Ultima™ Underworld 1+2

Ultima Underworld is easily the grandfather of RPG's. I know there are many that came before, but none that I can think of that allowed you as much freedom as Ultima Underworld. I love the old days of gaming when you weren't guided like RPG's nowadays. Ultima Underworld forced you to read the manual, take notes, and discuss details with friends. In my opinion, there has yet to be an RPG that has so many fantastic discoveries as this one. If you haven't played it, it may take some time to get used to the controls, but once you do get into it you won't want to stop playing.

What are we talking of? Ultima Underworld 1 and Ultima Underworld 2 especially are divine masterpieces. The depth of the story, npcs, dialogues, personality of everybody, the atmosphere, the locations, the magic system, the combat system, items, level design, the soundtracks, the sound fx.. all is incredible. We would need a better HD version for today's computers but with a bit of patience even this Dropbox version can work. Don't use music different from Sound Blaster Pro settings!

Very immersive games. The only thing I really dislike is something that's common throughout the ULTIMA series: It requires a lot of inventory management and sometimes you can't tell if you need an item ir not.

I just recently played this game for the first time thanks to GOG. and from a modern perspective I have to say that this game not only holds up, but is still better then most action rpgs made today. I had so much fun with this game. My only complaint is that the story can be difficult to follow and the hints for the clues can be obtuse at times. all in all Both games are ridiculously engaging.

Two important things to know about these games: 1. The audio settings are messed up by default in this download. You'll have to search how to set it to use Soundblaster audio. Trust me, you don't want to play it with the default settings, unless they happened to have recently fixed it. 2. Controls can be greatly improved (adding mouselook + a context sensitive "use" key) by searching for "John Glassmyer Ultima Hacks." You'll need to rename the .gog file to .iso and extract the game files, then use the patcher on the Ultima Hacks page on the executable. As for Ultima Underworld itself: the game holds up amazingly well for a game from 1992. It's very atmospheric with some great interactivity and player freedom. It's a major milestone in RPG history and I strongly recommend it to fans of immersive sims and first person RPGs/dungeon crawlers. So many games have been inspired by this one that it's hard to really understate its impact. The Elder Scrolls series, for example, started off as an imitation of Ultima Underworld and still contains a lot of elements of it. You can see bits and pieces of it in tons of games. It also has a lot of impressive tech, like physics on objects and fully 3D levels, before Doom even came out. Why am I not giving it a full 5 stars? It has a few flaws, mainly some backtracking and obtuse puzzles. You'll almost certainly consult a walkthrough at some point. Also, most of the "side quests" are actually required, even if they don't seem to be important at first glance. The game gives you the ability to attack or insult all NPCs, but you can ruin the main quest by doing so, so it's not really as open ended as it may seem (this is a problem that was inherited from Ultima and its focus on "virtuous" play). Overall though, an absolute classic. I don't like the 2nd game as much as the first, but it's nice if you want more after finishing the first one.