Recently i gone trough my archive of dos games, most of them from 1990s .
Things which i was amazed by dos games: Music , UI , Video sequences, Artwork example Day of tentacle, really impressive 3D modeling like in game: Decent,
Some dos games really take your full attention.
Even GTA like role play was implemented in the game Ring worlds, where you can switch between different characters.
So there no new innovation in the game industry at all , we just “unknowingly” repeating the same old patterns.
Of course our tools are pretty impressive, so people dont forget about that if your really want to be amazed try to find unknown dos game and play it trought …
I’ve played a few…one of my favorites was Magic Carpet, it was pretty far ahead of its time.
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Destructible terrain. it may not have been the very first game to do it, but even today it is not commonplace, even in 2d games, but it was done in 3d, all while handling 3d fps styled gameplay, multiple AIs, etc…
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Gameplay variable music…the music would get more intense during battle, and chill back out when the battles ended.
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Use of CD media…the game was simply too big for floppy disks, this was when CDs were just getting started to be used for games.
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Networked multiplayer…this wasn’t as common back then as it is now.
It wasn’t just these features though…the game was actually in simple terms tons of fun to play.
Aaah dos games, extended memory managers, conflicting IRQs, those were the days 
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Yeah and i was a kid, my first pc was a 286 then 386 then pentium, then AMD K6 , then first Athlon and now i have both intel , amd, arm we live in very strange times, but looking into the past of our industry is a must, if we dam not to repeat mistakes of the past, we should know it.
There were some legit DOS games. Star Control II, anyone?
I know SC only what Stardock released , bu i watched on youtube the old dos games, another point that dos game really big knowledge material.
My favorite dos game is reunion (done by Digital Reality)
You should try original doom. It is surprisingly amazing.
^^^ Watch health and ammo counters.
Yeah, Mine was a 8086 with CGA graphics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRMrzqKoGpY
Very true, I guess we old timers have some knowledge the kids don’t
I think almost all noteworthy games which I liked were DOS games. Civilization, Master of Orion, Ultima 4-7, Doom, C&C, Warcraft, Quake, Lucasfilm (or LucasArts) and Sierra adventure games. Atari-8 bit, C64, Atari ST and Amiga had some good games too but the most complex ones were usually ports from PC.