Hi everyone!

Time and time again I am coming back to this game. It is still one of the best games I ever played and it wasn't really surpassed by any recent games. I am sure I am not alone who thinks so. So what in people's opinion makes this game being so good?

I will tell you why I find it to be so good:

1. Classic fantasy setting (yeah, there is some tech stuff closer to the end of the game, but it is very small part of the game).

2. Vivid color palette.

3. You control party of heroes. (unlike solo-RPGs which are majority nowadays)

4. Your feel like your heroes are constantly improving. (you constantly find new gear, new spells, improve your skills, level up, promote up, find attribute enhancers, etc.)

5. Extremely high level cap. (goes way into the thousands)

6. World has respawns. (it is big point for me, games without respawn very quickly feel dead for me)

7. There is no level scaling. (which is another plague of modern gaming). Well, Arena is kind of scaled to party's level, but it is like miniscule part of the game.

8. World is relatively big and diverse. You have all kinds of biom.

9. Dungeon design is very good. Dungeons are diverse, big, sprawling. (unlike the linear corridors of most of modern games)

10. Game was extremely well optimized. It was especially evident at the time of its release. I think my PC had like 16 MB of RAM back then, and no video card, and game was smooth, no fps drops, freezes, crashes (well, there were a couple of rare ones, but they were quickly fixed) or anything. There was that one hall in Temple of Baa with 100 skeletons, and performance still was very smooth: I am not sure you can have such encounters in any modern game without huge hit to performace.

Of course this game has its own drawbacks (the major one: I wish it was bigger :) ).

So what do you like this game for? And did you find any good modern contender to this game?

I pretty much agree with all your points. To which I would add the following:

1) The in game music was great. In fact all of New World Computing games going forward of M&M VI had great music.

2) Sound effects also were effective. Think after mostly you have cleaned out a dungeon and you can still hear some monster activity eventually you recognize what is still left based on the noises they make.

3) A really clean and effective user interface. Left and right clicking with the mouse to get the information that you need to make decisions.

4) Character progression and development is still one of my favourite aspects of the game. What skills to acquire by each character and for the party as whole. I typically advance my characters to the expert level in all desired skills before progressing to master levels. It is one of the most enjoyable aspects of replaying the game.

Downsides. There are two that I can think of.

1) Some of the magic skills are not that useful. Offensive Cleric spells are primarily useless, especially anything in the Mind magic realm. Typically I only attain the status cures (e.g. remove insanity).

2) Progression after attaining Mastery. I find during replay that I tend to lose interest after the party characters have attained mastery. The difference between 12 skill points in Fire magic vs 11 skill points is not that compelling. I love the beginning of the game but tend to bail sometime around having to hunt down the memory crystals. Too many of those dungeons are just a boring slog.

Also, early-game time management (until able to teleport everywhere). Getting the exp for a level-up then getting to the gym before 6pm. Juggling coach and boat schedules to progress quests, and fit in the stat-up pilgrimage well of the month, without ever being stuck kicking my heals waiting in an area where I've nothing left to do (that I'm ready for).

Open world, with steady progression of enemies (somewhere! - find the ones meant to be tackled next), coupled with areas that cannot be cleared all at once, but contain dungeons meant for different levels, at different stages of the story, to come back to later.

The easily-recognisable three-tier family system for enemies (kid, nanny-goat, billy-goat-Gruff as it were)

Townspeople say different things each (in-game) day of the week, according to their oocupation, of which there are 77 (including child) from acolyte to wind master - that's a lot of remarks to collect. Plus other remarks specific to their town.