The folks who finish Baldur's Gate and want to stay in the genre always land on the same question, even if they never quite say it out loud: okay, now what? They've played the obvious classic, they know names like Fallout, Planescape, Arcanum are floating around out there, but nobody really breaks down which ones are worth the time and which ones are just nostalgia dressed up as quality. And funnily enough, the answer shifts depending on who you ask. The comparison that never gets settled, and honestly probably never will, is Fallout versus Baldur's Gate. It's not really a fair fight to begin with, since they're built on completely different combat philosophies. BG runs on real-time-with-pause, the famous RTwP, inherited from 2nd edition D&D rules — you pause, issue orders, unpause, repeat. Fallout is turn-based, full stop, with an action-point system (SPECIAL) that punishes bad decisions way harder. Some people swear that RTwP in big BG fights turns into a visual soup, that you spend more time mashing the pause key than actually playing. Others find Fallout's turn-based pacing too slow, too much of a grind, and say it makes up for that with sharper companion writing even if the fantasy setting is more generic. There's honestly no right side here. It's just a split between people who want tactical rhythm and people who want narrative flow, and it still divides the community every time the topic comes up. Then there's Planescape: Torment, which might be the thorniest point of all, because it's not really a matter of taste — it's almost a debate about what an RPG is supposed to be. There's near-total consensus that it has the best writing of the decade, no exaggeration. Philosophy, death, identity, all tied directly into the protagonist's own mechanics — immortal, amnesiac — used as a storytelling tool rather than just a plot twist. But there's a group, not a small one either, that finds the combat poorly designed, the level design weak, and calls it "a book wearing a game's skin." And honestly both sides have a point, each in their own way. If you go in expecting gameplay because someone told you "it's the greatest RPG ever" with zero context, you'll walk away disappointed. If you know it's about dialogue, about choice, about reading, you come out of it changed. Arcanum is its own case entirely. Troika Games attempted something nobody else had — Victorian fantasy where magic and technology coexist and actively compete, to the point where your magic degrades based on how technologically advanced your character becomes. It gets cited, rightly, as one of the most original games of the era. It's also one of the most broken at launch, with combat balance issues still called out to this day. It's worth playing for the idea, not the polish — and you need to walk in with that expectation, or you'll quit halfway through. Ultima VII is a different story, because here there's actually consensus, which is rare for this topic. We're talking 1992 and one of the most simulated, reactive worlds ever built in an RPG — NPCs with daily routines, an economy that genuinely functions instead of just decorating the world. The problem is the interface and combat aged in a way that isn't just "old game weirdness," it's a real barrier for anyone who didn't play it back then. No need to make excuses for that. Just needs a warning label. There's also a quieter, more technical debate that keeps resurfacing — whether System Shock even counts as an RPG or if it's already something else, a proto-immersive-sim. In practice the label barely matters. What matters is that it anticipates Deus Ex and Bioshock, and anyone who likes character progression but is burned out on generic fantasy finds a niche there with almost no direct competition that decade. And then there's Might and Magic and Wizardry, which almost don't need defending because their audience already self-selects. Anyone into grid-based, first-person dungeon crawling knows they're outside the "narrative" conversation that dominates everything around BG, Fallout, and Torment. It's not a lesser category, just a different experience, and forcing the comparison doesn't help anyone. One thing people keep glossing over, and it should really be said every time one of these games gets recommended: playing them "vanilla," without quality-of-life mods, is basically asking to quit halfway through. Fallout, Arcanum, and especially Ultima VII have fan-made patches that fix launch bugs that otherwise make the experience nearly unplayable today. It's probably the number one reason people abandon these classics before the credits roll. At the end of the day, each of these games represents a design bet that Baldur's Gate didn't make, which is exactly why asking "which one is the best" is always the wrong question. The real question is which of those bets you wish had won — and that one, everyone answers differently.