15. Divine Divinity
14. Betrayal at Krondor
13. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
12. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
11. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
10. Chrono Trigger
9. Fallout
8. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Calibur
7. Wizardry 8
6. Phantasy Star Online: Episode I & II
5. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
4. Xenoblade Chronicles
3. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
2. Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven
1. Baldur's Gate

There are also a lot of RPGs I own but haven't played yet that could easily become my favourites including Might and Magic 3-5, Planescape: Torment, Ultima V, VII, VII-2, Fallout 2, Gothic 1-2, Darklands and so on.

There also some great RPG-lite games that I omitted such as Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Rygar, and so on.

Guns are also instakills in most cases, and when you just start talking to people they look at you funny and they don't initiate battles before they sock you in the face.

No Man's Sky sounds like the game a lot of us have been waiting for - -here is the "gameplay" info from their wiki:

Gameplay[edit]

No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated open universe game. Players take the role of a planetary explorer with a spacecraft, allowing them to explore the surface of numerous planets and interact with the flora and fauna, and take to space, engaging in combat with hostile forces and travel to other planets. Planets and other features of this universe are procedurally generated; though initially built based on a 32-bit number processor, the final game will use a 64-bit seeding key, with the developers stating that this allows for more than 18 quintillion possible planets.[10] The game will have online features that allow players to share details of planets they have visited with other online players, and will allow players to visit these planets through a large galactic map once they have upgraded their ship for hyperdrive capabilities.[11] In August 2014, the developers announced that the game would be playable offline.

The game will feature planetary exploration, deep oceans, space-based battles, resource gathering, and potential predators on the various procedurally-generated worlds. Each world has its own ecosystem with potentially unforgiving conditions, such as desert worlds with large carnivorous worms.[12][13] Players are initially given an uncharted universe to explore, where information about any planet's characteristics and lifeforms may be shared and updated with others.[14]

No Man's Sky does have a larger goal, to reach the center of the galaxy, driven by the availability of resources to the player, which improve as the player moves towards the center of the galaxy. Players need to collect, sell, and trade resources to acquire better ships and more fuel that lets them explore the more-centralized areas of the galaxy. Hello Games' co-founder Sean Murray stated that a player could reach the center of the galaxy with between forty to one hundred hours of gameplay without focusing on any additional exploration, but will hope players instead find themselves involved in other activities enabled by the open nature of the game, such as managing a trade route or studying all the possible flora in the universe.[15]

Once they announced its playable offline I was set...then they explained that the game was so large that they actually sent out virtual "space probes" to help get anunderstanding of how large the game actually was I was amazed. I hope it lives up to the hype!

Why not focus on building a star ship and spacesuit where you could really go out and experience it for real?

Eye of the Beholder 1

Ishar 2

Bloodwych

Amiga 500 [many moons ago]

Wow I totally forgot about Bloodwych! "Truly my courage is remarkable!" Bring back any memories? lol

i loved neverwinter nights ;x

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

So many positive comments about "Elite"...
I am inclined to give the game a spin, though I do not have big expectations - the graphics are worse than starflight, how is that even possible?
LOL :D
but seriously, graphics not the issue but game mechanics and joyful exploration is.
So if I have too much difficulty surviving or navigating in game then I usually abandon the game.

To all the great comments here from fun loving gamers, I thank you all!
I am convinced that I will explore some game titles I would never have considered playing.
One such suggestion was Oolite - http://www.oolite.org/
created by fans of Elite, I was told...

I think I played X3 and for some reason didn't get into it, I forget if it was because of too much guns, or poor game mechanics, or game bug. I do not recall why X3 fell off my fun meter, but I recall having purchased it.

While life has great graphics and fancy, challenging quests it always annoyed me that the developers forgot about the save option, not even save points!

So I play Wizardry 8 instead.

I often read about the apparent crappiness of neverwinter nights' original campaign, and I too remember that at least parts of it were pretty boring and uninteresting. I recently replayed the original campaign and you know what, I really enjoyed it, but, only from chapter 2 onwards. I found the first chapter (there are 4 chapters) in neverwinter to be mostly humdrum and uninteresting, but when you get out of the city in chapter 2 and start to explore places like Port Llast's countryside and the neverwinter forest, the game suddenly opens up.

Elite is certainly a classic, but Frontier (Elite 2 and First Encounters) are different. They use Newtonian physics in combination with realistic dimensions based on "real-life" space. So travelling between planets in one star system might actually take weeks, even with SF space ship technology. That's why there is time-acceleration up to 10,000x.

Frontier is actually an open end grinding game - trade or shoot your way through a procedural universe with millions of star systems and generated missions. Make a career with the Federation or the Empire and climb the ranks...
First Encounters (= Frontier 2 = Elite 3) added a story line with hand written missions. In theory it can be made to look like this, but I haven't managed to get it to run this way - all planets are black :-(

And let's not talk about the grinding required to get anywhere (except you rolled some lucky dice in character creation...).

I am having difficulty interpreting what you typed...
I am not interested in Newton's physics and long travel times, perhaps I should steer clear of the Elite games?
Trying to interpret your text, I searched for the series' various versions (I was unaware of the different titles & versions; and I am still unclear):
1. Elite -Pub by Acornsoft in 1984?
2. Frontier: Elite II in 1993?
3. Frontier: First Encounters in 1995?

If the above is accurate then which one? - maybe I will leave this to the dustbin of the past.

I was writing about 2. and 3., sorry if it was a little unclear. In-game travel times are indeed (realistically) long, but with the "Star Dreamer" time acceleration actual travel at most takes a few minutes. I found in games like X or Freelancer in the end it took more time to get from place to place, even if the planets are almost in spitting distance from each other ;-)

If you don't like Newton physics, you should indeed stay clear of these games, maybe give the old Elite (or Oolite) a try, which has a more "airplane" feel to flying the ship.