Please do not perceive me.
I’d argue we already have a well done spiritual successor, check out Moonring. It’s free.
Personally, I never played the older Ultima games, I’ve mostly experienced them through YouTube essays. But, a solid 60% of the positive steam reviews for Moonring reference Ultima, as does the game’s own description, so I’d say it probably fits the bill.
Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition Remix for the PS2 was a mainstay fixture of my teenage years and might still remain my favorite racing game. I never had any of the N4S games, personally. But this one did me just fine, I played that game for years and years.
Runs great on the steam deck via emulation these days! I set up my collection through Retrodeck and it was one of the easiest drag-and-drop setup operations I’ve ever done.
You should play Morrowind! We’ve got:
…and more. This is just what I pulled off the top of my head in 20 minutes of thinking about it. I love this game, it’s peak elder scrolls in my opinion and nearly peak early-2000’s gaming in general.
It’s a little crusty though. I grew up playing it so I can deal, but the modern gamer is going to struggle a bit. I’m going to give you some tips for the most common complaints.
“The combat sucks! I can’t hit anything!”
The combat is roll based, like D&D. You wouldn’t expect your D&D wizard to competently cleave someone head to asshole with a greatsword, and you shouldn’t expect your Nerevarine to do it either with 30 AGI and 40 Long Blade. Chance to hit is determined by Agility score and weapon skill, and damage is determined by strength score and weapon skill. Make your AGI nice and high at character creation and pick a major skill weapon that you like and stick to it. Using gold to gain skill training goes a very long way towards competency in Morrowind and at low skill levels, it’s cheap enough to make it a regular part of your shopping. If you find a really cool axe and you only have 5 in your Axe skill, go get some training with it before you try and take it out into real action. Failing any of that, the “Fortify Attack” effect from the Warrior birthsign or the Orc’s Berserk power adds directly to your chance to hit. 10 points gives you 10% added on top after your normal to-hit calculations. Doesn’t add any damage though.
By mid to late game, with relevant stats and skill levels at 70 or 80+, missing melee strikes in combat will become kind of rare, even without fortify attack boosts.
“The leveling system sucks! You have to optimize everything with meta knowledge!”
Morrowind is a hilariously unbalanced game, you definitely do not need optimal levelups to succeed. If you do want to get optimal level ups, you are going to need to perform some strange cheese using meta knowledge. But as a casual player, just making the skills you want to use your Major/Minor skills and leveling up normally as you gain experience is plenty fine, you’ll be totally okay.
One caveat to that though, is that your HP total is dependent on your endurance score, and it is not retroactive. Getting your endurance high, or maxed, early in the game is usually a primary goal for most experienced players so that you get the maximum amount of HP per level up. I do recommend this. However, there are many other ways to get around this if other stats are more important to you, such as max HP boosting potions or enchantments, or just one of many ways of avoiding being hit in the first place (shield spells, flight, concealment or stealth, killing the enemy dead in one shot from 50 meters)
“I don’t know where to go!”
Just read, bro. People give you directions to get places. You don’t have quest markers but you do have a quest journal that will let you go back and read the exact dialogue of the quest giver whenever you want.
There are a couple of occasions where people will give you bad directions, or the place you’re looking for is just hard to locate. For those, UESP exists. I’ve been playing this game for 20 years and sometimes I still have to look up specifics on some places, the game is that big. I’ve run this game probably two dozen times and I usually find at least one thing I’ve never seen before each time.
I’ll put it this way, the community that plays this game had to bully the developer into releasing a $5 megadungeon DLC just so that they had a way to give him their money. It’s quality.