemic?

Tears of the Kingdom did not just repeat Breath of the Wild. It stacked three richly detailed maps on top of each other, gave players deep building mechanics, and turned item combination into a language through the Fuse ability. Its dungeons were better, its story was arguably the best a Zelda game had ever told, and its sandbox invited players to break it in ways Nintendo never explicitly planned. That is the systemic promise: give players a suite of abilities, then let them loose to make as much or as little mischief as they want.

Baldur's Gate 3 came from a similar place, but with dice, dialogue, and consequences. Larian's game is a sequel to BioWare's Y2K era Infinity Engine RPGs and, spiritually, to the Divinity: Original Sin games. It places enormous emphasis on reactive combat and yes-and-ing player choices, no matter how strange. Romancing companions, onscreen die rolls, extensive character creation, multiple quest solutions, and chemical reactions during battle all combine into something that feels like the RPG as its own unique mode of play.

Game	Systemic Hook	Why It Mattered
Tears of the Kingdom	Building, Fuse, Ascend, layered maps	Proved a dense sandbox could sell to a giant audience
Baldur's Gate 3	Dice rolls, reactive quests, companion approval, environmental chemistry	Showed hardcore RPG depth could break into the mainstream

The Blockbuster Template Started to Crack

For years, the conventional wisdom held that the biggest mainstream games needed to onboard players into an easily understood experience. The Call of Duty games have often been incredibly rigidly structured because of their status as the best selling games in any given year. Often the player is just running down a corridor, shooting, ducking behind cover, and shooting some more. The best Call of Duty levels have messed with that template, but it is still the template.

Recently, though, games like Elden Ring, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Baldur's Gate 3 have put up huge sales numbers while staying incredibly dense and complex. These games are not attempting to replicate the feeling of watching a blockbuster movie. Instead, they lean fully into the gamey-ness of games. They trust players to experiment, fail, and discover. That trust has paid off commercially and critically, which is why the 2023 showdown still matters in 2026.

RPG Mechanics Had Already Taken Over Everything

Baldur's Gate 3 feels a bit like an attempt to reclaim the RPG as its own unique mode of play. Over the years, RPG elements have worked their way into basically every genre. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare revolutionized multiplayer shooters by introducing RPG systems, allowing players to level up and unlock new guns and cosmetics. Over time, that approach took over basically every multiplayer game, with a steady stream of post-launch content for players to work through as they gain XP. In single-player games, the same change occurred. One only needs to compare The Last of Us original 2013 release to its 2022 rerelease, which adds the sequel's workbenches and lets players spend scrap to upgrade weapons, to see the expansion of the need for numbers to go up into every area of play.

The fact that Zelda, historically an action-adventure series, is discussed in the same breath as a hardcore roleplaying game like Baldur's Gate 3 is evidence of how much RPGs have taken over everything. If everything is kind of an RPG, it takes more to stand out as a hardcore RPG for the genre's most devoted fans. That is what Larian has done, developing some of the crunchiest games in the business. Tears of the Kingdom, similarly, goes deeper on all the things Breath of the Wild did, offering a denser experience that nonetheless attracts a giant audience.

Why Players Were Ready Then and Still Are Now

So what does this mean? It seems like a generation of players that grew up on games like Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite, games that facilitate and reward player creativity, have made systems-focused games increasingly financially viable. Those players do not just want to watch a story. They want to poke at systems, build strange contraptions, talk their way out of fights, and see whether the game remembers. In 2026, that expectation has only grown stronger. The audience that learned to build in Minecraft and design islands in Fortnite now expects games to react to their curiosity.

Games are still a young art form. The medium's silent-to-sound moment and the transition from 2D to 3D happened within living memory. No one knows exactly what games will become. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 and Tears of the Kingdom were a blip, a pair of unusually ambitious projects that happened to land in the same year. But maybe they were the future, too. Looking back from 2026, the latter seems more likely. The industry has seen that dense, systemic, unapologetically gamey experiences can stand beside the biggest blockbusters.

For fans of systemic games, that is worth celebrating. The 2023 Game of the Year debate was not just about trophies. It was about what kind of games could be huge, what kind of players mattered, and what kind of future the medium might choose. Enjoy gaming years like 2023 while they are happening, but also appreciate what they leave behind. In 2026, the ripple effects of that year are still visible, and they still point toward a stranger, richer, more reactive future for games. 🎲🗺️🕹️

The following breakdown is based on reporting from The Verge - Gaming, whose industry-focused coverage helps contextualize why systemic hits like Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3 mattered beyond awards: they signaled a blockbuster market increasingly willing to embrace dense mechanics, player-driven problem solving, and reactive design over tightly scripted spectacle.