Elder Scrolls: Arena is new-school: a real-time, first-person action-RPG. Any descendent of either Ultima Underworld or Diablo is a "new school" RPG. (I realize these aren't the first action-RPGs, but they had most obivous influence, especially on PC)

Baldur's Gate is old-school: point-and-click, isometric or top-down perspective, party-based CRPG, and a direct translation of a pen-and-paper game.

I consider action-RPGs and CRPGs to be different genres, representing the new school and the old school, respectively.

Action-RPG is separate from JRPG as well. And somewhere along the CRPG-JRPG continuum there is also MMORPG in-between them, and that's a new school genre too.

Old school RPGs: CRPG and JRPG
New school RPGs: Action-RPG and MMORPG

It's not 2-3 years recent, but there's a game on Gamersgate called Devil Whiskey which is basically Bard's Tale (first-person, text-information combat, dungeon crawler) but with modern-ish graphics. I think it came out in 2000 or thereabouts, and was an indie project, but had high production values for it's type.

I personally love it, but it's very... well old-school, very easy to die, high rate of random encounters, etc.

Personally, i prefer point and click aka old school.
Elder Scroll is nice too, although i always felt that they werent particular hard. But they are also single experience with no party.
I like party rpg's. It just has a certain spin to it.

Good choices here, but it likely depends a lot on what you consider a classic CRPG. Grimrock ain't gonna do anything for you if your nostalgia is more for Baldur's Gate than Lands of Lore.

Fallout and Fallout 2 were my big CRPG loves back as a teen, so the stuff coming from Obsidian and InExile are what I am looking forward to.

Ah, ok, I get it and I can relate to that. It's tough to play Arkania without a pen and a paper nearby unless you've got a very good meomory and don't intend to take longer breaks. So you're looking for games that have e.g. more helpful maps and quest logs. Hm.

In that case, I concur with what others have mostly suggested already:

Avadon: The Black Fortress (2011)
(map & quest log, plus the rules are not complicated at all, so it's easy to dive in and out of; combat is turn-based; it's pretty long though; somewhat comparable to Baldur's Gate - for lack of a better comparison)

Knights of the Chalice (2009)
(has neither map nor quest log, but then again the areas are very small and hard to get lost in and there are few and very simple quests that are hard to lose track of; combat is turn-based; this is a very oldschool RPG in that the combat, exploration, looting and leveling is more important than the story; comparable to SSI's old Goldbox games, e.g. Pool of Radiance, but much more ease of use)

Driftmoon (2013)
(has both map and quest log IIRC, very lighthearted, focuses on story and exploration; combat is real time and simple; somewhat comparable to Ultima VII)

Legend of Grimrock (2012)
(has optional map, no idea about quest log, but I'd assume you won't need it; probably light on story and heavy on combat and puzzle-solving; combat is real-time; 3D perspective, comparable to Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder)

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S'makh-Daon (2011)
(has a map, no idea about quest log; lighthearted and silly / parodistic; combat is turn-based; 3D perspective, comparable to Wizardry VIII)

Other indie RPGs that might be worth a look but which I'm not that familiar with are Teudogar and the Alliance with Rome (2003, comparable to Ultima VII) and Eschalon: Book I (2007).

And if you don't mind the graphics and sound, you could also check out the free <span class="bold">Dark Disciples</span> series (comparable to Ultima but featuring a quest log).

Of course there are also several classic RPGs from 1995-2002 or so that are more stream-lined than the Realms of Arkania series, but I assume you know about them or they're not oldschool enough for you?

Baldur's Gate, one of the first games which actually started the entire process of streamlining RPGs and making them accessible to wider audience, is more old-school then hardcore, tough as nails FP RPG that actually came out about 5 years before BG? Eh, all right.

Not sure about streamlining so much, Baldur's Gates' implementation of AD&D rules is actually more "by the book" than the Gold Box games, in terms of the classes, the amount of spells and skills in the game. The main problem I had with it is the horrible implementation of AD&D's turn-based combat system within a real-time framework (6 second rounds), it's just plain awkward and never functions the way it's intended to. If Baldur's Gate used something like Dark Sun's combat system, but with better interface and control, it would of been a MUCH better game because combat was the main element of BG.

The second thing I disliked about BG, and where Gold Box did better, was that the main story didn't feel like a pen & paper style adventure at all, it felt like a (linear) fantasy novel, it doesn't give the "sandbox-y" or open-ended feel that Gold Box did, the game right from Candlekeep to final fight with Sarevok felt like a railroaded non-interactive storybook using D&D rules.

I may have imagined it but I'm sure in actual AD&D a spell slot was more 'maximum level' i.e. you could put a level 1 spell in a level 2 slot if you wanted, Infinity engine doesn't let you do that, unless that changed in whatever ed of the rules its using...

I'm not talking about the ruleset per se, BG keeps to that pretty faithfully. I'm talking about things like:

Why did they do that? Well, because real-time approach is generally more popular than turn-based approach. That's not even remotely all tho. Dialogues in the first BG were very simplistic and obviously written so you don't have to read many blocks of text per conversation (thank god Bioware changed this approach for the second game), UI was simplified and cropped so it only accomodates the absolutely necessary needs of the player without giving him any additional options like how long does he want to rest etc. Just as a sidenote, I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that BG was one of the fists real steps on the road to Mass Effect.