Shackleton
for the most part i agree with the decision to move identification to a (hopefully meaningfully balanced between other equally useful skills) "buyable" class skill.
i've written about how the bishop character class and their ability to identify items mid-dungeon crawl was originally meant to dovetail into the logistical layers of the Wizardry game's exploration facets. i *believe* that their ambition was to create a character class that instead of serving as an end-result manipulation of all of the game's underlying gameplay systems, like all of the other character classes, that the bishop would instead be an almost completely transparent virtualization of the players psychology and methodology when testing themselves against the Wizardry games.
normally this imaginary player would proceed down 2 dungeon floors and spend some time killing high-level enemies in a floor slightly above his level in the hopes of accumulating rewards such as experience points, gold pieces and of course the skinner box that is the Wizardry treasure chest. Er, i mean the casino slot machine. Oh, they're the same thing. wizardry wiz kid ZeRoCoOLL would normally beat some arch demons, get some treasures and then hightail it back to the city to identify his haul and to rest and level up and all that stuff. this is a very organic bio-map of gameplay that was designed 30 odd years ago with the first Wizardry game.
it does not get any simpler in concept than what i have just described and it also does not get any more elegant or succint.
then came the bishop. The bishop character class is of the following characteristics and traits:
- the bishop is an extremely poor physical combatant. this means one should use them from the back row but they are mediocre there too as they still continue to lack the strength and other factors necessary to properly utilize ranged weaponry.
- the bishop has very poor choice of gear as they get the Priest leftovers except not even. this means they have poor defense. once again the affirmation that they belong in the back row... but here's the kicker:
- they've fooled rpg players about their magical prowess for all these 30 years! bishops are actually terrible spell casters as they gain experience so slowly that they are and will ALWAYS be SEVERAL SPELL LEVELS (and character levels) BEHIND a pure mage, priest, or even ANY OF THE HYBRIDS. this means bishops receive their spells too slowly to be useful because they will not have good spells when you need them to have good spells. they will have good spells when you're mopping up in the post-game, heh.
- so then what does this mean? they have bad defense and they can't effectively damage with weaponry and now they're too slow in learning spells that they might as well not even have them? except of course someone would now say, "BUT THEY FILL IN WITH THE UTILITY SPELLS!!!!!!!!!!", and that's how the bishop managed to fall into that "role" and gain the semblance of character class fulfillment they enjoy nowadays. or whatever. however...
- ...i'm almost dead certain this was never the intention with the bishop class. why would greenberg and woodward or whatever the fuck his name is, why would they introduce a character class that is literally worthless (that party member slot could be going to another valkyrie or a ninja, jus sayinnnn); remember these two guys play-tested Wizardry 1 FOR AN ENTIRE FUCKING YEAR before finally deciding that the mechanical gameplay systems were all good to go. (and they were!). it doesn't make sense that they would waste the player's time and waste their own intelligence by introducing... filler.
- so then we arrive at identification. of course they were not introducing an utility char; they were introducing a motherfucking teutonic plate shift into the Wizardry game design bio-map. Now that the player can choose to take with them a Bishop character they can now identify loot without having to return to the castle/town. I cannot stress enough how incredibly ingenious this was on the part of the designers because now:
- Wiz-kid player ZeRoCOoLL dumps someone from his party (a character that actively contributes both in combat and in whatever other facts their class works in) and instead takes in a bishop, effectively decreasing his party's overall effectives by whatever precentage it is when the party has 6 ppl and you replace 1 of them with a shitty one. i don't know math sorry. but now our player can go to that arch demon floor, kill, get phat loot, and ID it right there and then. what does this change? well for starters this changes many things, some of them subtly and living outside of the actual game such as the psychological approach the player engages in now, since they're not worrying about overstuffed inventories and they're not actively planning out strategical logistic stuff (i.e. gotta make sure i have "enough" to make it back to town); this player is in a different mindset altogether as his drive to acquire ID loot right then and there is now in overdrive.
- this means that this player will engage in exponentially increased amounts of game combat and will put their party's lives on the balance a great deal more times than before as they will be opening chest after chest after chest, with any one of them as always being an instant party-wipe. (talk about fucking skinner boxes. sometimes i wonder if greenberg and wood actually actively were into this casino gaming stuff while designing Wizardry or if they just did it on their own)-- in any case, this obviously raises the chances of this player's party eventually dying to the sheer attrition BUT now there is ALWAYS the _chance_ that in every loot drop the bishop will ID the shit and it will be an "awesome fucking weapon/armor" that will literally be a game-changer for the player.
- in wizardry, as in all good games and as in life, everything matters. EVERYTHING. every level is more important than the previous one; every piece of loot can literally be the thing that will let you survive this session; every spell is a precious resource that while extremely scarce and to be judiciously used always nevertheless are face-melters that will save your party's ass, guaranteed; so on and so forth. There are no trivial matters in a Wizardry game. Everything matters. There is no filler.
- so anyway i'm tired of typing so basically TL;DR bishops allow players to id items inside the dungeon but on the downside the player's party loses 1 effective occupant i.e. the party becomes a 5 person party instead of 6.
This right here is the kind of mature game design that the Wizardry games trust the player with. It's completely up to the player whether to have a bishop or not. If they don't, they'll have one very different journey through the Maze than if they did, and all of the variables will be equally good. Isn't this an example of "emergent gameplay"? I hear that bandied about a lot... people don't know shit if they havne't played wiz.
EDIT: oh! right, back on topic: having identification be a class skill that is chosen can (and probably does) work just fucking fine. however it does introduce a slight bit of... casualization.
remember that the bishop is useless as a party member. having one decreases your party effectiveness a lot, even if you gain all of the stuff i detailed just now. if however the identification is a skill that ANY character class can choose then that means that game is letting the player roll with a full party of all equally competent characters AND ADDITIONALLY the gift of identification without the downsides (bishops).
throws game balance slightly, very slightly askew. but shouldn't be really enough to make much never mind if the game itself is well balanced and designed.
for the most part i agree with the decision to move identification to a (hopefully meaningfully balanced between other equally useful skills) "buyable" class skill.
i've written about how the bishop character class and their ability to identify items mid-dungeon crawl was originally meant to dovetail into the logistical layers of the Wizardry game's exploration facets. i *believe* that their ambition was to create a character class that instead of serving as an end-result manipulation of all of the game's underlying gameplay systems, like all of the other character classes, that the bishop would instead be an almost completely transparent virtualization of the players psychology and methodology when testing themselves against the Wizardry games.
normally this imaginary player would proceed down 2 dungeon floors and spend some time killing high-level enemies in a floor slightly above his level in the hopes of accumulating rewards such as experience points, gold pieces and of course the skinner box that is the Wizardry treasure chest. Er, i mean the casino slot machine. Oh, they're the same thing. wizardry wiz kid ZeRoCoOLL would normally beat some arch demons, get some treasures and then hightail it back to the city to identify his haul and to rest and level up and all that stuff. this is a very organic bio-map of gameplay that was designed 30 odd years ago with the first Wizardry game.
it does not get any simpler in concept than what i have just described and it also does not get any more elegant or succint.
then came the bishop. The bishop character class is of the following characteristics and traits:
- the bishop is an extremely poor physical combatant. this means one should use them from the back row but they are mediocre there too as they still continue to lack the strength and other factors necessary to properly utilize ranged weaponry.
- the bishop has very poor choice of gear as they get the Priest leftovers except not even. this means they have poor defense. once again the affirmation that they belong in the back row... but here's the kicker:
- they've fooled rpg players about their magical prowess for all these 30 years! bishops are actually terrible spell casters as they gain experience so slowly that they are and will ALWAYS be SEVERAL SPELL LEVELS (and character levels) BEHIND a pure mage, priest, or even ANY OF THE HYBRIDS. this means bishops receive their spells too slowly to be useful because they will not have good spells when you need them to have good spells. they will have good spells when you're mopping up in the post-game, heh.
- so then what does this mean? they have bad defense and they can't effectively damage with weaponry and now they're too slow in learning spells that they might as well not even have them? except of course someone would now say, "BUT THEY FILL IN WITH THE UTILITY SPELLS!!!!!!!!!!", and that's how the bishop managed to fall into that "role" and gain the semblance of character class fulfillment they enjoy nowadays. or whatever. however...
- ...i'm almost dead certain this was never the intention with the bishop class. why would greenberg and woodward or whatever the fuck his name is, why would they introduce a character class that is literally worthless (that party member slot could be going to another valkyrie or a ninja, jus sayinnnn); remember these two guys play-tested Wizardry 1 FOR AN ENTIRE FUCKING YEAR before finally deciding that the mechanical gameplay systems were all good to go. (and they were!). it doesn't make sense that they would waste the player's time and waste their own intelligence by introducing... filler.
- so then we arrive at identification. of course they were not introducing an utility char; they were introducing a motherfucking teutonic plate shift into the Wizardry game design bio-map. Now that the player can choose to take with them a Bishop character they can now identify loot without having to return to the castle/town. I cannot stress enough how incredibly ingenious this was on the part of the designers because now:
- Wiz-kid player ZeRoCOoLL dumps someone from his party (a character that actively contributes both in combat and in whatever other facts their class works in) and instead takes in a bishop, effectively decreasing his party's overall effectives by whatever precentage it is when the party has 6 ppl and you replace 1 of them with a shitty one. i don't know math sorry. but now our player can go to that arch demon floor, kill, get phat loot, and ID it right there and then. what does this change? well for starters this changes many things, some of them subtly and living outside of the actual game such as the psychological approach the player engages in now, since they're not worrying about overstuffed inventories and they're not actively planning out strategical logistic stuff (i.e. gotta make sure i have "enough" to make it back to town); this player is in a different mindset altogether as his drive to acquire ID loot right then and there is now in overdrive.
- this means that this player will engage in exponentially increased amounts of game combat and will put their party's lives on the balance a great deal more times than before as they will be opening chest after chest after chest, with any one of them as always being an instant party-wipe. (talk about fucking skinner boxes. sometimes i wonder if greenberg and wood actually actively were into this casino gaming stuff while designing Wizardry or if they just did it on their own)-- in any case, this obviously raises the chances of this player's party eventually dying to the sheer attrition BUT now there is ALWAYS the _chance_ that in every loot drop the bishop will ID the shit and it will be an "awesome fucking weapon/armor" that will literally be a game-changer for the player.
- in wizardry, as in all good games and as in life, everything matters. EVERYTHING. every level is more important than the previous one; every piece of loot can literally be the thing that will let you survive this session; every spell is a precious resource that while extremely scarce and to be judiciously used always nevertheless are face-melters that will save your party's ass, guaranteed; so on and so forth. There are no trivial matters in a Wizardry game. Everything matters. There is no filler.
- so anyway i'm tired of typing so basically TL;DR bishops allow players to id items inside the dungeon but on the downside the player's party loses 1 effective occupant i.e. the party becomes a 5 person party instead of 6.
This right here is the kind of mature game design that the Wizardry games trust the player with. It's completely up to the player whether to have a bishop or not. If they don't, they'll have one very different journey through the Maze than if they did, and all of the variables will be equally good. Isn't this an example of "emergent gameplay"? I hear that bandied about a lot... people don't know shit if they havne't played wiz.
EDIT: oh! right, back on topic: having identification be a class skill that is chosen can (and probably does) work just fucking fine. however it does introduce a slight bit of... casualization.
remember that the bishop is useless as a party member. having one decreases your party effectiveness a lot, even if you gain all of the stuff i detailed just now. if however the identification is a skill that ANY character class can choose then that means that game is letting the player roll with a full party of all equally competent characters AND ADDITIONALLY the gift of identification without the downsides (bishops).
throws game balance slightly, very slightly askew. but shouldn't be really enough to make much never mind if the game itself is well balanced and designed.
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