The Bard's Tale IV until three months before we shipped it!—Rebecca Heineman
I got interested in Dragon Wars mainly because the makers of Newcomer listed it as one of their inspirations. While they mourned the lack of conversations and interaction with other characters, they liked the multiple solutions to quests, and the prison island in Newcomer sounds a lot like Purgatory.
While the outset is interesting, I found it not quite as enjoyable as Wasteland, but more so than the Bard's Tale series. In spite of the automap, the first person view makes navigation tedious, especially on the huge Purgatory map. The enemy graphics are less impressive than in Wasteland, for the PC they got only few embellishments above the 8-bit version (for the Amiga, they were completely redrawn in the higher resolution). But unlike The Bard's Tale, it is highly unlikely that the first encounter will wipe out your whole party.
Dragon Wars was ported to a lot of platforms, of all these the NEC PC-98 probably had the nicest title screen, due to its higher resolution. The gameplay screens were just pixel-doubled.
