Wizardry The Wizardry Series Thread

[Gastrick]

What exactly affects the odds of being ambushed by enemies? Is it the total of all your party members' agility or something like that? It sure sucks to get ambushed by skeletons and have half the party paralyzed in a single turn.

From here

In any unfriendly encounter, there is a 19% chance of surprising the monsters, and a 15.4% chance that the monsters surprise you.

Seems to be constant.

Do you mean Strength=-31 for example?

The variables they used for attributes would have been 5 bits long and unsigned, so -1 and 31 mean the same thing. It wraps around to the top in other words.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Clearly you can't get attached to your party in this game, because it'll do whatever's possible to insta-kill everyone. I'm assuming I'll eventually find some sort of way to quickly level up new parties.

 

[gman42]

From that same site, the stat change on level up mechanics are *supposed to be* as follows:

When you level up, each stat has a 75% to change.

If a stat changes, there is an (AgeInYears/130) chance that it decreases by 1 point. Otherwise, it increases by 1 point.

If a stat would decrease from 18 to 17, there is a 5/6 chance that it will stay at 18 anyway.

If a stat would increase from 18 to 19, then it will stay at 18 instead.

IIRC the PC port of the game is screwed up though, where it seems decreases are at least as likely as increases, requiring massive savescumming to avoid. I think the Apple II version follows the correct mechanics.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

IIRC the PC port of the game is screwed up though, where it seems decreases are at least as likely as increases, requiring massive savescumming to avoid.

Damn. So what version do people typically play?

 

[Gastrick]

Clearly you can't get attached to your party in this game, because it'll do whatever's possible to insta-kill everyone.

I know, I eventually started giving them color names, because I knew they'd be dead soon anyway.

Damn. So what version do people typically play?

The SNES version is the best one.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

My fighter wearing platemail armor was decapitated by a bunny rabbit.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Is the 6-8 trilogy as lethal as 1-4? I know that you can transfer your party between those games, but I imagine it'd be rare to actually carry the same party through multiple games unless you're save-scumming pretty hard.

 

[Butter]

They're not as lethal, and you can sometimes find items to resurrect people. You can't recruit new people to your party in 6 and 7.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

I was planning on playing all the games in order, but I'm not gonna lie, Wiz1 is putting me to sleep. And I hear 2 and 3 are just the same thing with new levels. Might just skip to 5 or 6.

I know, I eventually started giving them color names, because I knew they'd be dead soon anyway.

I started naming them after spell names so I remember how to type them out.

 

[Butter]

I was planning on playing all the games in order, but I'm not gonna lie, Wiz1 is putting me to sleep. And I hear 2 and 3 are just the same thing with new levels. Might just skip to 5 or 6.

5 plays pretty much the same as 1. 6 is where the gameplay noticeably changes, and IMO is the best introduction to the series.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Caution: Always have at least one item slot open in your party in case you find an essential item. Otherwise, you'll have to restart from a saved game. Unlike other games which allow your characters to blissfully walk away from items that are essential, Wizardry will force your party to accept an item. While good game players can generally recognize what's required of them, Wizardry's safety feature means that you won't find yourself frustrated at the end of the game without something you desperately need.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

I was planning on playing all the games in order, but I'm not gonna lie, Wiz1 is putting me to sleep. And I hear 2 and 3 are just the same thing with new levels. Might just skip to 5 or 6.

5 plays pretty much the same as 1. 6 is where the gameplay noticeably changes, and IMO is the best introduction to the series.

Yes. Starting from 6 your party can rest everywhere. In 1-5 you have to walk back to the city. This is a huge gameplay-changer.

 

[The Limper]

My fighter wearing platemail armor was decapitated by a bunny rabbit.

Seems your party was lacking a Holy Hand Grenade….

 

[gman42]

I was planning on playing all the games in order, but I'm not gonna lie, Wiz1 is putting me to sleep. And I hear 2 and 3 are just the same thing with new levels. Might just skip to 5 or 6.

5 plays pretty much the same as 1. 6 is where the gameplay noticeably changes, and IMO is the best introduction to the series.

Yes. Starting from 6 your party can rest everywhere. In 1-5 you have to walk back to the city. This is a huge gameplay-changer.

And going back to the city in 1-5 reset the state of the maze and the fixed encounters in it, which was annoying as well.

My understanding is that being able to do a traditional save in original Wizardry would have meant swapping out multiple floppies every time, which would have been crappy for gameplay experience...so the solution was to have an artificial requirement to return "home" frequently, and then save just the player data. And use possession of items (blue ribbon in Wiz1, etc.) as a ticket to newly earned areas, so the game just has to check inventory and that's it.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

What's up with the controls in Wizardry 6? You've got a whole keyboard to work with and you're stuck with the arrow keys and enter to scroll through menus. Makes me wonder if they were already making considerations for the console JRPG market.

 

[gman42]

What's up with the controls in Wizardry 6? You've got a whole keyboard to work with and you're stuck with the arrow keys and enter to scroll through menus. Makes me wonder if they were already making considerations for the console JRPG market.

Feels like even for the time it came out, SirTech was a good year or so behind the times with all the technical stuff in Wiz6 (clunky interface, EGA graphics when VGA had become standard, soundcard support but basically just to play digitized versions of PC speaker sounds).

The arrowing around is annoying but does become second nature after a while. Still a way better choice than mouse though. (Would be nice to have both enabled for the few occasions that a click would save time, but in their infinite wisdom, enabling mouse control gets rid of the text highlighting even though the keyboard still works.)

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Remember when I said the Wizardry devs were kind enough to tell you where the starting position on the map is?

Not in Wiz6!

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Can you roll a mage with Wizard's Eye from the very beginning? I'm gonna rage quit if this happens to me again.

 

[gman42]

Wiz6 levels start getting super unwieldy after a little while anyway, the main levels of the castle are straightforward enough, but eventually you're gonna be mapping out big asymmetrical blobs, and occasionally mapping out new areas only to find out they unexpectedly connect to places you've already been. Either use grid cartographer or embrace the need to tape graph paper together or re-copy your shit.

 

[octavius]

Why not use Grid Cartographer or something similar?
Even a fossilized relic of the past like me has moved on from pen&paper.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Why not use Grid Cartographer or something similar?

Because Grid Cartographer costs money and only runs on Windows. Like I mentioned a couple of pages ago, I'm gonna develop an alternative that runs on Linux in school (can't be too hard, just need a program that puts squares together for my purposes). I have to do some gay beginner's Python class for awhile before I get to the good shit and I release that. Until then, I'm gonna be a fucking MAN and use pen & paper like it's 1981.

 

[gman42]

Same here, but there is something about making that hard copy that becomes a special part of one's connection to the game. I sort of fondly remember making big sprawling maps of the old Infocom games back in the day, it gave me something to stare at when my progress was stalled with no obvious puzzle to solve, and more than once gave me inspiration of something to try.

 

[octavius]

Why not use Grid Cartographer or something similar?

Because Grid Cartographer costs money and only runs on Windows. Like I mentioned a couple of pages ago, I'm gonna develop an alternative that runs on Linux in school (can't be too hard, just need a program that puts squares together for my purposes). I have to do some gay beginner's Python class for awhile before I get to the good shit and I release that. Until then, I'm gonna be a fucking MAN and use pen & paper like it's 1981.

Well, in that case be warned that the whole starting Castle area is pretty big, with at least three levels, and the adjoining outdoors area are even bigger, and from that area you can access the mines which is a real challenge to map with so many stairs up and down. I remember I used to think that the whole map could actually be made into some giant 3D map made of papier-mache I had the skill and patience for it.

 

[No Great Name]

Why not use Grid Cartographer or something similar?

Because Grid Cartographer costs money and only runs on Windows. Like I mentioned a couple of pages ago, I'm gonna develop an alternative that runs on Linux in school (can't be too hard, just need a program that puts squares together for my purposes). I have to do some gay beginner's Python class for awhile before I get to the good shit and I release that. Until then, I'm gonna be a fucking MAN and use pen & paper like it's 1981.

I used AutoRealm when playing Wizardry and Might and Magic as a virtual graph paper program for drawing maps. Free to download and you can draw whatever the hell you want.

Example of first floor of Wiz1: https://imgur.com/Zy8oAwS

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

I like more the jap wizardry games, that's all.