battlepoet
First time out of the vault

This is a touch odd, and I'll agree that the first three games weren't much different from others, maybe a bit more eccentric with the design in some aspects, but they were still a bit dull compared to later on.
Ultima IV introduced what could be called the defining moment of CRPGs. While you only had one role to play, you have choices in how to do so and your actions affected the world. This went along until VI, which was pretty damn good in terms of world construction, until VII was heralded as the best CRPG world brought to life. Daggerfall and Morrowind both are full of zombies compared to that game, and I'd say that it has a good amount more community interaction between the NPCs than Fallout. That adds a distinct amount of depth few other games even try for.
The Zork series and its text based companions had far more influence on persistent state than the Ultima series, I feel. Again, Ultima did little more than take a existing ideas from established games and - as far as I'm concerned, I admit to being hazy minded because there's not enough coffee in my system yet - giving folks the impression they had this nifty groundbreaking idea themselves. It always got under my skin.
Even UO, touted as the first MMORPG, was a load of horseshit. Once again a concept those guys snagged from somewhere else, fed into the hype machine to churn out a boy-band wonder. Only Raph Koster went on to fuck up SWG, too.
And people who know the artistic design well and it does follow along with the core aspects of the game. Ultima changed a number of times, but that wasn't the focus of the game and never was, instead a focus in creating a believable world and ethos was made, up until they ruined it with 8.
There was a huge following for the Ultima Underworld series, which flopped anyway I think, I got tired of following the series even out of hate around 92-93. There were arguments about it but nothing approaching the Fallout debates here; every Ultima fanatic I knew back in the day practically masturbated to those FPS rejects, but I'm sure there were others who hated it, I just never read anything but "omg awesome" on the BBS gaming forums of the day.
OW! Hey, we're not going for blood (unless you count the ignorant), we're looking for answers.![]()
I'm just bitter, sorry. Time for more coffee I guess. :>