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.