It’s Wizardry vs Ultima for me, but I’m going with Wizardry as I definitely played those games more than Ultima prior to Ultima Online.
As a note, if you’re like me: the version of the game you played was probably a Japanese remake, as those were about the only ones available by the 1990s (and probably a great deal earlier). Interesting enough, my family did have an Apple II, but when it was still in use I wasn’t old enough to play games like Wizardry - although I was exposed to games very early in my life.
Why is it different now? Japan, as most people know, was the first market where RPGs became a major hit, and Wizardry was one of the first popular RPGs in Japan, and the fandom for the game franchise was far stronger than it was westward. In fact, the game is iconic enough that eventually Japanese devs took it over and the franchise survives in that market to this day. But the early games were ported to other platforms by Japanese developers, and localized to Western markets with updates, like a revamp of the battle mechanics that allowed you to simply select rather than type out (The early Wizardry games had a lot of keyboard stuff and writing out magic commands and such, and it also came with some additional literature that you basically needed to know to play the game). Some of this could be said to be because of gaming consoles, but Wizardry lost no complexity in outcome by simplifying the input. That’s just game design 101, don’t make your game UX/UI more complex than it needs to be: simplicity and consistency wins. Although… one of my favourite games is/was a bit of an offender (Dwarf Fortress), maybe deliberately so :D
But anyway, while the game was indeed one of the major inspirations for Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest in turn influenced Wizardry.
Bottom line: I’m voting Wizardry, because even in its archaic form, I would have likely been a fan of this game over the others.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
