To come back to this in the present day may take some getting used to. the game is played entirely with the keyboard. Yet, i still have not played any open world RPG as masterfully engaging and well composed as this. this is even farther ahead than Morrowind which was released a year later! you even have NPCs that follow a daily schedule, play guitar and eat and smoke, walk around and hunt and fight. it foreshadows games like STALKER and feels far more alive than even Witcher 3! you have to cook your food over fires, physically take metal to forges and cool it off in a bucket to craft items. touches like this really add immersion rather than just picking though a menu like most modern games. this is a dark fantasy world with a great setup where everyone wants to fuck you over and trust has to be earned, there's a real sense of danger everywhere, and the world has memorable locations and decisions and is rewarding to explore. There is also no level scaling, this is genuine Dark Souls esque combat where you have to learn combat and stay away from tougher enemies at first or you will be slaughtered. But your character visibly gets better at swinging a sword as you level up/learn skills, there's a lot more feedback than just stat increases, and eventually it becomes quite easy by end game. There are 3 major factions in the game to take questlines from and this adds to replay value. One of the camps is a religious cult that literally makes you sell weed to the others! how many RPGs have that lmao Overall i highly recommend giving this a chance, i got completely sucked in despite the learning curve and it became my favorite western/PC RPG of all time.
You read that right! There has never been a game in this subgenre before or since that has been as influential, innovative, or damn good as this title the Ultima series is already very important in the history of ALL RPGs, even JRPGs, but this one is a First Person spinoff that was developed by the team that would go on to make classics such as System Shock and Deus Ex. But, everything that makes those games good is already here, in primordial form! The whole of "immersive sim" and even Arkane's whole shtick begins here. Plus, this is the game that inspired the ENTIRE Elder Scrolls series! They basically just took this games design, and decided to make a massive world out of it(which ends up being less polished and more buggy than this title's contained environments). the 3D engine is also FAR more advanced than Wolfenstein 3D(which came out AFTER), with the ability to look up and down, NPCs to talk to with dialog trees, and rudimentary physics. If you like classic PC RPGs, this one is pretty much ESSENTIAL, and doesn't require much knowledge of Ultima lore to jump into.
