Anyone here played this game? I found it on Gamersgate months ago but only recently got round to giving it a spin. I believe it was an "indie" game released around 2003, and it's very much based on the 80's Bard's Tale RPG's. You start off in an adventurer's Hall and must create (recruit) a party of up to 8 characters, you choose from a huge amount of races and classes and roll attributes.

The game is really traditional, there's almost no explanation to the player of what to do, and at the start you simply have to wander around (it's first-person) and try to figure out what to do. Combat is very challenging, and the rate of random combat encounters is very high. Combat works almost exactly like Bard's Tale, it's turn-based but in phases, you give your commands to your entire party member, and they execute them, and then the enemy executes theirs.

Combat and the general pace of the game is quite slow and definitely rewards patience. The graphics are actually quite nice too, the first-person exploration is fully 3D, but combat as I said is essentially exactly like BT, once an encounter begins you get an (animated!) portrait of the enemy in the viewport, so it's combination of 2D and 3D graphics.

Everything is done in keyboard shortcuts, but there's an option for mouse control.

This game would be a great fit for GOG, and it's puzzling why it isn't already here. The Gamersgate version is DRM free too.