New and improved list of decent to must play cRPGs

• Phantasie, along with Wizard's Crown, represents SSI's first foray into party based cRPGs. Phantasie is a more traditional dungeon crawler in the style of Wizardry. You start off by creating a party of up to six characters, selecting between six classes and a large number of races including oddities such as minotaurs and pixies. While the exploration of the surface world takes place in a top down view, the dungeon crawling, surprisingly, also takes place in a top down view. When in a dungeon, the game displays a map of the current level, hiding unexplored segments. Your party, represented by a marker, can be moved about in this view, uncovering more of the map while bumping into various encounters, both plot related and random. When combat takes place, the game switches to a typical battle mode, not unlike Wizardry. Combat is turn-based but without any tactical positioning, just like all true blob-like dungeon crawlers. However, there are many combat options for each character, including multiple types of attacks such as thrusting, slashing and lunging, each with advantages and disadvantages. In addition, thieves have the advantage of being able to attack beyond the first rank of enemies, while there are numerous spells to cast, varying in level from I to IV. Phantasie's plot involves saving the land of Gelnor from the evil sorcerer Nikademus. The player's party must search for the nine rings of power that were created by a group of powerful wizards to stop Nikademus before he corrupted them, turning them into the Black Knights. The game features many references to Lord of the Rings, as well as many elements from mythology such as a trip to Olympus to meet Zeus.

• The first Ultima within the Age of Enlightenment trilogy. The game largely follows the gameplay formula of Ultima III with its top down, turn-based combat and first person dungeon crawling. However, the big difference between the two comes in the form of the quest. Rather than being tasked to vanquish a big evil, Ultima IV tasks you with raising your character's virtues by solving moral dilemmas. The end result is your character ascending to Avatarhood, becoming a symbol of virtue for the people of Britannia to live up to. The game introduces text-based conversations to the series, allowing players to type out key words and phrases to NPCs in order to get a response. This is made a vital component of the game as the majority of the clues pertaining to the locations and uses of necessary items can only be gained this way. Another innovation is its character creation system. Rather than picking classes and distributing skill points, Ultima IV asks you a series of moral questions. There are eight character classes, each relating to a virtue, and the game assigns your character a class in relation to your answers. If you demonstrate that you value humility over all else, you are given the shepherd class. If you demonstrate that you value compassion over all else, you are given the bard class. Being the first game in the Age of Enlightenment trilogy, Ultima IV introduces Britannia for the first time, a continent that stays largely the same, but gaining detail, all the way up to Ultima VII: The Black Gate.

• Wizard's Crown is the first truly tactical cRPG. In it you create a party of up to eight adventurers using a highly detailed character creation system, distributing points between a number of attributes and a large number of skills that govern both combat and non-combat activities. One of the key features of its character system is the ability to multi-class your characters to your heart's content, within statistical limits, allowing you to create your characters with far greater precision than in previous cRPGs. Character improvement throughout the game involves not only the increase of skills, but also the upgrading of magical weapons. Combat is, in many ways, even more tactical than SSI's later Gold Box games. There are advantages and disadvantages to different weapon types, as well as an extensive injury system to go with the multitude of offensive and defensive options available to you. Spells play a large part in the tactical nature of combat, potentially changing the balance of power considerably.

• As the first game in the well regarded Might and Magic series, The Secret of the Inner Sanctum is very much a descendent of the Wizardry school of cRPGs. Just like all of the other early Might and Magic games, it is a first person turn-based dungeon crawler, providing towns, dungeons and wilderness areas for the player to explore. Unlike later games, wilderness areas are maze-like in structure, resembling the towns and dungeons in design but with natural wall textures. The player creates a party of up to six characters and sets off on a quest that reveals itself slowly over time, mixing science fiction with standard fantasy. The game contains a number of optional encounters and side quests that do not relate directly to the main quest. Combat is turn-based with each combatant taking turns in an order dependent on their speed statistic. Clerics and higher level paladins can cast clerical spells, while sorcerers and high level archers can cast sorcerer spells. Just like in D&D, clerical spells are geared towards protection while sorcerer spells deal more in direct damage.

• Dungeon Master is a 3D, real-time, blob-like dungeon crawler. A very influential game, it redefined the genre by introducing a number of new mechanics and inspiring a number of clones. You start the game by selecting four party members from a pool of predefined characters with different combinations of fighter, ninja, priest and wizard levels. Instead of levelling up and gaining points to distribute among skills, you instead increase in power by making potions, using melee and ranged weapons and casting spells, with each of those levelling up the corresponding class, resulting in increased primary and derived statistics as well as an increased success rate with magic. The game is also one of the first cRPGs to experiment with its magic system, requiring the player to combine runes for spell effects. Rather than restricting the player by forcing them to collect runes throughout the game, the runes are given to the player from the outset. The challenge comes from discovering combinations through trial and error, or by using magical items to decode the spells that power them. Mana mechanically restricts the player's characters from casting any spell from the start, with longer rune sequences costing greater amounts of it. The game is set in a large dungeon, requiring exploration, puzzle solving and combat to succeed.

• As the sequel to Wizard's Crown, The Eternal Dagger continues to focus on the defining attribute of its predecessor, the tactical combat. The game features a greater variety of weapons and spells to play with, as well as an increased number of weapon abilities, including those that paralyse, envenom and leach life from their targets. While Wizard's Crown contained many character skills that proved useless during play, The Eternal Dagger makes all skills useful, adding to the breadth of effective character possibilities available to the player. On top of all this, the item upgrading is extended to six levels of enhancement, up from the five of the previous game. Your party starts off on an island host to a necromancer, requiring you to defeat it before gaining access to both vendors and the rest of the game world. By the end of the game you cross over to another world, entering the Demon World in order to prevent an imminent invasion. Just like Wizard's Crown, this pre-Gold Box SSI cRPG is highly tactical with its roots firmly in detailed fantasy combat simulation.

• The first game in the Gold Box series, Pool of Radiance is a low level AD&D adventure. The game largely involves tactical grid-based combat against various enemy types from ogres to vampires. Battles can range from the very small to the very large, sometimes against multiple screens full of enemies. Unlike later Gold Box games, Pool of Radiance's character customisation is very limited. There are only four basic classes to choose from, and dual-classing does not make an appearance. However, multi-classing for non-humans is implemented, thus allowing a wider range of character types beyond the four basic archetypes. Rather than characters simply levelling up in the game, once they've gained enough experience points they need to undergo training, at a cost, in order to gain their next level. Exploration in the game takes two forms. The main form follows a first person perspective, as in many dungeon crawlers from this time period. The second form is exclusively for travelling around the world map and follows a top down perspective with a single unit representing the entire party. The story of the game involves the recapturing of the town of Phlan from Tyranthraxus, dissuading his mercenaries and uncovering traitors along the way.

• The second game in the Age of Enlightenment trilogy, Ultima V plays similarly to Ultima IV but with some key improvements. While remaining a mostly top-down grid-based game, Ultima V introduces NPC scheduling and day/night cycles to the series. Time of day plays an important role in the game as some of the vital clues can only be gained from NPCs while they are awake. NPCs are fewer in number, but each one is fleshed out with a whole lot more to say to the player. The world is also significantly more interactive, allowing the player to push objects around, search for loot in containers, play harpsichords and drop coins down wishing wells. Combat, although similar to Ultima IV, is the most tactical in the series, with far more combat options, the ability to dual wield and the ability to attack enemies that are not only adjacent to you. The game takes place a number of years after Ultima IV. The Avatar returns to Britannia to find it in a worrying state, with Lord British missing presumed dead. Treading both familiar ground as well as new territory, the Avatar must put right what was set wrong in his or her absence. Graphically, the game is vastly superior to previous Ultima games, especially inside the dungeons where walls finally have recognisable textures.

• Known mainly for directly inspiring Fallout, Wasteland deserves acknowledgement for what it brought to the genre as a whole. On the surface the game is a top down, tile-based cRPG like many before it, featuring a combat system similar to that in the final two Bard's Tale entries. The player can create up to four classless characters from the start, with three additional slots reserved for AI controlled companions. Characters differ by attribute scores and skill values, with skill increases coming from their usage and through training. Unlike the majority of earlier cRPGs, Wasteland features plenty of non-combat skills that can be used, together with attributes and items, to directly affect the way objectives are tackled. This not only adds to the non-linearity of the game, it also makes it feel less constrained by the developers, allowing you to express yourself more through your characters. This, more than anything, is the game's legacy. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic USA and contains plenty of towns, cities and other assorted settlements to discover, with an explorable over-world connecting them. The plot, as is typical for the era, is stumbled upon through extensive play and dominates the final sections of the game.

• While technically being an expansion to Dungeon Master, Chaos Strikes Back is in fact very much a game of its own, and one of the most challenging cRPGs. Even though you still control a party of four, the skills are still increased through usage, and the interface remains the same, the game features increased non-linearity and intensity, with level design being extremely polished and unforgiving. Puzzles have grown more devilish, twists and turns more treacherous, and a greater sense of urgency follows your every step, as if the dungeon itself "lived" in real-time around you. You can import your party from Dungeon Master, with the party's strengths and weaknesses affecting the way you progress through the game, though with a good deal of alternatives possible. There are also a lot of items to be found, with much more varied abilities and effects, making different items useful in different combat situations.

• As the sequel to Pool of Radiance, the player can import his or her party of adventurers into the game or start out with a fresh party. Curse of the Azure Bonds introduces the paladin and ranger classes, fleshing out the options for party members. In addition to the new classes, the game introduces dual classing, allowing humans to switch over to another class. While not as low level an adventure as Pool of Radiance, the game doesn't reach epic levels, and thus sits at the mid-range, giving you access to more spell levels without throwing incredibly powerful beings at you at ever turn. The game is heavily combat centric, possibly more so than its predecessor, and contains scant few puzzles. One change, for better or worse, is the world map, which works in a different way. Rather than allowing for free movement across the land like in Pool of Radiance, the game designates areas for you to travel to directly, restricting freedom.

• This cRPG is a first person dungeon crawler with top-down, turn-based combat. It is extremely puzzle heavy and contains many traps to avoid and riddles to solve. The game is set in Eriosthe, a large underground city corrupted by Uukrul. The player's party must search for the means to destroy Uukrul and also uncover the fate of a previous expedition. The player must use a fixed party of four characters, consisting of a fighter, a paladin, a magician and a priest. This allows for the game to focus on teamwork and to feature vital class specific sections and puzzles without hindering those playing without all character classes. The starting statistics for the party are determined by the player's answers to a number of questions given at the start of the game. Both the priest and the magician not only gain levels, they also gain in the number and quality of rings equipped, with each one dedicated to specific deities or magic arcana, ranging from iron to crystal. Obtaining new rings is, in many ways, a different form of levelling up, but one that is woven in much more tightly to the exploration process. The game's magic system is quite tactical, with many spells and prayers to learn, each useful for different combat and exploration situations. All through the game the party will come across sanctuaries, acting as places to rest, save and recuperate. These act as checkpoints, as although you can save between sanctuaries, those saves are overridden upon character deaths.

• This is the first Gold Box game to use the Dragonlance setting, as well as the first game in the Krynn trilogy. The game plays very similarly to the Forgotten Realms Gold Box games but incorporates elements of the Dragonlance setting. To start with, the game includes different races such as the kender, Silvanesti and Qualinesti elves, and hill and mountain dwarves. Character classes are also different with the Knights of Solamnia replacing paladins, clerics being able to choose a deity, and there being two different mage classes to choose between (red and white robed). The game introduces a lore consistent mechanic that gives bonuses to the mages depending on the phases of the moon, altering their saving throws, spell selection and effective spell level. For clerics, their deity also grants them different bonuses. In comparison to the main Gold Box series, Champions of Krynn encourages multi-classing, with effective parties consisting of many multi-classed elves. The game's story takes place after the War of the Lance and, although involving a heavy amount of Dragonlance lore and characters, is fairly generic. The game offers a few party specific encounters, including an optional side-quest that can only be finished by a knight. Furthermore, there are also some choices and consequences as well as various ways to achieve your goals within the game.

• The final game in the Age of Enlightenment trilogy, Ultima VI deals with a conflict between humans and gargoyles, requiring the Avatar to find a solution to ensure peace. While the game remains turn-based, many aspects common to the previous games are removed or overhauled completely. Dungeons, for example, share the same top down view as the rest of the game, while towns and villages are integrated seamlessly into the world at large, scrapping the need for changes in scale upon entering and exiting settlements. In many ways the uniform scale throughout all areas of the game world improves the believability of Britannia and the the sense of place for each location. However, it also makes the world seem smaller, while technically not being so. The interface is also changed from the text-based one used in Ultima V to a graphical one featuring icons and inventory slots. While not being as feature filled as the following game in the series, it sits at least halfway between Ultima V and Ultima VII in terms of world detail and level of interaction. Its game engine was later used for both Worlds of Ultima games.

• This obscure game is an incredibly large and detailed first person blob-like cRPG. You start off with a pre-made character called Winwood, stuck in his own dream. To make up for this, however, you can recruit almost any character in the game, so long as they like you, into four separate parties of up to seven characters each. The game features a huge number of professions, classes, races and spells, making characters highly distinct from one another. Combat is turn-based and in the same style as Wizardry and The Bard's Tale, games that obviously influenced its design. The game is long and difficult, with a massive world to explore and many puzzles to solve. The environments are rather detailed and there is a lot of simulation present, including both weather and time of day. One reason for its obscurity is that the game was never released for DOS. It was only ever released for the Amiga and the Atari ST.

• The first part of Thalion Software's never-completed Amber trilogy, and the unofficial sequel to Dragonflight. Amberstar is a party-based, exploration and story heavy dungeon crawler with simple turn-based combat. Similar to Ultima V, it features three different perspectives, a bird's-eye view for the exploration of the large overland map and building interiors, a first-person view for the dungeons and cities, and a separate combat screen where you plan your turn on a grid and watch the results in animated 3D.

• Often cited as the pinnacle of the Ultima series, The Black Gate features the world of Britannia at its most detailed, with many secrets to stumble upon. It improves upon the previous game in a number of ways, such as by ramping up the environmental interactivity, allowing the player to make use of almost all objects in the game. The schedules introduced in Ultima V reach their peak here, with NPCs doing far more than just cycling between going to work, going to the pub and going to bed, making the game world feel more alive. Unlike the previous Ultima games, Ultima VII has a rather clunky real-time combat system. This results in even less tactical combat, but at the same time makes combat much quicker. To partly make up for this, the game improves on its non-combat aspects. Quests are far more involving and often tie in to one another, and the amount of dialogue is greatly increased, injecting even more life into the various characters scattered across the game world. The game's plot, which involves the investigation of a cult, is made far more prominent in The Black Gate. Unlike older Ultima titles the Avatar is thrown straight into it with a murder investigation, breaking the tradition of gradual plot introduction.

• A first person single character dungeon crawler, Ultima Underworld was one of the first truly 3D video games. The game is set in a single large dungeon featuring multiple levels full of both friends and foe alike. The game is highly interactive and simulation heavy featuring deteriorating weapons, trading and the creation of food. The game includes stealth mechanics as well as rudimentary physics. The combat is a simple real-time hack and slash affair that is made marginally more tactical with the use of magic.

• The sequel to Amberstar, it largely retains the gameplay as well as the three signature perspectives of its predecessor while improving mostly on the UI and visuals. Slightly more linear story-progression this time around, and party customization is a bit limited, but the game makes up for it with an even bigger world and ultimately allows free exploration of Lyramion and its two moons. Fluid 3D graphics, solid 2D artwork, the series' trademark soundtrack and a slick UI round off this cRPG.

• A sandbox role playing adventure from MicroProse. In it you lead a party of up to five adventurers through medieval Germany at a time of universal Catholicism. Solve quests from finding Siegfried's helmet for bankers, retrieving holy relics for the church, hunting heretics, freeing oppressed folk from raubritters, exploring haunted mines and probing into rumours of dragons. The game is largely text driven, with both combat and dungeon crawling using a real-time with pause system in an overhead perspective.

• Following on from The Black Gate and Labyrinth of Worlds, Serpent Isle continues the story with the Avatar moving away from Britannia to Serpent Isle, a land full of people and places last appearing in the series before the formation of Britannia at the end of Ultima III. While the game plays the same as The Black Gate, it is significantly more linear. However, to make up for this flaw, the game explores warped beliefs, new religions and ancient civilizations, a departure from the Britannian virtue system introduced in Ultima IV.

• Taking place shortly after the events of Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Ultima Underworld II involves travelling to other worlds under the Guardian's control. The game plays almost identically to the first game, but with a slightly improved user interface to allow for a larger view port. Unlike the first Ultima Underworld, this game was planned to be an Ultima game from the outset, resulting in a lot more Ultima lore scattered throughout the game as well as familiar characters such as Lord British and a few of the Companions of the Avatar.

Renegen said:

Ah great, Fallout 2 isn't on the list, let the raging begin.

The way you created that list, you'd think the game industry was cranking out 3-4 Fallout-calibre games every year in the 80s and then it suddenly stopped. I have a very strong feeling that wasn't the case, and many of them were much less complex than some of the RPGs we've since had.

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Renegen said:

If you're going to create a new improved list, you may want to make it objective. What I recommend is having a "strong points" for every game so that people decide what RPG itch each game scratches, and we would probably have less cat fights for "what is an RPG".

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made said:

Commendable effort, Mr. 2011. The list we have is all but useless.

Is this supposed to be PC-only? If not, Amiga had a number of worthwhile exclusive RPGs that I would like to add to it.

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Spellcaster said:

- All Ultimas from 4 to 7 should be present, I'd put 8 too but I know it's controversial.
- Also, you've put Savage Empire on the list, so why isn't Martian Dreams also present?
- Krondor definitely should be there too
- Fallout 2, eh, it's a great game, even if it's a circus compared to 1, I really don't get the haters.
- All Wizardry games, 1-8, should be there. Well, at least 4-8.
- M&M 1-7 too.
- I'd put BG2, there will be complaining and disagreement on that though.
- Icewind Dale series, or at least IWD1.
- Temple of Elemental Evil
- Knights of the Chalice

Try not to add obvious hybrids such as Deus Ex, keep it pure.

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Jaesun said:

Ultima IV
The first Ultima within the Age of Enlightenment. The player is tasked to raise his or her own The Eight Virtues and become The Avatar. Ground breaking for it's time, as there was no "main villan" to defeat and had moral dilemmas the player would have to overcome. Combat is stat based and turn based.

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Ed123 said:

If this is going to be a "must-play" list of classic RPGs, I'd rather see coherent explanations of why someone (i.e. me) should be playing these games today

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made said:

Should I have cut down on the fanboyism? Got a bit carried away there...

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Erebus said:

I wouldn't call Champions of Krynn a must-play. The two sequels, Death Knights of Krynn and Dark Queen of Krynn, are much better.

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MMXI said:

Jaesun said:

Ultima IV
The first Ultima within the Age of Enlightenment. The player is tasked to raise his or her own The Eight Virtues and become The Avatar. Ground breaking for it's time, as there was no "main villan" to defeat and had moral dilemmas the player would have to overcome. Combat is stat based and turn based.

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Thanks. I've put it in, though I did modify it and pad it out slightly. I hope you don't mind.

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Erebus said:

I wouldn't call Champions of Krynn a must-play. The two sequels, Death Knights of Krynn and Dark Queen of Krynn, are much better.

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