Since nobody’s mentioning many adventure games, and you mentioned Monkey Island, get Grim Fandango. Now. It’s one of Lucasarts’ best and weirdest. It has the annoying interface of Monkey Island 4 but the plot and characters are great.
Second Grim Fandango. Tons of fun!
Daniel
Wasteland is not by Electronic Arts. The game is by Interplay. EA was merely the distributor for I-Play at the time.
However, EA owns the name Wasteland, which is why Fallout came out and was referred to as the spiritual successor to Wasteland. The way I understand it, EA wanted a shit-ton of money to release the Wasteland name. I-Play owned all the code for the game, but the name was an EA owned thing. Many of the original people who had worked on Wasteland worked on Fallout.
And for the best Wasteland reference page, check out Ranger HQ here: The Wasteland Ranger HQ-Grid / Front Desk
That game lost me at a point where I had to engage in physical combat with my wizard.
I lost.
How about Conan - the online MMO?
The palace or the duel? Either one was damn tough for spell slingers, true.
I beat them by:
The palace I turned Invisible and sidestepped most of the baddies.
The duel, I cast stone skin, and ran around until the guy’s barbarian rage wore off, then blasted him.
I loved playing Grim Fandango, it wasn’t quit as fun recently when I played it for a while. I know of no other game that was like it. Link for description.
The damned palace. I didn’t have any defensive spells memorized and I streamlined my inventories so I didn’t even have any fun potions to imbibe.
Another thread mentioned Titan Quest as being similar to Diablo II. I purchased it and enjoyed it, even if I am stuck right now.
I cannot wait until Diablo 3 is released.
We ought to have a sticky, because the “recommend an RPG” question seems to come up every now and then and the answers are often the same.
Planescape Torment – the best CRPG ever made. If you haven’t played it, you have denied yourself too long.
Fallout 1 & 2 – Enduring classics that changed the way people think about the genre.
Baldur’s Gate I & II – Great games both in terms of story line and challenging and fun combat.
Icewind Dale I & II – Lacking the depth of Baldur’s Gate, but what the hell? Same combat system.
Wizardry 8 – Turn-based with a 3D perspective and combat that is challenging sometimes to the point of being nail-biting.
Arcanum – Primitive graphics by modern standards, but a great game that gives you tremendous freedom in character development and action akin to Fallout and has a kick-ass story full of surprises.
Deus Ex – A “first person sneaker” game, though I suppose you could play it like a shooter.
System Shock 2 – Should by law come packaged with at least one change of pants. This is the game that Bioshock was made to imitate.
Gothic I & II: These are hard-core RPGs in the sense that you work hard for your XP and struggle to get good enough to expand the boundaries of the world you can travel through without getting murdered. Gothic III is easier in this sense, but still a deal of fun.
As for adventure games:
Anything by Lucas Arts
Sam & Max seasons I and II – Witty, with the solutions to the puzzles often demanding taking a skewed perspective on the information given to you.
The Longest Journey – It’s hard to make an adventure game last long enough to be worth the money a modern game costs without making it frustrating, but this one was well worth the $30 I paid for it new.
Syberia – It’s a beautiful world which you get to work with in fascinating ways. The game is actually only half a story, and the end of Syberia II kind of chaffs me, but otherwise it’s well worth looking into for an adventure fan.
Psychonauts – An adventure game in the style of a 3D platformer, brought to you by the mind that did Grim Fandango. It didn’t sell well, owing to the sad state of our educational system and possibly the presence of Satan in the world.
Hey, keep us out of it!
Another vote for Planescape: Torment and another for Psychonauts.
Two of the best games, ever.
A First-Person RPG I enjoyed that doesn’t get a lot of love is TRON 2.0. It’s pretty nostalgia-fueled, I’ll admit, but the low-key humor in the game is pretty well done, and the visuals are excellent.
** Planescape Torment ** is by far the best computer RPG I ever played. I didn’t really care about the stats. That’s the storyline that was enthralling. It’s, I think, the only computer game that made me all emotional. Note that it isn’t an uplifting story, and the more you dig (about the NPC companions, for instance) the more depressing it gets. There is a lot of stuff to read, but that’s a good point in my opinion. I’ve been told that the English voice acting was superb, but since I had a French version, I couldn’t tell.
I also loved both **Fallout 2 ** (never played Fallout 1) and **Arcanum **. Both have a quite original setting and allow you a great deal of freedom in the way you create and develop your character and interact with the game world.
These three games are IMO way more original, more immersing and to some extent more “adult” than most other “standardized” computer RPG (like the aforementioned Baldur’s Gate, Might and Magic, etc…)
Oh… And I liked “**Morrowind **”, too even though I’m yet to finish it (I also own the more recent sequel “Oblivion” but didn’t play it). There are an incredible number of user mods for this game. That’s the only game I used mods for, and my main problem was to decide which ones I wanted. I think my game runs with close to 20 of them installed : modified bodies and faces, new taverns and shops, people and children added, modified plants and animals, clothes, books and potions appearance changed, new companion NPCs, etc…
INteresting, and I agree with all your recommendations that I’ve played
–except one.
Wizardry 8? Are you serious?
That game was dreadful. Combats could literally take 5 minutes. And not 5 fun minutes. I’d get attacked by a swarm of like 80 mosquitos (yes, mosquitos), and I’d have to wait for each freakin’ mosquito to do its combat animation before I could attack. I’d tell my characters what to do, go make a sandwich, come back, check on them, go call my brother, come back, check on them, go plant some flowers, come back, see that they were done, make my next move, and rinse and repeat. Eventually I realized, “Hey! This sucks!” and I stopped playing.
Maybe there was some option that I didn’t turn off that would’ve made combat more fun; all I know is I looked and couldn’t find it. It’s one of the few RPGs that I’ve started and not finished.
Daniel
It’s interesting to note that most of the games recommended in this thread (often the same ones, I can see on review) had poor sales.
A little elitist are we?
I quite freely admit to being an elitist in regards to many things, but in the case of computer RPGs the reason for low sales, IME, is that RPGs are a niche market within a relatively small market (Computer gaming is not the massive, expansive market people like to pretend it is. Look in an EB Games sometime, you’ll see it’s 90% Console Gaming stuff), and most of the RPGs that I’ve seen on consoles tend to be of the Final Fantasy LXVI Part II type, with all the Japanese Spiky Hair and Massive Swords and Doe-Eyed Ninja Babes That Don’t Wear Much. Not my cup of tea, in other words.
As for PC RPGs, though, I’ve gone on about the excellence of both Fallout games, as well as Arcanum and Deus Ex, and my points have already been made in this thread so I won’t re-iterate them.
I will, however, suggest Oblivion, which I got recently and have been thoroughly sucked into. It’s got an interesting plot, even if the world does seem to have the same faults as many other RPGs; ie lazy people that ask you to go and fetch things they should be quite capable of getting themselves.
For the adventure genre, Psychonauts and Portal are the cream of the crop. Both have engaging gameplay, brilliant stories and an absolutely fantastic sense of humour. Lying just beneath on the ladder are games like Grim Fandango (A noir story set in the realm of the dead, with you playing an entry-level Grim Reaper who’s busting his ass to pay up for his sins in life. Gallows humour has never been more appropriate) and the Monkey Island series. Alternatively, you could just skip the middlemen and abduct Tim Schaefer to tell you bedtime stories.
In the RPG genre, we have a lot of mediocre games with good stories. There are also some gems, but most of them have been mentioned already. The Knights of the Old Republic games are brilliant in terms of gameplay and story, with a truly epic scope and immersive quests. The graphics may be dated, but they’re not bad, even by today’s standard.
While I never quite got the hang of Neverwinter Nights - the gameplay being too passive and sandbox for my tastes - I can easily recommend the Gothic I&II installments. Skip the third game - it’s broken. The Gothic games has a decent, epic storyline with plenty of sidequests and an engaging combat system that requires participation and concentration. (To steal a Zero Punctuation phrase about another game, it’s the kind of game where you have to bind Quick-Save and Quick-Load to the left and right mouse buttons while you’re figuring out the learning curve)
If you want pure story and humour, go for the Fallout series. Now is actually a very good time - the third installment will probabaly be released in the fall.
If you want pure gameplay, try Mount & Blade. It’s still in beta - v0.95x, IIRC - but the beta’s been open since v0.63 and if you buy a trial key now, you get access to the full game at launch. It’s basically a medieval skirmish “simulator” aiming to get you out of stat-based combat and directly in touch with the actual fighting.
You start out as a peasant and try to earn money by trading or fighting in the arena, to level up and earn money for better equipment. After a while, you’ve got a stock of good equipment - ranging from weapons like swords, two-handed swords, pikes, spears, bows, crossbows, axes, maces, throwing knives and so forth and so on, to a fully fledged line of armour and horses. Mounted combat is a huge deal and very well implemented, with a cavalry charge perfectly devastating against infantry but bloody suicide against pikes or countercharging lance cavalry.
The combat system is directional based with opponents actually using feints to get you to defend in the wrong direction. It’s still being ironed out, but you’ll have some sweaty, adrenaline-pumping moments with it as it is. Weapons have distinct advantages and disadvantages - like pikemen being unable to use their pikes to defend and only have one direction to attack, or swords which are quick and sturdy but do negligible damage against infantry in plate armour - and the feeling you get when you’re defeated is almost never one of “THAT’S NOT FAIR!” but rather more of a "Huh, that tactic sure as hell didn’t work.)
(I also want to mention that bows are beautifully implemented and damn scary - my favourite tactics is to divide my squad into two, with archers and spearmen. Form solid lines with my spearmen and tell them to hold position and then putting archers on a hill behind them. For an infantry army, walking in front of a row of thirty-forty archers with longbows on a hill is bloody suicide.)
Which brings me neatly to my next point - it’s inherantly squad based. You recruit glory-seeking peasants and train them up different path - usually infantry, archers or mounted, with some divergence down the lines, like spearmen/swordsmen, archers/crossbowmen and lancers/knights/horse archers. Or you can recruit mercenaries at tavern to fill in spots. The armies are entirely losable - you’ll often find yourself beginning from scratch early on, having lost your army after being pounced upon by a Lord pissed off at your caravan raids.
There’s a macro game in there, as well, a strategic map not unlike the Total War series in which you travel between cities to trade, shop or take quests from the local Lords and kings, or scout for enemies, brigands or caravans. You can also choose to join one of the factions - each one representative of a military style, like the Nord infantries for the vikings or another one which is essentially the mongols, horse-archers and all. There are sieges, both attacking and defending, with siege weapons and surges (in which the saying “One man on the wall equals ten on the ground in front of it” becomes painfully realized). There are stats and levels - you can level everything from your martial abilities, your markmansship, your horsemanship, your financial barter abilities, your ingeneering abilities, your leadership abilities and so on. (I think there are around twenty distinct abilities trainable, as well as the normal stats - Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Charisma)
Now, a few of those of you who read the above are probably thinking - “Holy Shit! What’t the catch?” And to be honest, there are three.
One, the game is not finished. It’s not polished. You’ll encounter bugs and problems, and most gameplay elements are not quite finished yet. Two, the graphics are bad. Not Dwarf Fortress bad, but quite dated. I’d say around 2002 level of quality. (Battlefield 1942 springs to mind) It’s being developed in it’s entirety by a married couple from Turkey. Three, there’s no story. It really is a purely gameplay-driven, sandbox game. It’s also hilarious to play - I consider myself a “serious” gamer (for a given level of serious) and I’ve played all the classics and most of the new games. But seriously, I’ve never encountered such a high density of slack-jawed amazing and gratifying moments such as in this game.
(My favourite moment is probably a few versions back, around the v.075 releases a year or two back, when I was being charged by twenty armoured horsemen with only ten archers and two spearmen at my side. I knew I was going to die, so I told the archers to stay near the border on top of an hill, so we could escape, but I was determined to get at least three volleys off before I went. So I was drawing up an arrow with my longbow when I saw the horsemen crest a hill five or six hundred yards in front of me, before dipping into a valley again. A Dark Knight was leading the pack - the worst enemy in M&B at the time, fully armoured in dark plate and with reinforced helmets, greaves, gloves and some truly ugly flamberges. So I put the bow sixty degrees above the horizon to get a rangefinding shot, so I could determine when to give the order for the volley, and let fly. Five seconds later, the Dark Knight crested the next hill - and flew back from his horse. The volley flew around my ears (you can hear the tchkk, tchkk, wshhh sounds as the arrows go by you) the next second, unexpectedly absolutely decimating the riders. Seven of them were caught in the first volley, five on the next and the third volley took down the horses of the remaining ten and put five of them down. By the time they closed to melée range, there was only one left - he caught a throwing dagger in the throat.
So, out of curiosity, I rode on over to where the Dark Knight had dropped. What do you know? He had an arrow sticking out of his right eye. 
Red fletchings told me it was mine, a barbed arrow. (One of the gruesomely cool things about the game are the corpses being permanent and having visible damage - when you up the battle scale to a hundred troops a side, you really get the feeling of being on a battlefield afterwards. Bodies lying around pincushioned with arrows, blood everywhere, dead horses, weapons lying scattered around.
(No, I don’t work for Taleworlds. Why?)
. . . Which gratuitously brings me to the next and final point. M&B has a fantastic mod community and is very, very moddable. Mods have been created for everything from new weapon models, new horse models, gameplay mechanics or even total conversion mods. (Like the Lord of the Rings one, in which Helms Deep is accurately reconstructed)
It’s at v0.960 right now, downloadable from Taleworlds.com for $25 (for full beta access and full game access.) There’s even a free trial for the first six levels.
Go. Go!
After wholeheartedly urging you to grab M&B, I just popped in to say that I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Thief II or Thief III. I never liked the first game, but the next two were absolutely brilliant. It’s closer to a medieval/steampunk FPS than to an RPG, insofar as you don’t gain XP or levels, but rather modestly expand your capabilities by buying new items.
However, the FPS comparison gets a little thin when it comes to the fact that you have practically no weapons. You get a sword, a blackjack, and a bow & arrow with lots and lots of special arrowheads (water, fire, moss, rope, noisemakers, and a bunch of others). As far as I can tell, there are perhaps two cases in the entire first game where you will actually find the sword useful. In every other single encounter, it will get you bloody killed.
Why, you ask? Because the kind designers at Looking Glass Studios decided that if they were going to make a game about thievery, they were damn well going to mean it. Your character, the titular thief, is sarcastic (with wonderfully well-written and well-executed dialog), greedy, and sneaky. He is not, however, a fighter, and practically every enemy in the game is capable of defeating him in a head-on engagement.
Further complicating this is the fact that most enemies will never engage you head-on, prefering instead to shout out an alarm, run away, and come back 10 seconds later with five of their buddies.
This sad state of affairs essentially leaves you in an FPS without the S. You can shoot things, and you can stab them, but the vast majority of your time will be spent distracting, misleading, or simply avoiding the various guards and civilians as you sneak about various heavily guarded, heavily populated maps, trying to steal and pickpocket as much wealth as possible while slowly uncovering the reasonably intricate and immensely rewarding storyline.
Stealth-baesd gameplay isn’t for everyone, and I acknowledge that this is more action than RPG, but I highly recommend it.
ED: Oh, and it gets my vote for the creepiest level ever award for that damn sequence where you take the streets and flee from the Keeper Enforcers.
Mount & Blade always draws me back. There’s something very visceral about impaling a peasant and then turning your horse around for more. Combat is very well done. I wish the AI was a little better, I often find myself exploiting its weaknesses to get ahead.
It’s relatively cheap and can be played in short periods of time for a quick fix.
There is also a mod that allows you to increase the battle size to 1000. It can supposedly do a number on modern processors.
I love Mount & Blade, and the developers deserve some serious praise: I started playing about a year ago, and since then they’ve addressed almost every big complaint I might’ve had. A story would be nice, but that can wait or be modded in.
I just have one problem, and a mod may exist to fix this… but it drives me crazy that the leader’s Charisma is the only thing that determines your army size. I can understand the wish to force the player into specializing in a few things, and in general the way they’ve made your ability scores determine your skill caps seems to work, but the fact that they’ve forced me to chose between a giant army and a weak commander or vice versa is kinda disappointing.