sheek said:
What was so interesting about Grimoire in the first place? I've seen screenshots before and they always look crap.
Well, back when it was first announced, there was a sense in the air that just-released Daggerfall has been the last RPG ever, and diablow clones are all we are going to get from now on (nope, no Fallout yet). Thus, a second coming of Wizardry 7 felt like a second coming allright.
The whole design didn't age well, but still feels good for the nostalgic among us. They don't make games like that any longer (yes, that includes Wizardry 8). Although gameplay-wise it is much more like Wizardry 6 than 7, very linear. Still, were it to be finished back in 1997, it would be remembered as instant hardcore classic. In fact, the '97 DOS edition, while not very stable and limited to shareware section, was probably the best of the three beta versions. Game mechanics were fully balanced and polished, unlike the last beta. I spent hours killing dwarves in the mines to switch classes. You could also mess with spells which were scripted as plain text... Too bad I lost the copy years ago.
The 2005 version was enjoyable enough, fully playable and finishable with only a few cheatcodes, but felt very unpolished. NPC scripts were a biggest problem indeed. And no, there are no star children and gorilla races. Although I wouldn't mind a bit if there were
Has this Cleve ever produced anything, was he some genius programmer once? Otherwise how come his project has gained so much fame?
He was in original Wizardry 8 team back around 94/95, before Sir-Tech started it over. Also wrote various small games in 80s. As for fame, he's quite infamous on Usenet, almost like Derek Smart. Nobody (well, almost) played Battlecruiser 3000AD, but everybody heard of the game and it's developer, haha.