I'm new here, but I want to post my suggestions.
GOTHIC I, II and expansion "Night of the Raven".
This are some of the most climatic and impressive games I have played in my childhood years.
First Gothic I
The story is set in the Khorinis Island, where penal colony has been set to force criminals to dig precious magic ore. It's a very good material for creating weapons and the kingdom need them because orks have invaded the mainland country Myrthana. So to meet high demand for magic ore a new laws have been passed. Every criminal no matter the crime will be sent to the colony. And the colony will be surrounded by a magical barrier. But some magic shenanigans later the barrier consume more than it was intended to and anyone that will try to leave will just die. The prisoners use that disarray to take over and now the king is forced to give them what they want in exchange for magic ore. And that is all you now when they drop you, ass first into the lake behind barrier.
Here are some points that in my opinion make the game good.
The world feel alive. The people do their daily stuff, react to weather, and fight off monsters.
NPC are interesting and many of them are very memorable.
The story is somehow standard but still feels right in the world of the game.
Enemies stay dead. Later it can make the world feel empty when you kill every single life form in some parts of the world, but well, there was suppose to be respawn system that would respawn animals every new act, but to my knowledge it was scrapped in the final version so once you clear a location it will stay clear.
They were more features like that. For example, there is a stage in old camp that was suppose to be used by in game version of the band 'In Extremo' with music and all after finishing second act. The Alchemy was scrapped. Smithing swords was suppose to be better but you can make just a basic unfinished sword.
Almost everything is interactive. You can kill some animal, knife some meat out of it, go to the camp, buy a frying pan, go to the bonfire and fry it. The more time you spend on that, the more meat you fry. So if you have like 15 pieces of meat it will take longer than a few seconds.
You browsing your equipment don't stop time like in skyrim. When you want to eat something to recover HP your character will it, that in game with animation and sound.
According to some people the game has clunky controls, but to me they were good.
There are mods to the game that restore content and fix some things. There is polish mod "enhancededition" that adds more quests, factions, items, and many other things. I don't know anything about English mods or English versions of polish, german and russian mods (the game really did good in this country).
Now Gothic II
Take gothic I but add time to finish the features that were planned for G1, add more polish to the game and bigger world that is just as rich as the one from G1, add interesting mechanics to combat the players cleaning the map, new factions and fucking dragons. You have G2.
I could write more, but seriously this game will speak for itself if one is willing to give it a chance.
And on top of that the expansion "The Night of the Raven" is the expansion. It adds so much new content along with a new big map and enemies and other stuff that you will cry at the thought that content poor DLC's are what we have today.
