This is probably just nostalgia, as I was the right age to sink hours into the golden age of Ultima IV-VII when I was younger, but I still think these are the b

This is probably just nostalgia, as I was the right age to sink hours into the golden age of Ultima IV-VII when I was younger, but I still think these are the best roleplaying games ever made, and by an absolutely gigantic mile. Every time I try a new RPG, I initially have this feeling like, will this be like Ultima, will this be like Ultima, but I always end up disappointed. The best way of describing what makes them so great is that they avoid everything feeling like one of those fake-cardboard-cutout Western movie sets. Every other RPG I've played feels like this, the infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate (I've only played 1, not 2) being the canonical example. Everytime I run into an NPC or situation in Baldur's Gate it just feels like the characters start talking through a script that was written just for me, the player, to setup some problem for I, the player, to solve. This is of course the very definition of immersion breaking, because this artificial setup draws attention to the fact that you're playing a game, you're not actually in a real believable world. Baldur's Gate has fantastic combat (an area Ultima VII is terrible), but I think the way that the story is setup and told is boring and uninspired. And that goes similar for literally every other RPGs I've played: Mass Effect ("Hi I'm an alien from a new race you've never met, would you like me to tell you everything about how my race fits into the universe?"), Skyrim (Besthesda, masters of the anonymous, faceless NPC), the Witcher/Cyberpunk (the CD Projekt Red games are actually masters of this style of game design, because they use it as scaffolding for easily the best writing ever in video games, but they're still hampered by inherent weakness of the format: That the world feels like a prop to setup quests for the player to knock down). In contrast, the Ultima games feel like they create the world first, so that feels alive and believable. And I don't mean by writing a bunch of lore (writing has it's format already, books, use game mechanics to tell your story), but I mean by creating a world piece by piece, character by character, city block by city block, room by room, each piece of furniture, individual dresser by individual dresser. Environmental story telling, game mechanic story telling, storytelling native to the format of of games. The tavern goes here, the barber lives here, these three friends meet at this pub, at this time every day, and discuss this. Ultima does this for every town and every character in the game, for even the most trivial NPC. There's no anonymous, faceless, story-less NPCs acting as walking props like in every other RPG. And once that world feels like a real believable place, one that you could just sit and watch at have it be interesting, like people watching through cafe window--existing through an intersection of mechanics (how NPCs move, day-night-cycles, how they interact with the environment, e.g., the classic "using flour to bake bread"). Only then are the player-driven interactions then built on top of this world, e.g., if you hear a rumor that the shopkeeper seems to disappear for a couple of hours after their shop closes each night, well you can wait till 5 PM and follow them and see what they're up to. Since everything is scripted to this degree, it doesn't feel like you've entered into a pre-programmed scenario for following just this one NPC, you can follow anyone in the game this way, it just so happens that some NPCs might do something interesting after you follow them, like maybe you see them hide a key under a plant and you can go investigate. This way of having the player-driven gameplay come directly from mechanics that existed first to make a believable world, just makes for more interesting games in my opinion than anything that has come after. A game that's just a series of scripted encounters for the player to knock down is just less interesting.