There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series, to name another popular modern RPG) for that reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
Much as I like C:DDA, it does not perform terribly well battery-wise relative to what it should and looks like it should use. The game re-renders frames even without keypresses, and on top of that, each frame displayed recomputes the world state.
!patientgamers might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
Old games were also typically steaming piles of shit. It’s just that the ones people still remember are the worthwhile ones, because the bad ones have gone into the dustbin of history.
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
There were so many bad platformers for the Super Nintendo, but nobody is ever going to go back and play those or dredge them up.
I like the game (as well as the similar https://store.steampowered.com/app/211820/Starbound/) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
Further down in the thread, I ran into someone talking about an older RPG, Realmz. I dug up a subreddit on Reddit related to the game, and the stickied post had this gem:
These are codes that were reissued by Skip (Aka. SpoonLard). He and my grandfather were the original two collaborators when Skip attempted to carbonize Realmz in 2005.
Nothing like a comment about someone’s grandfather having tried twenty years ago to modernize a game you’ve played in its original form.
I’m stretching my memory too far. I remember the City of Bywater world map, but I can’t even remember the world maps for the other scenarios, if I indeed played them.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
I have no idea what scenarios might be included, and I’m always a little leery about running binaries from random sites outside of a VM — abandonware can be a vector for malware — so I don’t know if I should recommend using it, but it’s there. There are serial numbers to activate what looks like all the listed scenarios in a comment there, so maybe it comes with all of them.
The company appears to have been defunct for the past 20 years, so I suspect that there isn’t going to be any legitimate re-release.
It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about a fraction of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
While new scenarios were released throughout the game’s history, also typically packed along with the game in the next Realmz release, the game ultimately ended up with 13 official scenarios:
City Of Bywater (developed alongside Realmz by Tim Phillips)
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
Destroy The Necronomicon (1995, Tim Phillips)
White Dragon (1996, Jim Foley)
Grilochs Revenge (1997, Sean Sayrs)
Twin Sands of Time (1999, Sean Sayrs)
Trouble in the Sword Lands (1999, Pierre H. Vachon)
Mithril Vault (1999, Tim Phillips)
Half Truth (2000, Nicholas T. Tyacke)
War in the Sword Lands (2000, Pierre H. Vachon)
Wrath of the Mind Lords (2002, Pierre H. Vachon)
EDIT: There’s also apparently a pretty-inactive Realmz subreddit at /r/Realmz. No GOG Realmz release either, though. Some abandonware sites appear to have it.
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of the non-RPG games.
Yeah, Dwarf Fortress too, but at least Dwarf Fortress has an extensive, well-documented wiki. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a not-very-up-to-date wiki at one point, but then whoever maintained it had it go down at some point in the past year, and I’d say that the game has also been constantly updated and more-dramatically-rebalanced than Dwarf Fortress, so learning to how to play involves scouring Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to try to figure out what information is current. I think that the current recommended route on the subreddit to learn how to play is to watch recent YouTube videos of some streamers playing, which is…kinda nuts. It’s not uncommon that a question on the subreddit as to an authoritative answer on game mechanics is “go check the code”…
There are also some military sims I’ve played that are probably reasonably approachable to players who are familiar with the military hardware involved from prior to the game, but for players who aren’t, they’re probably in for a lot of reading and understanding mechanics, and some milsims don’t bother to document that, so you really need to do outside reading beyond whatever the game documentation has.