The best CRPG docuseries on YouTube just covered Ultima 8 with a 3-hour retrospective

The best CRPG docuseries on YouTube just covered Ultima 8 with a 3-hour retrospective | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these RPG Cara Ellison, senior narrative designer on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 before Paradox switched developers, discusses her love of Troika’s original RPG: ‘Everyone on the team helped really make that maximum goth’ RPG Esoteric Ebb isn’t just the best Disco since Disco, it’s the closest anyone’s come to the magic of tabletop D&D in a videogame RPG It’s only March, but I’m calling it: Esoteric Ebb is 2026’s best RPG and the first worthy successor to Disco Elysium RPG You’ve never heard of it, but a Russian studio made a fantasy take on original Fallout way back in 2001, and it honestly kind of rules RPG This bizarre CRPG features claymation graphics, beat ‘em up combat and the option to send defeated enemies to a prison colony, and it just left early access after a massive final update RPG The OG Baldur’s Gates are freshly patched, and you can pick them up with 500+ hours of other CRPGs for $23 right now MMO How many of these MMORPGs can you name in just 6 minutes based on a handful of vague details? 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From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Ultima VIII: Pagan Retrospective | A Titanic Mistake – YouTube Watch On Before Esoteric Ebb, before Disco Elysium, and before Baldur’s Gate, there was Ultima. One of the earliest CRPGs in our favored medium’s history became a sprawling series, and if you want to learn more about it, arguably the best way to do so is through YouTuber Majuular’s excellent retrospective series, which we covered at length right here on PC Gamer.I knew this latest video on Ultima 8, embedded above, was in the oven from my interview with Majuular, but it’s still shocking that it dropped only two months after his four-hour look at the Two Worlds games. I think I’d need a break from RPGs in general after that, but the new video seems as exhaustive as ever.If you haven’t seen the Ultima retrospective series, each video breaks down the game’s history, analyzes and critiques its narrative, reviews it as an RPG in the context of its release, and weaves in the story of its development, including the antics of eccentric creator Richard Garriott, aka Lord British. You may like ‘A good idea, infinite drive, and lots of Diet Pepsi’: How YouTube essayist Majuular’s life changed course telling the story of Ultima across 2 years and more than 20 hours of documentaries Tabletop gaming saved videogame RPGs Fallout designer Tim Cain reckons his subsequent 3 projects were buggy games ‘or, as people called them, flawed masterpieces’ because ‘we had a lot of feature ideas, we did not edit ourselves at all, and we were a small team’ They are worth watching even if you don’t care about Ultima at all. Because it was there when the CRPG was being defined and for many years while the genre grew up, its influence can be felt all over the medium.EverQuest wouldn’t look the same without Ultima Online, Larian founder Swen Vincke has long been obsessed with Ultima 8, first-person games were utterly transformed by Ultima Underworld, and so on. The games have aged and many of them are hard to go back to, but it’s essential context for the CRPG golden age we’re livi