Recently went into this nostalgic mode and decided to replay some memorable games. One of the first ones on the list was - Arx Fatalis. Curious to hear if there are other fellow members who have played this wonderful game. It's not a massively known title, but a gem in its essence with some unique mechanics and interesting story. You can get the original game from GoG + Mod that fixes a lot of old issues and makes it compatible with modern hardware and OS.
I have, it was one of the first video games I played on my first self build computer.. although I can't remember much of the game now having been so long ago.
Brilliant game. Wasn't it hailed as a modern Ultima Underworld back in the day? Think it was. Either way, great game.
Precisely the same case here. I remember it being really interesting and unique in terms of presentation and atmosphere. But besides that I can't recall much, so time to dive in. Yes indeed, there were a lot of lines drawn between those two in magazines back in the day.
I grabbed this on Steam over the holidays because it was a dollar or something, and got a bit into it. It looks like a fun dungeon crawler, but the bizarre control options require some learning to figure out where to map all the million functions, way too many to remember for me right now. I'll probably get back to it at some point. Thankfully it does let me use analog joystick and mouse combo.
Did you ever play Dark Messiah of Might and Magic? that was the next game released by the same developer, that one is really good too.
Was quite a different game, more of an first person action game. Kinda like the Vermintide games. Might and Magic VI is my favourite game ever btw
I really like Arx Fatalis, having played the Ultima Underworld games in their day. Especially the opening dungeon is very atmospheric and immediately draws you in, and it's obvious a lot of effort went into making living things seem alive (back then devs actually tried to ADD IMMERSION instead of merely increasing the number of gratuitous kill animations in completely meaningless, grindy combat). Think I finished 90% of it at the time (with bugs in place and using an iffy ball mouse for the magic system, ack), but never really went far after it hit Steam. Just getting a whiff of the initial atmosphere, I guess. Still need to finish Stonekeep as well. I finally did finish TES: Arena's campaign last year (Bethesda did an awesome job releasing a broken version in disk format and then a patched CD-rom mere weeks later in pre-internet times, I have the 8x 3.5" disk version)...on a 486-DX2 66...
Immersion is a core component which is frequently missing from modern games. There are very few modern titles with an immersive world. Modern devs think that you can easily replace immersive atmosphere with fancy graphics resulting in their games being shallow. Playing Arx now, damn it has a good immersive world. P.S. 8x3.5... dem floppies still work?
All eight of them completely hassle free, same for Ultima VII incl expansions, and Ultima VIII, of course all official factory 3.5" diskettes designed to survive nuclear blast EMP or something.Old retail disks and disk drives can be a bit iffy (read: trash from the day you bought them for an arm and a leg, let alone over a quarter century later). And I still had to get that essential Arena patch onto the 486, which only eats 3.5". Took me at least three attempts getting it across without errors iirc. But hey, nostalgia accomplished.
Kind of...it was kind of a rule back then that any cool new PC should still have annoying problems, and in this case it was the Sound Galaxy NX Pro 16's Sound Blaster emulation versus the actual games (SB FX+Music really didn't work well if at all). But with Adlib sound on everything that it couldn't handle usually ran fine. Most games with speech also worked fine, just not Ultima Underworld II, so basically that one game I wanted to play on it.