It's kind of the same format go where you want when you want do the quests in any order towns to visit, day/night cycle fighting, leveling up. I had this game as a kid for the Amiga 500 and I loved the game. You had to eat in this game to or else your character would starve to death it was kind hard, for the time the game was just beautiful here is a link to a page with several screen shots, at the time of this games release it was the largest game world ever created 17,000 screens with no loading times!

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/faery-tale-adventure-book-i/screenshots

I think it was more directly inspired by Ultima Underworld. Arena and Daggerfall are hugely similar to it.