The David W. Bradley's Wizards & Warriors Thread

[Darth Canoli]

Sounds like whatever it was, it hasn't been fixed. If I hated it 20 years ago, I'm sure I would still hate it now.

I played it "recently, probably 2 years ago or so and it wasn't fixed, there's no way to skip it either.
Each time you switch to another party member, they go on ranting about these promotions quests or whatever it was, the more class quests you take on with your character the worse it is.

That's probably the main reason why i dropped it about halfway.
In Enduring, you grow stronger, until you can't endure it anymore...

 

[Dungeon Lord]

Sounds like whatever it was, it hasn't been fixed. If I hated it 20 years ago, I'm sure I would still hate it now.

I will never understand this harsh judgement. Sure, I hated this "shop speaking game feature" as well.
I am replaying MM6 recently and my party is flipped on leaving a house/shop. It is annoying, but I will not dump a great game because of that.

 

[Zombra]

I will never understand this harsh judgement.

It's not a moral judgement, nor a criticism; it's a simple statement of fact. If I find myself saying "I hate this" when doing something, particularly during a leisure activity, I stop doing it. Life is better for it I think.

 

[Bad Sector]

Matt's video about Wizardry made me, for some reason, think about Wizards & Warriors again. Funny enough, i have two physical copies of the game but i never actually played it: the first copy was from a magazine coverdisk from around mid-2000s but the disk was unreadable in most PCs i had - i only barely managed to install the game once but it didn't work. The second copy was from some years ago when i found the game while browsing eBay and found it as one of those re-releases from UK budget publishers - i was interested in playing the game after all... every time i looked at that screenshot at the back, i thought "i should play this" :-P. But i bought the game together with a bunch of others and the back of the disk mentioned in system requirements that it only runs in Windows 95 and Windows 98 - and true enough, it didn't work on my PC at the time. I could have tried to find fixes, but the other stuff i bought grabbed my attention.

Then GOG released the game a couple of years ago and decided to buy that instead since even the re-release version needs a CD to run. But two years ago i was busy with work so i just added it to the pile of games to play at some point later.

Anyway, Matt's video reminded me of it and i did rebuild my ~2005 PC (originally bought in late 2003 but upgraded it a bit later) recently as a retro PC so i installed it there. Around twelve hours later, well past midnight, i have to say that it is a nice game. I'm not very enthusiastic on how the turn-ish based combat works (i think i prefer M&M 6's approach where anything that is in combat with you pauses and waits its turn instead of only the enemies in close range), but it does look like it has some good exploration and environmental puzzles which are things i like.

Now while the game runs perfectly fine on my retro PC and it even looks great on the CRT, the game insists on running it at a 60Hz mode which doesn't feel that great, so i decided to install it on my main PC. At 640x480 it is perfect with AMD's integer scaling since on my 2560x1440 monitor i get perfect crisp scaling - none of that blurry mess with other low resolutions and it looks like it works fine there. The only issue i've noticed is that the mouse has a tiny "dead zone" when looking around - if i try to rotate the camera and make only a small motion with the mouse, it doesn't register. I tried to use both RTSS and AMD's control panel to cap the framerate (usually this happens when a game is running at a high framerate and mouse motion deltas create too small values) but for some reason neither tools could cap it. It is a minor issue though as the "dead zone" is very small so i'll probably just get used to it.

Also i found that the 6-party (including elephant dude) on a single horse amusing:

And even more amusing that the horse can strafe :-P

Anyway, i've got eeeeevil to smite.

 

[dark_savant]

Would DEFINETLY recommend using the 1.1 fan patch to fix the plant enemies with insanely OP attacks: http://www.jeffludwig.com/downloads/thank-you.php?tag=ww-mod-v1.1

This is not a patch but fan mod. Changes too much and I don`t recommend it for first playthrough

 

[dark_savant]

I am replaying MM6 recently and my party is flipped on leaving a house/shop. It is annoying, but I will not dump a great game because of that.

This was fixed decades ago by Moks patch which is also included in Grayface MM6 patch (optional if you don`t like it)

 

[Desiderius]

I remember figuring out some way past the Poison Monsters (actually had to give up first playthrough at that point which sucked) but can't remember what is was. Can you refresh our memories in case we want to give it a go?

 

[felipepepe]

I remember figuring out some way past the Poison Monsters (actually had to give up first playthrough at that point which sucked) but can't remember what is was. Can you refresh our memories in case we want to give it a go?

This is why I recommend using the mod, even if it changes other stuff. There are plants near the haunted castle that are a pain but can be avoided by knowing where they are... however, what made me install the mod was a group of plants in a corridor inside the ogre dungeon. I tried like 20 times and just could not get past them.

If you are a purist I guess you can directly edit the D6MONS.DAT file and just remove the ranged attack from the plant monster, keeping everything else the same.

 

[Bad Sector]

Sometimes mechanics consistency can lead to amusing results. For example,

Spoiler

this woman told me to find some amulet that belonged to a man she knew and it meant a lot to her and blah blah and sure, i find it, i give it to her and she's like "oh thank you, take this ultra rare potion as a reward".

Then i ask to trade with her...

...and in her inventory is the amulet i gave her :-P and if i buy it and sell it to her again she's like "oh thank you, take this ultra rare potion as a reward", etc again :-P.

Though i do wonder if it was intentional (so you can get the elixir multiple times) or a bug as it doesn't seem to happen with the rat guy (i can't buy his rat pie though if i kill him it is one of the items he drops).

 

[jungl]

I decided to give this game a shot. I briefly played it 10 years ago 10-20 minutes thought it was trash and quit. Turns out it is a great game but has a lot of annoyances. Taking guild quests for example. You have to individually take the guild quest for everyone in your party that can take it or you leave them gimped missing a guild level. Had to massacre the toad people because I didn't know swimming under their village pisses them off. It was in the middle of night I cant see shit. And oh god those plants. Its nice the game makes you pause and figure out how to deal with a roadblock but at least give you the tools to deal with it. All my guys suck with bows and I only have one mage so it take forever cheesing them with the fire spell.

Its a good game but it sure does throw a lot of old school bugs and jank at you.

 

[Desiderius]

Ludwig is solid. I’ll give his mod a go when I wrap up Wiz8.

 

[Fluent]

I can very much recommend this game to anyone who's a fan of dungeon crawling RPGs. It's got great character creation and development. It's got a pretty open world you can explore with lots of hidden stuff to find. My old channel (some of u may remember), Fluent's World, had an LP of this game and some livestreams I did. Those were some of my most popular livestreams at the time, this was before it was on GOG. Glad to see the game is easy to get nowadays, it's definitely something one should play if they like interesting dungeons and old-school RPG mechanics! <3

 

[jungl]

I managed to beat the game yesterday. Gameplay was fun its more of a old school adventure game then a rpg. The combat was crap and the rpg mechanics stuff was on the weak side.

The meat of the game was exploring the foggy low view distance world and making map notes of chests I opened and managing my cluster fuck inventory filled with ? and quest items. Also tolerating the JANK like the mermaid getting crushed by a door she intends to open and my ship getting permanently stuck.

It gave me nostalgia of Aidyn chronicles for the n64 and resident evil games where you can drop key items like resident evil outbreak.

 

[Desiderius]

It’s crazy that I’m finding new areas in a game I already played twice ten years apart. Did you know Serpent Temple had a Belfry with giant high EXP Spiders and four chests in it?

So much depth in the dungeon design.

 

[jungl]

It’s crazy that I’m finding new areas in a game I already played twice ten years apart. Did you know Serpent Temple had a Belfry with giant high EXP Spiders and four chests in it?

So much depth in the dungeon design.

ya I saw that area. At that point of the game when I was in the serpent temple I was getting disappointed "jeez they let me grab all these things and you can jump on them but it seems useless!" I thought to myself.

I really wanted to believe the game had platforming and then I entered that odd area in the temple where they there tons of boxes and I'm like okay there has to be a fucking point to all this they cant simply add boxes into the game for the player to destroy for trash items and too my surprise looking up there was. it was silly getting up there I only used 2 boxes but the game was nice enough to give a big jank powered boost to my partys jumping ability.

 

[coldcrow]

The game is ridiculously bad, 'cept the moody atmosphere. Replaying it at the moment and it is such a mess of conflicting design visions. One major flaw is that it is WAY too easy, and you really need that mod. But then it becomes a better Dungeon Lords with horde after horde respawning, ready to be obliterated. It is a flaw, because you can grind money rather effortlessly once you reach Ishad N'ha. In the safe area just short of the PLANTS, ratlings spawn generously and they drop jewelry en masse, god forbid you encounter a group only armed with shurikens. Then you just walk circles and heal, then collect shurikens. Moneybased advancement only works when money is actually hard to come by. See PB games. You can clearly see that Bradley had lost almost all touch with the ideas that made Wizardry 7 a good game. Irrefutable proof of that is Dungeon Lords. Sad.

PS: You can do the same with nymphs, it just takes longer.

 

[Desiderius]

The game is ridiculously bad, 'cept the moody atmosphere. Replaying it at the moment and it is such a mess of conflicting design visions. One major flaw is that it is WAY too easy, and you really need that mod. But then it becomes a better Dungeon Lords with horde after horde respawning, ready to be obliterated. It is a flaw, because you can grind money rather effortlessly once you reach Ishad N'ha. In the safe area just short of the PLANTS, ratlings spawn generously and they drop jewelry en masse, god forbid you encounter a group only armed with shurikens. Then you just walk circles and heal, then collect shurikens. Moneybased advancement only works when money is actually hard to come by. See PB games. You can clearly see that Bradley had lost almost all touch with the ideas that made Wizardry 7 a good game. Irrefutable proof of that is Dungeon Lords. Sad.

PS: You can do the same with nymphs, it just takes longer.

Then stop grinding dumbass.

 

[coldcrow]

You don't get it. 1) Grinding money wouldn't be an issue if the economy was somewhat balanced, or normal opponents would actually put up resistance 2) To some extent the game wants you to grind, you run back and forth anyways and the respawn timer is really brief, also the only real difficulty are gatekeeper enemies, which encourage you further to grind. You surely don't need it per se, just saying the game design encourages it alot, which imho breaks the obvious goal of immersion Bradley seems to have followed.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

the respawn timer is really brief

You can change it in the game settings.

 

[coldcrow]

Then stop grinding dumbass.

If a game throws you quickly respawning enemies which basically drop several full high skill/stat ranks for the low investment of some 30 minutes. Idk. You have to be quite a LARPer to not use the possibility to power-up.

And then you want to play the Lud-mod which further increases the spawn rate. Lol.

I admit if you play the game without grind on low spawn settings and high difficulty it is much better. The problem of a totally fucked up game economy still stands, though.

 

[V_K]

low investment of some 30 minutes

 

[coldcrow]

30 minutes in a 40h+ game? Not to mention they will be made up easily, since your toons will be much stronger?

 

[jungl]

Skill training once per level up with money is very dumb design in wizards and warriors but nothing is worse then wizardry 6 character creation. You do not have to min max in wizards and warriors at all even if you get the skills to 10 u dont notice a difference unless its sorcery.

Character creation should not take forever (30 minutes or more) it should be pick up and play.

 

[Old Hans]

You don't get it. 1) Grinding money wouldn't be an issue if the economy was somewhat balanced, or normal opponents would actually put up resistance 2) To some extent the game wants you to grind, you run back and forth anyways and the respawn timer is really brief, also the only real difficulty are gatekeeper enemies, which encourage you further to grind. You surely don't need it per se, just saying the game design encourages it alot, which imho breaks the obvious goal of immersion Bradley seems to have followed.

just outsource the grinding to some homeless Asian kid.

 

[Zombra]

Old Hans

#98 +(7410)- [X]
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