I swear you can pick any game relased in the last 4 years and with the exeption of legend of grimrock and none of those games would have the charm and ambence of this game. I wish skyrim had the inventoy system and item interation of this game, I hope Hellraid isn't going to be just a hack and slah FPS even though we all know thats exactly what its gonna be.

If anyone knows a game similar to this aside from System shock 2 (or anything older then that) or Legend of grimrock please let me know

The game is more or less the successor to Ultima Underworlds. The games are old, and show it, so many people will have difficulty enjoying.

I ofrgot about ultima underworld

Well the makers of this did make Dishonored which was pretty good- just not the same kind of thing. Think stealth in Arx Fatalis magnified but minus the open-world.
Hopefully the success of that game leads to an Arx 2. I got my fingers crossed...

How about Dark Messiah of M&M? It has some very cool ideas & some flaws, but is by the same team as Arx and what I played is very enjoyable.

I was thinking more along the lines of fantasy horror atmosphere with slow paced combat like a survival horror, not a faster paced slash em up. Kings field 4 for example but on pc, thats the kind of game I'm lookin for.

I absolutely love Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, it has the best fighting mechanics in any game to this day in my opinion. It really confuses me how it is generally accepted as being mediocre when I got so much enjoyment from it. Although it is not really much like Arx Fatalis other than being first person and in a fantasy setting I highly recommend giving it a go. My one bit of advice is don't choose a magic focused character on your first play through as they are underpowered compared to the others and melee combat is what the game does best.

Well, the story is not very original. The level design and game mechanics are great though. Haven't finished it yet, but I love what I played so far.

Also the target audience is notoriously critical; as a rule of thumb, an cRPG needs to score 85+ metacritic score to start making a profit.

Actually, that's no longer the case and hasn't been for a number of years. Skyrim, for instance, is one such "deep" (although that's arguable) rpg that has sold millions of copies--many millions of copies, actually--and several other games since are "rediscovering" the rpg as a desirable and profitable venture. Dragon Age: Origins was another recent and very successful rpg. There are many more of them that I haven't named, of course.

Further back, the entire Baldur's Gate rpg series sold into the millions, easily, and rpg's like Planescape Torment have hit nerves of tremendous pent-up demand for such games in the game's latest multimillion-dollar successful Kickstarter campaign. There's actually no shortage of successful multi-million-copy rpg sellers, and what's great is the genre is experiencing a definite Renaissance.

What hurt rpg development for a few years, if anything, was console popularity, and game consoles do not have rpg-friendly control inputs--playing an rpg with an xBox controller is not my idea of fun...;) You *need* a keyboard and mouse to do it right.

Anyway, Gog and Steam among other online distributors have revitalized the PC as a game platform--and not just any game platform, but the superior gaming platform (even the new "consoles" are actually just customized x86 PC components suface-mounted on a motherboard--as was common to PCs in the 1980's, etc.) PCs are pretty much making the gaming world go round these days as all of the successfully funded Kickstarters we've seen attest, as well.

I actually think the golden Age of RPGs is yet to come!

I think the golden age of RPG's ended slightly more than a decade ago, not saying we're getting bad games these days but the old ones had something special to them, something.....hardcore.

I've started Planescape: Torment just 3 days ago and just yesterday I forgot what the sun looks like, have probably spent 8 hours on the game. The last time I got this stuck on an RPG was when I played Witcher 1 for the first time last year, I spent 2 weeks going through it.

There are very few games that I can call RPG these days. The genre has been simplified to accommodate today's gaming generation in a sort of way, which leaves the old school ones a bit in the dark.

Luckily this year promises some great titles for rpg fans. Aside from Witcher 3, I'm also highly interested in Pillars of Eternity which will be available on GoG as well.

Well, the thing to think about is that the upcoming Planescape: Torment successor from the original game's creators--a very successful Kickstarter project--as well as of course Witcher 3, and several others, simply would not have been possible 10-15 years ago. That's what I mean about "golden age"--it doesn't necessarily mean "original" as much as means "the best"...;) At least to me, anyway. I think that with RPGs the best is yet to come. The old games are great, I agree--no question about that at all--I have about all of 'em ever made that were in the "great" category. But that kind of game, let's face it, has *always* been rare--that's the way it is with really memorable, great games. We remember them as well as we do because they stand out so much much from the sea of mediocre games being published at the time of their original releases. IE, when Planescape: Torment originally shipped it was "one in a million." There's no reason that games with great stories & great sound tracks, graphics, voice acting, etc., cannot be made and I think we will see a lot more of them in the coming years because of the fact that the PC has at long last absorbed the "game console", and because of services like Steam and so many successful Kickstarter projects the PC has once again established itself as the dominant gaming platform, imo.

I think the PC-centric gaming industry is about where the movie industry was in the 1960's. The best is definitely yet to come. I think the future is bright. But, yes, I surely agree that the really great games are always going to be relatively rare.

An interesting link on the subject.

:D

While I agree with Ganni in that PC Games had a certain something that you just don't see nowadays a bit over 10 years ago...

I actually like Richard Garriot's perspective that says that games are still young (they are!) and that the best stuff ever is definitely yet to come.

Though I do think someone needs to quantify what it is that older PC games are doing because they're way more interesting than just about anything you'll find today.

Yea, there's this ineffable quality about the older stuff that still draws me back to it today. Games weren't so cookie-cutter and they were far more cerebral and text-driven than most of them are today. The budgets were much smaller and the number of people it took to develop a game was far smaller than seems to be the current norm today. The older games were a lot better at setting emotional moods, and because graphics and sound output was so limited, much had to be accomplished in the writing and stories and plots that is rarely seen in computer games today. I liken it to the difference between books and movies, in a way. The old games were a lot better at stimulating the player's imagination to "fill in the gaps" created by the very limited graphics and sound output possible. In the same way that you can read a book without a single illustration in it and yet develop a clear image of everything via your imagination, an image that no mere illustration can ever hope to equal, so it is with the older games versus the newer ones. An appeal to imagination always trumps graphics realism in a game, imo. (And I like good graphics, actually...;))

But who is to say that it isn't possible to generate both superior graphics & sound *and* have inspiring, fantastic writing and stories? I think this is what Garriot is talking about and I agree. To that end we're just scratching the surface of what is possible. I'm replaying Ultima VII via Exult at the moment (having played it through years ago when it was released), for instance, and the graphics in the game are fairly poor by current standards--indeed, my wife took a look at a U7 screen and remarked good-naturedly that it "looks like something a ten-year-old would play." But I don't play U7 (or any Ultima game) for the graphics...;) I don't think anyone does. It's the writing and stories and the concepts the games advance that hold the appeal, and such things rarely go out of style.

This generation is the "sound byte" generation, remember. Everything is truncated, reduced, and often simply dumbed down so as to appeal to the lowest common denominator. In the early days the games were deliberately written to appeal to the mind and the imagination instead of the twitch reflexes found today in online multiplayer gaming--which I've steadfastly resisted for the last decade and a-half. The genre is so poor that it hasn't been a difficult abstention at all...;) The field is wide open to the enterprising people who can see this and are not afflicted with the sound-byte, multiplayer -mindlessness bug. Yep, I think the best is yet to come...