Wizardry Wizards & Warriors running (near) perfectly on modern OSs

[Great Deceiver]

I figured this would be worth posting in a new thread instead of necroing the old one.

After nearly a decade, I finally managed to get Wizards & Warriors running almost perfectly on a modern OS, thanks to the latest version of dgVoodoo2.

Previously, the Direct3D renderer was fucked (black patches on polygon faces, many other things broken) and you had to use Software mode to play, which in turn caused many problems with the mouse (hanged in certain spots, made the game practically unplayable). With the dgVoodoo2 wrapper, everything works perfectly under Direct3D mode.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Clean install
2. Apply unofficial 1.0 patch from Heuristic Park (http://www.jeffludwig.com/downloads/thank-you.php?tag=ww-hp-patch-v1.0)
3. Apply town avi fix (http://www.jeffludwig.com/downloads/thank-you.php?tag=ww-townavi)
4. Download dgVoodoo2 WIP 35 (http://dege.freeweb.hu/temp/dgVoodooWIP35.zip). Copy the files from the "MS" folder (DDraw.dll, D3Dlmm.dll and D3D8.dll) into your root Wizards & Warriors folder. Make sure "Fast video memory access" is turned off and that the Output API is Direct3D 11 (feature level 10.0) as per the following screenshot:

5. Play the best (before Grimoire) Bradley Wizardry successor, by the man himself. This is a seriously awesome game.

The only reason why it's nearly perfect and not quite is because the mouse still has a weird deadzone - probably related to the game's polling method. It's not a big deal and you can ameliorate it somewhat by upping your sensitivity/DPI.

Info from this thread on VOGONS:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=52343" class="light_un" target="_blank">https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=52343

Enjoy!

 

[V_K]

This thread needs a bumping.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Agreed, the game is not as good as the Wizardry series, but it deserves more love.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I think it's a lot better than Wiz 8 personally, it plays much faster overall. The prestige classes are a bit more popamole than in Wizardry (much easier to get), but at least you get some cool quests to go along with them.

Even the very first dungeon is miles beyond pretty much every recent game.

Overall a fun game. A pity Bradley spent years remastering Dung Lords and left this to rot, but that probably has something to do with Activision holding the IP rights or something.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Eh, combat is wonky as hell. Real time with sorta pause, click the cursor on the enemies to attack them (fucking bats), AOE spells will rape the shit out of you, mind-numbing and repetitive content, buggy as a motherfucker. The class change system is interesting but the classes are all gated by quests, some of which you can't complete until the final dungeon.

Wiz 8 is a way more polished, fun, and rewarding game. But muh dungeon design.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Combat is not real time with pause, it's strictly turn based (the manual says it's 'phased' but in practice it's just turn-based) with free movement. If you're "engaged" to an enemy it's simply turn-based. Ranged enemies are annoying if you can't close the distance sometimes as they keep firing, but it's a minor issue.

Complaining about repetitive content is at least ironic considering that Wiz 8 is nothing but painfully slow fights with 10 trash enemies for 3/4ths of the game. At least you can run away in W&W.

 

[cvv]

My second game I've ever bought, after Albion. In a small stationery shop, there it was randomly standing next to boxes of MS Office and printer ink. A completely surreal experience. By then I was a huge fan of Bradley so I ran to withraw some cash and bought it on the spot. For a price not much lower than that blasted MS Office iirc.

Game is great. I remember thinking it was a bit of decline as opposed to W7. Then again it was early 2000s, true old-school RPGs were basically dead and this game was like a second coming of Christ. The story is completely retarded and the combat felt clunky even back then but apart from that I had a huge blast. Thanks for the tip and the nostalgia trip Great Deceiver, gonna give this a try.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Combat is not real time with pause, it's strictly turn based (the manual says it's 'phased' but in practice it's just turn-based) with free movement. If you're "engaged" to an enemy it's simply turn-based. Ranged enemies are annoying if you can't close the distance sometimes as they keep firing, but it's a minor issue.

Complaining about repetitive content is at least ironic considering that Wiz 8 is nothing but painfully slow fights with 10 trash enemies for 3/4ths of the game. At least you can run away in W&W.

The logical conclusion of this argument is that 99% of all fights in RPGs are pointless trash mobs, therefore combat is always boring and repetitive, and not a valid complaint.

That's crap.

Just looking at the spell lists and combat mechanics between the two games proves that's not true. In Wiz 8 you have a lot of options and tools for dealing with different fights. Huge range of buffs, disabling spells, status effects, mass damage attacks, various utility items, summons, strategic positioning w/ weapon ranges, etc. In W&W it's just click till they're dead, and hope you don't lose anyone.

I'm not saying every fight in Wiz8 is some kind of amazing tactical masterpiece like Xcom + JA, but the simple usefulness of ranged weapons in Wiz8 compared to their utter worthlessness in W&W proves which game has more depth.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

My second game I've ever bought, after Albion. In a small stationery shop, there it was randomly standing next to boxes of MS Office and printer ink. A completely surreal experience. By then I was a huge fan of Bradley so I ran to withraw some cash and bought it on the spot. For a price not much lower than that blasted MS Office iirc.

Game is great. I remember thinking it was a bit of decline as opposed to W7. Then again it was early 2000s, true old-school RPGs were basically dead and this game was like a second coming of Christ. The story is completely retarded and the combat felt clunky even back then but apart from that I had a huge blast. Thanks for the tip and the nostalgia trip Great Deceiver, gonna give this a try.

I recall buying it at launch, no idea who Bradley was, only played the older Wizardrys at that point. Was extremely disappointed by the game and how buggy/unfinished it felt. Took me a long time to get through it and remember being pretty sick of it when it was finally over.

Funny I still have the manual but can't find the actual disks.

 

[Iznaliu]

5. Play the best (before Grimoire) Bradley Wizardry successor, by the man himself. This is a seriously awesome game.

Should you get six copies of it because there's six copies of every item in the game?

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

You're probably talking about class/guild promotion items, since there are six characters. That's about 0.0001% of the game items and to get six copies of any one of those would still mean going for the same class/guild promotion, at least once, for every single character, which probably never happpens in any game.
If that's all you got, that's a pretty cheap shot. If not, I'd be curious to know what the fuck you're talking about.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

You're probably talking about class/guild promotion items, since there are six characters. That's about 0.0001% of the game items and to get six copies of any one of those would still mean going for the same class/guild promotion, at least once, for every single character, which probably never happpens in any game.
If that's all you got, that's a pretty cheap shot. If not, I'd be curious to know what the fuck you're talking about.

All the guild quests work like that

 

[felipepepe]

Great game, has some really fun dungeons. I used a Virtual Windows XP machine to play it but still had some issues, nice that this seems to work better.

What's interesting is that this game and Wizardry 8 are basically complementary... IMHO Wizards & Warriors had much better dungeon design and encounters play much better, while Wizardry 8 has a more interesting and developed world, NPCs and character system.

 

[Jaesun]

All I remember about this game was the very big slayers LP of this. Twas epic.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I remember Vazdru's LP, it was great. I checked it again and all the image links are dead though

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

All the guild quests work like that

Yes, I know, I thought my post made it clear. It still doesn't amount to much and six characters doing the same guild quest, even once, is still stretching it. At worst you'll get to see two or three same unsignificant items a couple of times in the entire game. How horrible !

I remember Vazdru's LP, it was great. I checked it again and all the image links are dead though

Thanks. It's only the first half that's gone though (Photobucket & Imageshack links), in the second half, from page 4 and on, images are hosted by a fellow codexer, and still work fine. It's like half despair.

 

[Scroo]

Nice, thank you. I bought W&W off Ebay years ago but some design choices turned me off. Like having to talk to every Questgiver NPC with all your characters which took forever. I might check it out again with this

 

[cvv]

Nice, thank you. I bought W&W off Ebay years ago but some design choices turned me off. Like having to talk to every Questgiver NPC with all your characters which took forever.

Whaa? Don't remember this. Can anyone confirm it?

 

[V_K]

Whaa? Don't remember this. Can anyone confirm it?

I think it only concerns guild quests - you'll need to report them with each character advancing or something since they all have their individual tracks.
Bradley originally wanted to have multiplayer in the game, so some features are artefacts of that intention.

 

[V_K]

Also, I think if you delete the speech files, dialogs will become instant or something, which solves the problem.

 

[Zandig Slaytanic]

Here is the way to install without the need for dgVoodoo 2, or the Town avi fix:

1) Install the game from the CDs by running the SETUP file as Administrator

2) Install the Version 1.0 patch

3) IN WINDOWS 10 : click on "All Settings" and type " Windows Features "
- click on "Turn Windows Features on or off"
- Put a check mark in ' Legacy Components ' and under it..'DirectPlay '...click OK and Apply

4) Set the Compatibility of the file 'deep6.exe' or 'deep6_crk.exe' (if you are using the NOCD patch)
to Windows XP (Service Pack 3)

5) Install the W&W Graphics Patch:
http://tgeweb.com/ironworks/wizardswarriors/downloads.shtml
- Set Graphics to 1280x960 for both deep6.exe and deep6_crk.exe
- In game set the graphics to D3D: 800x600

 

[Zandig Slaytanic]

Scans of my box:

Spoiler

 

[Leitz]

Good thread. I alwas wanted to play this game.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Shit, win a 16th century suit of armour. They sure weren't fucking around.

 

[thesheeep]

That was before the time when I started keeping boxes of some games that held some value for me.