best "first" goldbox game?

[miles teg]

And so, after Ultima IV, V and VII, I'd like to play one of these goldbox games. Which one would you suggest to a noobie?

It's unlikey I'll have time to play all of them, so I'd like to start with something that is considered the best of the serie. I heard many good things about the first one (Pool of Radiance) but I assume in term of mechanics they must have improved it later, right?

Generally I'm what in this forum is called a storyfag, I don't care too much about combat mechanics as long as the game is not too easy (e.g. a single strategy/spell that works from start to end game) so having a good plot/story telling is more important than a fully balanced excel sheet with all the right numbers in place. I do love turn based combat though

I read books from both Forgotten and Dragonlance settings and I don't really have a preference between the two, so if you tell me that The Dark Queen of Krynn is the best crpg ever, I'll grab it.

 

[Lhynn]

Play the ranveloft series or dark sun.

 

[Morality Games]

Mechanically it's more of the difference between low level D&D (tedious, but potentially challenging) and high level D&D.

 

[Melan]

Start with Pool of Radiance. The later games don't change much (in fact, they remove a few features PoR experimented with), but get progressively more gimmicky as you get closer to the high levels. PoR has a sensible range, a good sense of progression, iconic locations and a nice mixture of dungeons and wilderness. Also, going from Pools to Curse of the Azure Bonds and later Secret of the Silver Blades is a good "complete" zero to hero Gold Box experience. (Pools of Darkness is part of the same series, but the gimmicks get overpowering.)

 

[Excidium II]

Pool of Radiance.

Also happens to be the only worthwhile one tbh

 

[janior]

I've started few days ago with Pool of Radiance i was sceptical about it cause i wasn't even born when it came out but so far i'm having a lot of fun , combat system is glorious!

 

[Dorateen]

The best place to start is at the beginning.

 

[V_K]

I second Dark Sun. It's the best thing that has ever come out of DnD franchise.
Classic Goldbox games are good but extremely combat-focused. We're talking numerous fixed and random encounters per map, most of whic involve more than a dozen (or several) enemies. As a storyfag you might find them a bit tedious - as an explorefag I sure did. Dark Sun on the other hand balances combat, exploration and story in an almost perfect proportion.

 

[miles teg]

Cool, thanks.

Sligtly unrelated, but in terms of combat/exploration/story, how do these games compare to Realms of Arkania 1,2,3? (asking because I just discovered I have these 3 games in my GoG library and haven't played them, yet )

 

[V_K]

Cool, thanks.

Sligtly unrelated, but in terms of combat/exploration/story, how do these games compare to Realms of Arkania 1,2,3? (asking because I just discovered I have these 3 games in my GoG library and haven't played them, yet )

While RoA games were obviously influenced by Goldboxes in their presentation (first person exploration and isometric combat), they play very differently. The focus in RoAs (just like in The Dark Eye PnP ruleset upon which the series is based) is on simulation, everything is extremely detailed, from the character system (expect to spend no less than a couple of hours on party creation) to geography and ecology of the world to numerous survival elemetns and resource management.
As for story, RoAs get progressively more story-heavy from first to last. Blade of Destiny barely has any story at all, it's all about exploring the world in search for a mcguffin. Star Trail balances exploration with story, and Shadows over Riva is pretty linear and ditches the world map in favour of a much smaller but more fleshed out world. Which is quite a pity because world map exploration is basically the best feature of the series. Thankfully, its second best feature is dungeon design, and dungeon design in Riva is top notch. Combat is fine (except for Blade of Destiny where for some reason ranged weapons and spells only shoot in four cardinal directions) but not the main focus of the game, there's even an autocombat feature.

 

[octavius]

Pool of Radiance is the best fiest game of the three fantasy series. For the two other series (Krynn and Savage Frontier) the sequel(s) were superior.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Pool of Radiance. I still replay it now and again, whereas the other ones I go back to less often.

 

[Metro]

Pool of Radiance is the best but certainly not the only worthwhile one. Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn, and Death Knights of Krynn are also excellent. Secret of the Silver Blades is so-so and can get fairly tedious. Pools of Darkness is EXTREMELY TEDIOUS and, imo, not worth playing unless you're hellbent on playing through the arc. Dark Queen of Krynn is much the same. The Savage Frontier ones are okay.

Common denominator is the higher the level range the worse they get.

 

[ColCol]

Sega version of Buck Rogers rpg.

 

[almondblight]

Any of them have good exploration/environmental interaction and no repetitive trash mobs?

 

[Metro]

You're going to face random encounters no matter what but Pool of Radiance has the best overworld exploration. Death Knights of Krynn is probably second on that front.

 

[Beastro]

I'd go with Countdown to Doomsday. It's pretty easy to get into and is both pretty short (by old style RPG standards) with a few neat things to make restarts fun like the ship combat, and you'll be restarting a couple times until you get an idea of the mechanics if you're going in blind, especially if you get save stuck in places (like going to certain areas where only certain weapons are effective and were only sold on a certain asteroid you ignored and now you can't go back for reasons).

I've yet to play other Gold Box games, but Buck Rogers is easy enough to mess around with. You just do the opening, then get your ship and can mess around the solar system in an hour or so IIRC. Growing up, whenever my brother would rent it for the Genesis I was fine just starting up my own game to enjoy the ship combat and boarding.

 

[Metro]

Fuck that Buck Rogers shit.

 

[King Crispy]

No, fuck you. BR: CtD was a great little game.

 

[Beastro]

No, fuck you. BR: CtD was a great little game.

It's not the best game, nor the best Gold Box game, but it's a great introductory game to the series which is what the OP is asking for.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I would agree with everyone that said Pool of Radiance, and because of many more reasons than simply it being the first. The game is also one of the best of the Gold Box games when it comes to level and quest advancement, with fantastic encounter design and a steady learning curve. Also, many different party compositions can be tried in order to reach the finale, while in later games and higher levels demi-humans become obsolete. The overall quest may also be the most grounded of the game, where a people are trying to reclaim a fallen city rather than the trope where you have to save the province/kingdom/realm/world.

I should have beaten the series 15 years earlier than I did, but I actually rage quit several times due to the copyright protection, even when I owned the manuals in the early days and the code wheel later when I purchased the collections on CD. Try to find a cracked version where you don't have to deal with it.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Ultima > Realms of Arkania > Dark Sun > Gold Box games. Come at me combatfags.

Pool of Radiance is great but its interface will drive you nuts, I thought I could endure it because I have no problem with lots of older games and boy, how wrong I was. You may want to start with a later game.

 

[Jaesun]

 

[Keldryn]

Pool of Radiance is definitely the one to start with. It doesn't have a very in-depth plot and there is little NPC interaction, but it captures the feel of a classic AD&D adventure module better than any of the others in the series, with a fairly contained setting (Phlan and the immediate surroundings), but leaving it completely up to you how you want to approach the game.

PoR and its immediate sequel, Curse of the Azure Bonds are easily the best in the series, IMO. There was very, very little innovation in the series as it progressed and the game engine really didn't change in any significant way. I got bored with the series after Curse and never came close to finishing any of the games that came after the first two. From Secret of the Silver Blades onwards (chronologically), I just found them utterly tedious to play.

 

[Lilura]

So is there "a best" version of this game? Wikipedia lists Amiga, Apple II, C64, MS-DOS, Apple Macintosh, NES and PC-9800 versions.

By rights (i.e, its custom chips) the Amiga version would shit on the others, but I doubt SSI were capable of taking advantage of them/had the inclination to.

So I suppose it's the DOS version, unless the C=64 has better sound (it was often the case back then).