jesus max heap is a retard. dragon quest was developed as an intentional mix of both 50% wizardry and 50% ultima; simply google for any interviews with the original DQ creator. Those were the creator's two favorite games and, along with Dragon Slayer (original grandfather of all japanese RPGs), the two direct western inspirations for DQ1.
First of all calm your tits and take your medicine.
Second of all: How did I claim anything different than that?
DQ was a mix of both wizardry and ultima. And the topic is "A world without wizardry"
So what's wrong with the statement, that in such a world DQ would have probably taken more notes from Ultima?
Also I didn't claim that wizardry was simple. What I do claim is, that JRPGs trying to emulate either Ultima or Wizardry mostly went down the easy road by sticking with the simpler mechanic (from a programmers perspective!). And yes, static turn based combat is easier to program than a game that requires path finding and a certain movement AI on combat scenes. Both of which were pretty memory heavy back then. Even with an AI as simple as "move towards the player and then hit".
Which actually makes sticking with static turn based combat a rather valid design decision on the side of the programmers. Especially considering that most of these games were written down on an assembly level for the respective machines.
I'm fully aware that in its design wizardry provides deeper combat mechanics than Ultima, however broken down into it's pieces most of it is the base combat mechanic and an abstracted form of status effects that come with certain attacks. And yes, that is easier to make than what Ultima did (most of all since Ultima also provided similar mechanics - except not as deeply designed from a gameplay perspective).
Now maybe you can argue that programming a system like Wizardry back then was more difficult, due to the fact that programmers didn't have the same kinds of techniques and basically a complete lack of classes and object orientation and all that fancy jazz - but then just think for a second what an immense effort Ultima was. Even making Ultima 6 - you can look up the technical design documents - was still an enormously complex endavour (and by the way: If you have to allocate your memory via assembly (or whatever other shitty low level language garriott was using) with <48kb of RAM, making an overworld like Ultima did is quite an achievement - you can't just keep that entire shit in memory and just pass it onto the screen)
My claim was not about the game design elements. What I'm talking about is the effort of programming that went into these games.
