Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Wizardry The Wizardry Series Thread

TigerKnee

Arcane
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
1,920
it makes me wonder if there's a japanese equivalent of the codex where rpg otakus have their own culturally specific sense of decline
2ch, I believe.
 

treborSux

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2013
Messages
1,677
Yeah I changed my mind on getting LoLS. I think the lack of puzzles and it's supposed short length both were bummers. It actually looks fun otherwise, too bad.
 
Self-Ejected

theSavant

Self-Ejected
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
2,009
I would actually be happy if they attempted to stray from the norm (like maybe to Wizardry 8 standards).

That would be great, but LoLS is minimalism at its worst. As previous Jap-Wizardrys are similar I doubt this will change in the future.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Post on Night Dive Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NightDiveStudios/posts/312268745581886

Lee shared a distribution story, and the issues that can arise from needing a publisher to reach your market.

"When Wizardry 8 came out, online digital distribution was not an option. Steam didn't exist yet. Online retailers were just starting out, and were not a viable option. In fact, the majority of people were still using dial-up to access the internet on 56k modems! For people to purchase your game, you needed to be in a retail store. To be in a retail store, you needed a publisher. Unfortunately in Sir-Tech Canada's case, they couldn't find one for North America initially, so they ended up self publishing through and exclusive agreement with EB Games for a period of time. This really hurt sales, and consequently contributed to the closure of the studio. It would have been interesting to see how Wizardry 8 would have fared back then if online distribution existed as it does today."

There are other Wizardry 8-related posts there too.
 
Self-Ejected

ZodoZ

Self-Ejected
Patron
Joined
Nov 6, 2013
Messages
798
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Bows are pretty garbage in Wiz 6 and 7. I wouldn't worry about bows. Bow attacks are really only more of a fallback option when you don't feel like doing something useful with one of your back row characters. It's not like Wiz 8 where having a good archer was pretty cool.

Firing up the ol' Wizardry VI engine has re-edumucated me in regards to the fine line betwen hints and cheats. Crossing that line momentarily or inadvertently can plant a seed in the mind that sets in motion a user-generated strategy which ends, after weeks, in futility.

Case in point:
An Elven Bow offers +4 to hit and +5% critical long range bonuses. Restricted to Elf only race it seemed as good a reason as any to include an Elf in the party. A hint guide recommended that. So after some general class profession planning, the Elf would proceed from profession to profession until finishing at Ranger wielding Elven Bow and Alchemical spells.
<insert actual gameplay time here>
After a few level ups to make sure said Elf gained proper statistical increases to allow gradual transition towards Ranger it became apparent the Elf as a Ranger was not going to fit in with the Party's final profession make-up. After revising party profession designations the Elf ends up as a Ninja...Maybe not ideal as she was Valkyrie then Monk then Ninja instead of Ranger.
{because Mook didn't transition from Bard very well}
No problem, Elf Ninja with Elven Bow sounded a good alternative.
{modified game code to allow for multiple attacks with Bows because it seems like it should be that way, I'm not a 100% Wizardry Purist}
Get to Robin Windmarne, get the Elven Bow....which I now understand my Elven Ninja cannot use even though a Ninja can use a long bow, short bow, vex bow, great bow...

Why, D.W. Bradley, Why?
 

Essegi

Cipher
Joined
Nov 21, 2012
Messages
396
Maybe it's time for me to play Wizardry games.
I was thinking to start from 6 for the trilogy of The Dark Savant. From what i read 7 is the one i'd be mre interested in, but 6 also seems a damn fine game and 8 too.
The problem is with the audio popping bug with dosbox.
I've tried solutions form gog thread (i've gog version, but that doesn't really matter), tried daum dosx box with different sound frequencies, tried virtualbox + freedos, linux + doseme, dosbox and wine... When game starts there's still that popup.
Tried only with laptop, but i want to play with that device.
I have problems with slow animations, i can barely stand that.
Turning sound off solves that.

Is sound skippable in Wizardry 6?
In that case i'll to play without sound, the alternative is to start with Wiz7 and skip 6...
From what i know there's no music, just some sound effects... Are sounds used for puzzles too?
 
Last edited:

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,184
Location
Bjørgvin
I suggest playing with sound off. Being an old turn based game with no music (I think) you won't miss much.
 

Essegi

Cipher
Joined
Nov 21, 2012
Messages
396
Thanks to both for the replies.

Afaik there's no music, not at the beginning in gog version at least. Nor in yt videos it seems.
Did you try using this custom version of DOSBOX:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/dosbox/#dosbox

Wizardry 6 / 7 - Audio Popping The new setting wizpopfix was developed specifically for Wizardry 6 and 7 and reduces popping from the pc speaker sounds in those games. To enable it add the line wizpopfix=6 or wizpopfix=7 respectively, below pcspeaker=true in the config file.
Already tried (it's the "gog" fix). With that the game is smoother and nicely playable, but without sound game is even smoother and faster (i value a lot that).
So, still, if sound is not required for gameplay or atmosphere maybe i prefer to turn it off.

For a noob it's ok normal difficulty?
I'm not too scared by difficult games, but i don't want them to be brutal unless i know what i'm doing...
 

treborSux

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2013
Messages
1,677
I suggest playing with sound off. Being an old turn based game with no music (I think) you won't miss much.
Nonsense. The enemies and NPCs in Wizardry 6 and 7 make some awesome noises. Not that anyone gives a fuck, but the Amiga port of Wizardry 6 didn't have the PC Speaker pops and random freezes you'll get playing it in dosbox. I think you have flip floppies a bunch if you play it on an Amiga emulator though.
 

ghostdog

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
11,079
I suggest playing with sound off. Being an old turn based game with no music (I think) you won't miss much.
Nonsense. The enemies and NPCs in Wizardry 6 and 7 make some awesome noises. Not that anyone gives a fuck, but the Amiga port of Wizardry 6 didn't have the PC Speaker pops and random freezes you'll get playing it in dosbox. I think you have flip floppies a bunch if you play it on an Amiga emulator though.
IIRC you can create as many floppies as you want in winuae and insert all discs, thus eliminating any swapping
 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,184
Location
Bjørgvin
I suggest playing with sound off. Being an old turn based game with no music (I think) you won't miss much.
Nonsense. The enemies and NPCs in Wizardry 6 and 7 make some awesome noises. Not that anyone gives a fuck, but the Amiga port of Wizardry 6 didn't have the PC Speaker pops and random freezes you'll get playing it in dosbox. I think you have flip floppies a bunch if you play it on an Amiga emulator though.
IIRC you can create as many floppies as you want in winuae and insert all discs, thus eliminating any swapping

My experience with Amiga Forever (which is based in WinUAE) was that there was a limit of four extra floppy disc drives, and that it still depended on the game supporting extra disc drives. A game like Death Knights of Krynn only supported one extra disc drive, IIRC.
I haven't really followed the Amiga emulation scene, though, so things may have improved since then.
Anyway, another problem with the Amiga version is that you can't transfer your party to Wiz 7.
 

Cadmus

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
Messages
4,264
Well W8 is finished and it was fun, a lot of fun actually, but boy does this game have a few issues.

Putting aside the sluggish combat, discussed above, my biggest gripe are the monsters, especially their level scalling and HP bloat. W6 and W7 handles this so much better. And my second big gripe is the "magic issue" which is somewhat related.

I was always looking forward to bigger and more destructive spells to deal with the trash fights faster but they always disappointed (as many people warned). That's because the monsters always seem to have about 10 times more HP than is your reliable (green range) destructive spell dmg output. By the time you get WMDs like Nuclear Blast or Earthquake, enemies start in the 300 HP range and have 80+ elemental damage resistance and many of them cast Elemental Shield. This renders those spells effectively useless. For the same reason the instant death-type spells like Asphyxiation, Death Wish or Quicksand are doubly useless (moreover the 7th level spells like Death Wish come very late in the game, if you don't powerplay, I got mine on the Ascension Peak :( )

And as for the disabling magic, most of it is also pointless, when Paralyze or Web is rarely successful and Blind is more annoying than anything since blinded monsters run away. Best magic school by far seems to be Psionics (in W7 it is the worst), at least this one becomes useless only at the very end.

On the other hand some protective spells - Magic Screen, Soul Shield, Elemental Shield and Missile Shield - seems a tad bit overpowered. Combined with high resistances my chars accumulated through leveling monsters could hardly touch me. The last fight was a joke and I was only about level 22. Also, as a side note, after dozens of hours of playing I still have no idea what exactly spells like Bless, Armorplate and Enchanted Sword actually do.

All this would probably seem a little weird but otherwise fine if I hadn't played the previous Bradley games right beforehand. Those are balanced so much better. There's still some scalling in W7 but so much more subtle and organic. And monsters aren't so ridiculously spell resistant.

(Also, fuck Gadgeteer next time. Most gadgets come late, there are much fewer of them than music instruments and many are underpowered. The Omnigun can be decent but blinds very often, which is annoying, and the ultimate - and truly awesome - addon comes at lvl 26 which means 25 million XP. Fuck that, next time I take Bard).

Don't get me wrong, W8 is still a great game and great fun, especially compared to...well, almost everything else, but it's not a work of pure genius anymore.

Buh, I've finished Wizardry 8 this weekend for the first time and I must agree with everything. The magic should have been a bit better tuned up, imo.
But! the mass insta-kill spells weren't that bad - while they usually kill 1 out of 10 enemies, it's at least something. I can only imagine how much smoother the combat would have been if they worked better on the generic underleveled respawned monsters. I was also going to bitch about having no idea on the exact effects of most of the spells but I haven't read the manual, so I don't know whether or not is this explained there.

On the other hand, the constant fucking respawns were the only thing preventing me from sleeping any time I wanted to. This was great and forced me to make do with left-over spells and even some potions, providing for some epic fights that would have been trivial had I dared to rest previously.
My problems with the game were:

1) the motherfucking Trynton, I still kept getting lost in there even at the end of the game, because it was just annoying and I wanted to breeze through it, thus not remembering the layout
2) the motherfucking Rapax rift - I mean crossing the small bridges when the 232323892 hostile Rapax fucktards can spot you from below and you spend 20 minutes trying to run away from the combat. And also I foolishly entered it the first time I reached Marten's bluff, via the port, thus kinda overleveling my party, imo in what seemed to be the hardest part of the game, after that everything was too easy.
3) I was disappointed with how unnecessary the potions were, maybe some magic nectar here and there but otherwise they seemed like a waste of combat action
4) my alchemist was just a generic buffer/nuker, I had no use for the potion making ability and her silence resistance was useless as she got silenced maybe 3 times throughout the whole game
5) I disliked having to pick useless spells just to increase the MP
6) I never properly understood the requirements for some spellbooks, some status effect landing rate and power and basically most of the mechanical workings of the game, but I think that mostly makes me a retard. Anyway, the game could use a little better explanation of its skills and spells in some cases (like Bless, Armormelt, does power cast increase heal potency? What does it even do exactly? etc.)
- I think most of this can be solved through experimentation so I don't mind that much
7) the absolutely horrible journal - at the very least let me save the conversation if you don't bother listing the locations of the characters, this game took me weeks to finish and how the shit am I supposed to remember who that one sentence on the 3rd page is talking about ...?
8) I fucked myself over by splitting points instead of trying to max 1 attribute to reach the super skill, but that's my fault for not researching the game more throughly before playing it
9) the gadgeteer is strange, I got the healing gem too late for one, and secondly I was always conflicted about shooting/casting because casting was shit due to the huge enemy resistances and shooting was just weak as hell PLUS had the horrible chance to cause blindness. I was so annoyed with chasing the stupid enemies around the map.
10) I couldn't find a way to re-read the class special ability in detail mid-game, was it possible?
11) the cone area of effect spells don't work after walking
12) obviously, the slow combat
13) there should have been way more hand placed encounters encouraging you to use different spells

All of these things are small but the game is long and it all piles up.
The game was great anyway. I had no problem whatsoever with Arnika road, it was the only part scaring me after reading up on the game before playing it. What for you was Arnika road, I think for me was the Rapax rift.

I'm sure I'll remember more stuff to add.

Oh and I forgot to absolutely horribly frustrating layout of the Umpani and Trang bases.
And I forgot the stupid fucking patrols in towns getting involved in fights, that shit took forever, exactly as annoying as in Fallout as someone's already mentioned.
 

Cadmus

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
Messages
4,264
No =/ I had heard of it but naively wanted a more "pure" experience.
Well, Trynton doesn't have many places to go but if you go the wrong way, it takes a long time to backtrack.. Plus as I said, I didn't like the place, I was happy to have found a new shopping mall for my party when I first got there but instead it was a damn tree with more encounters and slow guards and weird creatures and I was tired and bleh.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
No =/ I had heard of it but naively wanted a more "pure" experience.
All it does is effectively uncapping a bunch of sliders in menu.
>_>


Well, Trynton doesn't have many places to go but if you go the wrong way, it takes a long time to backtrack..
Protip: you should start backtracking the moment you notice that you're passing the same landmarks you've already passed, but in reverse order. Postponing it at this point generally won't do you much good.

Plus as I said, I didn't like the place
I actually kind of do. Treetop cities (or "cities", at least) aren't exactly commonplace in cRPGs. Would risk ragequitting due to linearity if I didn't.
 

Baron Dupek

Arcane
Joined
Jul 23, 2013
Messages
1,870,765
Come on, even for me - map illiterate - Trynton wasn't big deal. Only tree monsters (forgot the name, it's before you meet some shaman) and fairies and you're done.
 
Self-Ejected

theSavant

Self-Ejected
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
2,009
I agree with Trynton being confusing. Once I wanted to create a rush-through-party (no irony), which worked until I reached Trynton... then the slowness began, starting right at the entrance... which of the 3 ladders to go? All of them branched into 3 other ladders - only 1 leading to the treetop (or something like that). You go the wrong you may end up with a tree critter. Duh... eventually that was the point I realized how slow everything would become. It's OK to play once or twice with slow pace and exploring, but then you want things to go faster. Pointless.
 

TigerKnee

Arcane
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
1,920
Trynton's... uh, 3Dness confused me, I guess. I didn't really hate it though. If anything what I found more annoying is when you get sort of stuck having to wait for a patrol to slowly walk past a tiny bridge.
 

Cadmus

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
Messages
4,264
Trynton wasn't hard combat-wise. It was just a little bit irritating combination of the slow combat against monsters who would often run away "cuz gadgeteer", patrols trying to help you, patrols blocking your way, the starting phase with climbing up the tree was annoying (albeit short, it's more like a sour memory than an actual problem because it took like 10 minutes to finish).
I think a part of the problem was that I wasn't really paying much attention thus I didn't know what exactly I was supposed to do so I would often mindlessly run around, clicking anything that looked clickable and getting lost.

I'm sure if I were to go there now again with meta knowledge, it would have been a breeze though.


But hey, maybe it would also be nice to say what I liked!
I liked
-the learn by use system, it was faster than in TES and after every fight I got some satisfaction!
- the art direction, the enemy models, especially the bandits and the weird demons later on!
- think I liked the combat system..it was more of an abusive relationship maybe.
- the party banter..except for WHY DO I ALWAYS PICK THE WINNERS, HUH??? HUH??FUCK YOU BITCH
- I sorta liked the items, I only wished there was a bit better item progression.
- the voice acting and the presentation were awesome, I only wished I had a way to increase the view distance
- the character development was really fun, same like spells though I wished I could have tested it against more tailored encounters, too many of the fights it seemed better to rely on brute force instead of fiddling with debuffs, especially later ingame where the landing chance was very small on the beefed up mobs
- I liked the exploration, mostly
- the quests seemed quite fun
- I liked the bank in Arnika, everything at the beginning of the game had such a sense of mystery for me, I didn't know what the fuck to think about the robots and aliens in a fantasy game
- I originally wanted to ally with Trang, I was glad to have found an ugly looking race that wasn't apparently all evil, but at the end I fucked up and destroyed their mothership :(
 
Last edited:

Fatty

Augur
Joined
Nov 17, 2011
Messages
134
Location
Gladstone
Not much Wizardry 1-5 in this thread (from what I skimmed). Skippable?

side question - anyone make a list of blobbers anywhere? Brief google search yields nothing.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom