Wizardry What is the best mainline Wizardry game?

[Hrymr]

If 6 and 7 are the best I imagine how bad the other ones are.

Much better.

Wizardry 6 is a fine game, but 7 is shit. I half-believe it's some sort of inside joke on this forum to pretend to like Wizardry 7, I don't see how someone could enjoy that bloated autistic mess.

Early Wizardries are fast-paced and straightforward, some of the most tense games I've played; while Wizardry 8 manages to turn Wiz7's systems into something actually enjoyable, replaces dice rolls with point buy (as befits a game where you're not supposed to permanently lose party members), and is generally much less of a save scumming simulator than the previous two titles.

Yeah, I agree with that. But I understand people who think that 7 is the best. When I was playing it for the first time (only a couple years ago, so it's not nostalgia or anything like that) I was convinced that it's the best game that has been ever created. And now I think that I was wrong. For some reason this game gives this impression, and it's easy to give in.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Voted VII, but can see how people would vote for 1 or 6. A little surprised at the love for 5; I played it as a kid, but don’t remember it being anything all that special, although I was grateful I could actually finish it, unlike 4 which kicked my ass too hard at the time. Should I revisit 5? What makes it so special?
Also never played 8. Always been on my list, but I’m getting old and don’t know if it’s ever going to happen realistically.

 

[Wizfall]

I played 5, 7 and 8 in this order.
I enjoyed all three of them greatly at the time.
However i would only recommend W8 which has the best character system/development by far.

W5 was great by the time but now i would consider it too simplisitc, it's a "pure" TB bloober with a good maze.

W7 has a great world but too many random fights and a very flawed character system (class switching is great at the beginning until you realize it's massively overpowered and kill the interest of character development in the end, moreover some skills will be maxed before mid-game...a few puzzles are awfully difficult too)

W8 has a good world, few but interesting dialogues and absolutely top notch character system/development which make every character in your party truly unique. The best bloober i ever played by far.

 

[Serus]

The problems with W8 has been discussed at length in other threads but one is that it is slow. Even with wizfast the battles last way too long (especially for a blobber). There maybe now some additional fixes to make it run faster. Maybe it's less of an issue today but still it was when i played. Many people comparing it to Wizardy 7 forget this slowness of W8. In W7 you had a massive number of random encounters and the game played very slow because of that. But at least many of those encounters could be done fast. Often in one round of combat with nuclear blast or similar spell. In W8 damage spells were nerfed so it doesn't work. In W8 there was a lot less of random encounters but they were on average longer and because of that, imho, more boring.
I played W8 twice - and twice i gave up near the very end. The endless ranks of Rapax, who can't possibly be a danger to the party at this stage and take a few minutes per group to beat, wore me down. Twice.


Edit: I don't people who say that character development in W8 was great. True, it wasn't broken as in W7 (when played by an autist abusing class changing) but it wasn't very interesting. All there was in W8 to character development was choosing which stats/skills to increase first. It had an impact on the character but the choice was made at the beginning. Then at each level add those few points to the chosen stat/skill. And in the end most character of a given class ended the same anyway. Changing classes was mostly pointless, they overnerfed it - probably because it was broken in W7. In the end there wasn't much in terms of sensible "builds" within each classes. The system didn't offer much in the terms of interesting choices except the ones you make at character creation.
Overall it was a system that worked well, a very solid one if you will, but great? No.

 

[Max Damage]

I'll go with 5. Would prefer 8 if combat didn't take forever and if there were less annoying sound effects.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

My favorite's Wizardory XIX: Revenge of the lolis, shame on you for not including it in the poll.

 

[Twizman]

V for me, psx version. I think the dungeon design is excellent.

 

[EruDaan]

7. Hard as fuck. There are no shotcuts, no cookie-cutter builds (because leveling up depends on luck too), no the-moment-you-got-it-made-the-game-a-cake-walk items (except maybe the Poets Lute for the early game) and no tactics but praying that the group of Gorn Ashigaru uses their melee attacks and miss instead of each casting a fireball on your lvl. 4-6 parties ass in a mandatory fight you cannot evade. Playing that game on iron man mode must be a hellish nightmare and kudos to anyone who actually managed to do so.

But the best part? Having your lvl 28 party going toe to toe on a Godzilly... and still getting wiped out during the 10min+ battle without the usage of Hiding in the Shadows and spells. But, boy oh, boy is it satisfying to get these sweet, sweet 800.000 exp after the fight for anlvl up? Oh, fucking yes!

 

[Ysaye]

7. Hard as fuck. There are no shotcuts, no cookie-cutter builds (because leveling up depends on luck too), no the-moment-you-got-it-made-the-game-a-cake-walk items (except maybe the Poets Lute for the early game) and no tactics but praying that the group of Gorn Ashigaru uses their melee attacks and miss instead of each casting a fireball on your lvl. 4-6 parties ass in a mandatory fight you cannot evade. Playing that game on iron man mode must be a hellish nightmare and kudos to anyone who actually managed to do so.

But the best part? Having your lvl 28 party going toe to toe on a Godzilly... and still getting wiped out during the 10min+ battle without the usage of Hiding in the Shadows and spells. But, boy oh, boy is it satisfying to get these sweet, sweet 800.000 exp after the fight for anlvl up? Oh, fucking yes!

TBH this is true of many Wizardries; in other Wizardries you are hoping the enemy Ninja doesn't insta-kill you, or the vampire lord drain a heap of your levels. A small difference is, in this game you can go back to your save file a few minutes back, which takes all the risk out of it compared to the earlier Wizardries where the best outcome is to basically reset back at town, which could still really suck if you actually progressed between town and that location.

Also 10 minutes for a battle (where there are a heap of misses+failed spells on both sides most likely)? - is this really fun? Don't get me wrong, the choices for the player should require strategy and be a little stressful, but IMO it should not take that long to decide an outcome.

 

[Butter]

 

[DraQ]

I played W8 twice - and twice i gave up near the very end. The endless ranks of Rapax, who can't possibly be a danger to the party at this stage and take a few minutes per group to beat, wore me down. Twice.

Do you even mythology?
Just use the magic they are vulnerable to rather than trying to fireball (or nuclear blast) everything.
Also status effects.

Edit: I don't people who say that character development in W8 was great.

It says more about shittiness of baseline RPG character development than anything else. Any system where you don't just max out 1-2 stats per class and ignore the rest will seem great in comparison. Coincidentally it's like this thing DraQ was talking about.

Changing classes was mostly pointless, they overnerfed it - probably because it was broken in W7.

You can use it to skew hybrids, change bards, gadgeteers (as long as you are absolutely positive you won't be using that omnigun)and in some cases combine stuff. I haven't really used it, but the worst thing seems to be the overreliance on class specific gear.

7. Hard as fuck. There are no shotcuts, no cookie-cutter builds (because leveling up depends on luck too), no the-moment-you-got-it-made-the-game-a-cake-walk items (except maybe the Poets Lute for the early game) and no tactics but praying that the group of Gorn Ashigaru uses their melee attacks and miss instead of each casting a fireball on your lvl. 4-6 parties ass in a mandatory fight you cannot evade.

That's not "hard" that's just luck based (and shit design).

 

[DJOGamer PT]

6 is neat one. It's like a mixture between the classic games that were solely about dungeon crawling and the next 2 games where the campgain is a "proper" adventure. Maybe it's because of this focus I like 6 more than 7.
8's campgain isn't as ambitious as 7, but it's still a good ending to the trilogy, and offers a good degree C&C (and importing a save from 7 actually affects the campgaing unlike the Witcher games). Plus, and the reason why I voted 8, it's that IMO it has the best gameplay of series.

I've said this in another thread but IMO the classic games (wiz 1 to 5) are not really RPG's because their focus is completely different from traditional RPG's:

IMO Wiz 1-5 (and similiar blobbers) are entirely different beasts to games like Wiz 6-8 and Grimoire, and as such they really can't be compared.
I don't know a better to way explain it than this:
>Wiz 1-5 are dungeon crawlers, this means that the dungeon is the sole focus and the true enemy of the game, every other aspect revolves around this design principle and their function is to enchance that enemy, and make the experience must be as tigth as possible;
>Wiz 6-8 are more classical RPG's (this becomes more apparent in 7), so the dungeon is no longer the star of the show and other aspects (some brand new, as they would amount to bloat in the dungeon crawler) share equal if not higher importance, aspects such as: the game world's design, the level of interactivity, exploration, c&c, quests, gameplay systems that allow for builds that aren't fully meant for combat or dealing with the dangers of the dungeon, etc...

 

[octavius]

None of them are really RPGs, since they don't allow any meaningful role playing.
One could just as easily argue that it is 1-5 that are the true RPGs since the dungeon being the true enemy of the game was the essence of Gygax's D&D.

 

[Palomides]

Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land.

 

[Zer0wing]

Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom, SNES port. Because asses'n'tiddies in prestigious artstyle.
WizVII on the second place for its innovative gameplay mechanics.

 

[Serus]

I played W8 twice - and twice i gave up near the very end. The endless ranks of Rapax, who can't possibly be a danger to the party at this stage and take a few minutes per group to beat, wore me down. Twice.

Do you even mythology?
Just use the magic they are vulnerable to rather than trying to fireball (or nuclear blast) everything.
Also status effects.

There are resistances in W8? And status effects? Wait, wait, there is... MAGIC in W8? Wow, I had no idea, that changes everything.

 

[DraQ]

None of them are really RPGs, since they don't allow any meaningful role playing.

Improved.

 

[Desiderius]

praying that the group of Gorn Ashigaru uses their melee attacks and miss instead of each casting a fireball on your lvl. 4-6 parties ass in a mandatory fight you cannot evade. But the best part? Having your lvl 28 party going toe to toe on a Godzilly... and still getting wiped out during the 10min+ battle without the usage of Hiding in the Shadows and spells. But, boy oh, boy is it satisfying to get these sweet, sweet 800.000 exp after the fight for anlvl up? Oh, fucking yes!

I feel like you could Silence them? Magic Screen? Been awhile but don't remember having to savescum that one but do remember it being suitably difficult. Do remember savescumming level-ups like a madman. Way too much variance.

Agree that challenging/rewarding lategame is nice and unfortunately rare.

 

[Empary]

Is there any wizfast for 7? I beat 6 and 8, but I can't bear playing The Bane

 

[Desiderius]

Just use the magic they are vulnerable to rather than trying to fireball (or nuclear blast) everything.
Also status effects.

He knows, that's why he said they're no threat. I got burned out there as well a few years ago. Funny thing it was just after getting a major deja vu in the Rapax Zoo area and realizing I'd played the game before after 100 hours or whatever of thinking I'd discovered a new Wizardry.

 

[Wizfall]

The problems with W8 has been discussed at length in other threads but one is that it is slow. Even with wizfast the battles last way too long (especially for a blobber). There maybe now some additional fixes to make it run faster. Maybe it's less of an issue today but still it was when i played. Many people comparing it to Wizardy 7 forget this slowness of W8. In W7 you had a massive number of random encounters and the game played very slow because of that. But at least many of those encounters could be done fast. Often in one round of combat with nuclear blast or similar spell. In W8 damage spells were nerfed so it doesn't work. In W8 there was a lot less of random encounters but they were on average longer and because of that, imho, more boring.
I played W8 twice - and twice i gave up near the very end. The endless ranks of Rapax, who can't possibly be a danger to the party at this stage and take a few minutes per group to beat, wore me down. Twice.


Edit: I don't people who say that character development in W8 was great. True, it wasn't broken as in W7 (when played by an autist abusing class changing) but it wasn't very interesting. All there was in W8 to character development was choosing which stats/skills to increase first. It had an impact on the character but the choice was made at the beginning. Then at each level add those few points to the chosen stat/skill. And in the end most character of a given class ended the same anyway. Changing classes was mostly pointless, they overnerfed it - probably because it was broken in W7. In the end there wasn't much in terms of sensible "builds" within each classes. The system didn't offer much in the terms of interesting choices except the ones you make at character creation.
Overall it was a system that worked well, a very solid one if you will, but great? No.

Wizfast is obsolete because it only increase enmies' movement speed, unfortunately everybody talk about it instead of "Faster combat"
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/wizardry-8-enhancements.79581/
"Faster combat" also increase the speed of all animations (spell/missile/splits included) which solve the terrible slow combat of W8, the game only weakness.
This utility is just awesome.

Character system is great because :
- every class (except maybe Paladin in some extent) have a very distinct flavor and is interesting to play, in a bloober it's very rare.
- all class has a minimum of 3, more often 4 stats that are almost equally important to improve while the remaining one are just "nice +" and not total garbage.
While i agree the core of the system is simple, it is exceptional for a blobber for his balance and what it allows.
It may not seem much but a blobber which offer a lot of only interesting class and two possible quite different build for each is a lot of different party composition.
Speak volume for blobber i agree but still.
Multiclassing has been overnerfed indeed, very few interesting combination but still ten time betters than the other way.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Edit: I don't people who say that character development in W8 was great. True, it wasn't broken as in W7 (when played by an autist abusing class changing) but it wasn't very interesting. All there was in W8 to character development was choosing which stats/skills to increase first. It had an impact on the character but the choice was made at the beginning. Then at each level add those few points to the chosen stat/skill. And in the end most character of a given class ended the same anyway. Changing classes was mostly pointless, they overnerfed it - probably because it was broken in W7. In the end there wasn't much in terms of sensible "builds" within each classes. The system didn't offer much in the terms of interesting choices except the ones you make at character creation.
Overall it was a system that worked well, a very solid one if you will, but great? No.

Lol, what systems from that era would you call great, then. Codex top crpg list is full of games that fare much worse, to say the least.

A lot of classes in Wiz8 have multiple stats that are very useful for them and since the points are extremely limited then the choice is definitely there, and very real. Many classes absolutely do have vastly different builds available and that's without venturing into the more meta/bizarro ideas (that still very much work). It's also obviously intentional, there are safe and "boring" classes and there are "advanced" ones, although you can definitely do some interesting experimentation with pretty much anyone outside of maybe a fighter.

The races aren't as obvious as they seem and, again, give many different options if one is willing to look outside their archetypes.

It also has great itemization, so that building same class for different weapon types can give vastly different experiences.

It has great spellcasting/resource management systems.

It's also extremely unique in that every class is useful in combat, but at the same time there is pretty much no broken/ridiculous shit (unless you cheese learn by doing to the point of brain damage). I don't think a I know a game with better class balance (tm) that at the same does does not inject blandness the way modern low iq game design does.

Its biggest flaw is probably the wrong-minded oldschoolness, meaning lack of information. See people arguing to this day how critical skill works exactly and all.

 

[samuraigaiden]

I've said this in another thread but IMO the classic games (wiz 1 to 5) are not really RPG's because their focus is completely different from traditional RPG's

If by traditional RPGs you mean tabletop RPGs, I couldn't disagree more. Few videogame RPGs - if any - make the player think within the game's own logic and systems like the original Wizardry games. Most developers are not confident enough on their game systems to do it - and that is the essence of RPGs.

None of them are really RPGs, since they don't allow any meaningful role playing.

What does "meaningful role playing" even mean?

 

[octavius]

That is has actual consequences, like in the Fallout games.
Of course, I was playing the devil's advocate when replying to a rather stupid post about Wiz 1-5 not being "real RPGs".

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Few videogame RPGs - if any - make the player think within the game's own logic and systems like the original Wizardry games. Most developers are not confident enough on their game systems to do it - and that is the essence of RPGs.

That's cool and all, but many games outside of the RPG genre make the player think within the game's own logic and systems.
So the essence of RPG's must be something else, otherwise any game that does the above can be considered an RPG.

That is has actual consequences, like in the Fallout games.
Of course, I was playing the devil's advocate when replying to a rather stupid post about Wiz 1-5 not being "real RPGs".

When I said they weren't real RPG's it wasn't an insult, quite the oposite.
Like I said in the post those games were extremely focused and because of that achieved their desired experience magnifically.
And again the reason why Wiz 6-8 are completely different beast from the previous is because they focus shifts into a more "complete" (for a lack of better word) experience where things like quests, npc's, world design, narrative and the even the PC's themselves have more importance than the Dungeon.
Also if your definition meaningful role playing is C&C than I can't see how Wiz 8 an specially 7 aren't RPG's.