I've been trying to find this game for months and can't for the life of me.
This PC game is most likely from 1996-2003. I believe it's classified as a Western RPG, or perhaps RPG/Adventure. When in a mission, you see the characters from a birds-eye view. You control mages and warriors, and you can see what kind of armor/robe they are wearing. The opening is nice, kinda of long, and it revolves for a bit around a tower (probably where the bad things started happening(. I believe you are the apprentice of a great magician, and he is killed, so you head off with the mission of finding more about what's happening and putting an end to it. There's a lot of bad activity, goblins, orcs and trolls are more active than usual.
A BIG SPOILER, so please ignore this if you don't want a spoiler, is that, in the end, everything is happening because someone opened a portal to another dimension, and a really powerful and evil being came through and was holding the portal open. Perhaps the person who originally opened it didn't have bad intentions. To finish things you kill off that monster and I guess the portal is sealed. END OF SPOILER
There were a lot of nice cutscenes. I remember one where you'd find a sword, I think it was inside a coffin.
Between missions, you'd go to a town. In this town you could go to the tavern to get new missions or hire mercenaries, there was a separate building where you could train your spell-casting skill, and another place to up your fighting skills, and also a shop where you could buy equipment. The equipment list would increase after every mission, and the list became huge, with super amazing and expensive items. The mercenaries you could hire in the tavern could be seen wearing the equipment, which would also upgrade with every mission, often ending up better than the one your main party had (since the newer and best equipment was so expensive).
In the town view, I believe you wouldn't see your character walking around, but you'd rather just click the building and you'd go into the building automatically. The places would be highlighted when you hovered over them.
If you tried to leave town without having found a mission, the guards next to the gate would cross their weapons and say: it's not right to leave town without a mission to complete.
There was a lot of narration in the game, at least in town, almost all your interactions would prompt shop owners/tavern folks to say something. When talking to people in the tavern, they'd often have longer stories they'd tell, and they'd be narrated (I think they were also written out so you could read them on screen as well).
When you hired mercenaries and went on a mission, I think they would just follow you and help you, but you couldn't explicitly open their inventory or make them do things like the main characters. I could be wrong, though.