Wizardry Long Live Wizardry! (And The All-New Games By Ex-Wizardry Developers)

[Dorarnae]

eventually I'll play Wizardry 7 on ps1 but right now I am playing elminage 3 (shouldn't be too hard/long because I can't resist breaking the game...).

Dude, you're the man. You have no idea how much stuff I found out just by watching your videos, even before you had to change channels (?). It's part of what got me into Elminage and blobbers in general. Welcome to the Codex! We are one of the few bastions of DRPG lovers besides the Parakeetman threads on NeoFAG.

haha yeah, I went to Neofag because it seemed interesting at first the discussion about dungeon crawler over there. Parakeetman does some nice OT. but the people(not everyone but most) over there, ugh. they never really talk about the game...
same on gamefaqs too, kinda tired to see ''is there romance'' in every game -_-
and lately with the new artstyle in stranger of sword city, people just talk about that. so annoying.

as for my first channel, it's because in the beginning I used to upload tons of music(metal, I have like 400 albums). at first I didn't have any problem but one day I decided to try posting some stuff from nuclear blast (I knew it was very risky), and got flagged 2 two times.
eventually I stopped posting music video and changed my channel for gaming...I thought those 2 claims would of disappeared with time(I got them in 2007-2008) but nope. and the third claim was from Atlustube(japan), who flagged my persona Q video(jp ending). the weird thing is I posted the ending like a month or almost two(considering with shipping ect, I get the game a bit late) after the release of the game and it seemed fine for a good while and right when the US version released, they flagged my video. I tried to contact them and the US branch but never received an answer. maybe if I tried to contact the atlus guy on neofag it would of been better but at that point I was like ''fook it''.
at least now I have a fresh new channel. hehe

 

[aweigh]

on a somewhat related note:

do any of you guys know how to force the windows pc versions of wiz empires 2 and generation xth: code hazard to launch in full-screen? they always hard-launch in a 4:3 aspect ratio corrected window.

 

[Dorarnae]

on a somewhat related note:

do any of you guys know how to force the windows pc versions of wiz empires 2 and generation xth: code hazard to launch in full-screen? they always hard-launch in a 4:3 aspect ratio corrected window.

isn't there a config icon with Generation Xth. the very first box is for full screen mode. (for me it doesn't work with

Code Realize though).

 

[aweigh]

i finally fucking finished wizardry 5. dear god what a long-ass game. i can't even imagine playing (and finishing) this game without using some form of save-state or "manual" save-file backup.

i have a few self-imposed rules for myself:

- accept consequences of treasure chest traps, and/or other "event" squares.
- only reload a save-state if you get party wiped.
- ...re-load save-states for level-up gains like a motherfucker! the game's hard enough jesusfuckingchrist.

i actually had to unbind the savestate keys just to help in stopping my hands mechanically going for the button too much. it's pretty funny how much that works! just having to go to some sort of menu for "saving" is enough discouragement from constant save-scumming.

anyway, back on topic: wizardry 5.

best wizardry game i've played so far. i have played and finished 1, 3, 6, 8 and now 5, and have pending playthroughs (indefinitely post-poned) of 2, 4, and 7. Wizardry 5 is the absolute pinnacle of the classic formula and probably the best all-around party/combat/general systems blueprint for an rpg i can imagine.

that said, it ain't perfect. for starters:

- it's too long, the maps are gigantic (much bigger than the maps in games like the elminage series, or generation xth, or class of heroes, or the dark spire, or pretty much any other crawler i can think of); unlike almost every other crawler i've played so far wiz 5 doesn't utlize 20x20 floors and in fact some floors can reach 100's in one of the coordinates.

- you can actually buy a magical item in the very first fucking floor that allows infinite castings of DUMAPIC... so the creators were aware of just how big they had made floors.

- it's insanely punishing once you reach the lower levels in terms of what the game does to your party; your thief or ninja will ALWAYS FUCK UP and the chest traps are absolutely heinous. they're fucking sadistic! much worse than the ones in Elminage. the biggest party-killer in my wiz 5 playthrough ended up being the chest traps. aside from the traps once you reach the lower levels of the dungeon the enemies start beheading, poisoning, paralyzing and level draining you of FOUR LEVELS OR MORE with melee attacks. oh, there are also a bunch of enemy thieves that steal your shit during battles, and it's not uncommon to encounter groups of 10+ thieves. there are also monsters that PERMANENTLY break your armor with their melee attacks.

all that said the game is pretty much fantastic. if it had the extra stuff modern crawlers have added like item crafting or enchanting, a bigger and wider variety of character classes and/or sub-classing, etc, then for sure it would be the wiz game i replay the most. it doesn't, though, since of course the game is almost 30 years old.

my initial dislike of the changes bradley made starting with wiz 6 are beginning to change. while i still prefer the sheer, brutal lethality of wizzes 1-5 where basically every step can mean your doom i can now appreciate why he implemented things like being able to rest and restore hit points and spells anywhere you want and very little, if any, chance of a character permanently dying.

i haven't played wiz 7 legitimately yet, and i finished 8 long ago but now i appreciate a little bit more the mixture of old and "new" in wizardry 6. it's a MUCH better game than 8 at any rate. my opinion on wiz 7 will probably be dictated by how closely it resembles 8 and not 6.

edit: i didn't clear the "post-game" in wizardry 5. the optional infernal hell level 666 (777 in the snes version lewl) is ridiculous. now in a game like elminage: gothic it's incredibly fun to attempt something like the post-game's challenges because of the increased variety of options the game gives you, but in the case of wiz 5 i really don't see any point in trying to kill the la-la-moo-moo god of gods down in hell.

edit edit: did i mention how fucking long this game is? it might actually be shorter than wiz 6 but it's hard to tell because in wiz 6 you move from area to area continually in a linear fashion whereas wiz 5 is of comparable length but you're traipsing through the same (gigantic) levels.

i kind of feel like i have PTSD now, or withdrawal symptons or something. i started up a playthrough of wizardry empires 1 on the ps1 and am using a japanese wiki to get through it in order to ween myself off the wiz 5 withdrawals.

edit edit edit: oh, the version i finished was the ps1 version.

 

[Celerity]

So was the SNES Wiz 5 massively casualized or something? What am I missing here? Looks pretty easy.

https://youtu.be/wK5V9bCyAL0

 

[Dorarnae]

I only finished 1-2-3-5 from the main serie and played 4 a little and yeah wiz5 is my favorite one
the number of event items you have to carry in 5 sometime.... lol
btw the laughing kettle gives good exp if you manage to kill it

 

[aweigh]

AFAIK the only real changes in the snes version are in cut dialog and truncated text (makes solving the puzzles quite a nightmare without resorting to a walkthrough).

i consider wiz 5 more punishing than most, but the keyword is punishing not 'difficult'. it's not a difficult game at all but it is one that is very sadistic in torturing the player.

for example once you get the hacksaw and cut the chains off the door and find the secret alchemy potion mixing table after beating its guardian you can craft a special potion of spirit-banishing if you got the recipe for it from a random npc encounter in the form of a mystical duck then you can use the potion in a hidden chest to banish its protective spirit and inside the chest there is a jeweled scepter that if you equip you can wave in front of a door in another level that unlocks it and then you meet an npc lord who asks you for the scepter after congratulating you for unlocking the door.

...if you give him the scepter he laughs at you and tries to kill you and if you beat him then you have to repeat the entire process all over again in order to get the scepter a second time.

that's fucking punishing imo. it's basically an intentional decision by the designers to punish the player for playing the game as there is no legitimate way of knowing whether giving him the staff is good or not.

also armor destroying enemies and level draining enemies' afflictions are permanent, whereas in games like the elminage series there are spells that repair broken items and/or an item repairing option back in town so you don't lose the items permanently. also wiz 5 is the only crawler where i've seen level draining enemies drain more than 1 level at a time. it's also the only crawler i've played where there is a breath attack that level drains.

all that said none of that makes the game 'difficult'. elminage: gothic is MUCH more difficult once you reach the post-game. there's no comparison whatsoever. however it isn't as punishing to the player as wizardry 5.

edit: i watched that video and what's shown there is only possible by accumulating one specific magical item, the gold medallion, that can only be acquired in level 6 by stealing it from a random npc encounter. the player is only meant to have 1 copy of the item but in the original wiz 5 and all other versions, whether by mistake or bug or whatever, it is possible to keep stealing gold medallions until everyone has one. with that item and casting cortu/bacortu you can trivialize any encounter in the game because of it's 80% magical resistance, otherwise his party would've been wiped by the barrage of tiltowaits.

if one were to compare what's shown in that video to a similar video of ibag's tower in elminage: gothic then the video would consist of a single random encounter where the enemy attacks before anyone can act first with some sort of special group-melee attack that instantly beheads half your party... as part of his first action for the round, as the enemies have multiple actions per round. and then they regenerate their hitpoints automatically after every round end.

so as you see there is no comparison in terms of difficulty. gothic is still king. but it's not an asshole to player like wizardry can sometimes be.

 

[Celerity]

I was just talking about the endgame sequence. Even me spending a round buffing was unnecessary as the boss literally did nothing then died in 3 melee attacks.

My first time I didn't understand the importance of magic resistance and got rekt hard, in that video I did and often even the post game enemies would just completely waste turns.

As for the other stuff you said, yes armor breaking is permanent and so is level loss. It is not the only game where you can lose more than 1 level at a time. Even Wizardry 1 had Lifedrinkers which stole 2, and Vampire and Demon Lords which stole even more. Pretty sure those enemies are in at least most Wizardry games, and some spinoff games like Forsaken Land. I'm also certain I've seen breath weapons with this before, I forget where.

First fight:

Melee attacks and AoE nukes only, enemies don't really do anything.

Second fight:

Melee attacks and buffs. Cortu is used but does nothing (the Labadi hits anyways). Most likely because that character had the lowest magic resistance.

Third fight:

Melee attacks and buffs. Cortu is used, the Tiltowait fizzles on everyone but no one would die from one Tiltowait anyways.

Fourth fight:

Melee attacks and entirely unnecessary buffs.

Then everyone's equipment is shown. There is one Gold Medallion, on the Wizard. All of that magic resistance comes from items like Gold Plate, Gloves of Myrdall, Cloak of Capricorn, Shield Pro Magic... Even the caster weapons were specifically chosen for the resistances they offer.

I don't remember the exact stats on those items as that video is 6 years old but I remember why I picked them.

 

[aweigh]

...i didn't have a single one of those items when i finished the game, except for 1 gold medallion. the best loot i had was 1 single shield pro magic, the rest were top-tier of the regular loot (plate mails +1 and +2, scale mails +1 and +2, etc.)

i was probably unlucky in the rolls. also i left a lot of chests behind when i was clearing the final two levels if the inspection said the traps were of the kind that party wipes or destroys items. i didn't want to have to reload.

 

[Celerity]

Well then you were not doing things very efficiently. Oh and I forgot, Jeweled Armet is also magic resistance. There was a door in floor 7 where you're asked a riddle. The correct answer is Phoenix, answering wrong makes you fight one. That enemy gives a lot of experience and has almost endgame drop tables (you can at least get a Cloak of Capricorn, Jeweled Armet, Shield Pro Magic here, I forget exact loot tables). On the hell level you have random encounters mostly with regular demons and occasionally those postgame boss demons. There's also these ghosts that act as shopkeepers and can also be robbed (really easy source of Ankh of Wonder).

Since I figured out the importance of magic resistance after having my shit absolutely rekt by Liches on the 5th floor (normally a 6th floor enemy, they can appear in that dance room though) on my last run, I specifically prioritized it on this one.

Then, after getting more or less the best equipment for each character on each slot, in part from doing that loop without the Muramasa Katanas and Odinswords you can only reliably get from them I made that.

 

[aweigh]

the thing that makes the elminage games considered so hard tho, specifically Gothic, is that there's no way to accumulate resistances to anything fully, only partially. it's the only rpg i've played where it's simply not possible to out-gear enemies' attacks or abilities. and it's supremely well balanced in terms of how the player can accrue resistances as they play game where you start with barely being able to enchant a 5% resistance to petrification, for example, but if you dedicate some time to grinding ores you can expect to be able to enchant a nice 50-60% resistance to it by the time you reach the post-game.

as for wiz 5 is the door the one with the riddle answer "TIME"? that's good to know as that would make it the only place to get gear with magical resistance outside of stealing repeatedly from npc's in levels 6 and 666. i mostly fought and killed the laughing kettle whenever i needed to bump up a few character levels but he doesn't drop loot. btw, how is the navigation in the hell level in the snes version? in the ps1 version level 666 the entire screen is covered in flames and you can't see anything around you except fire and blackness. every step either bumps into a flame wall or makes the flame wall vanish revealing the next tile so you need to do it by trial and error.

 

[Celerity]

Aren't resistances, at least for status effects also an opposed level check? I'm not sure but I know there's an item that shows all the math and calculations and shit. And I'm not that familiar with Elminage at all yet.

I'm pretty sure you can find the low end endgame stuff anywhere on floor 7, just the phoenix is really easy and quick and you can fight it repeatedly. I'm not even sure exactly how much magic resistance that equals, I just know it was the highest for each slot.

There wasn't any flame wall thing on the SNES. There were some tiles where a firestorm would hit your party for about half Tiltowait strength, not very many though and most were on the direct path so if you walked around a little you would avoid them.

Fake edit: http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/Sir-Tech/wizardry.5.1/WIZ5.HTM#items Here's item resistances.

 

[aweigh]

i was looking through the maps of wiz 5 just now and i just wanted to post this picture of level 5, which i *think* is probably the biggest one in terms of sheer landmass:

each "area" of the level is equivalent to 1 regular wizardry floor. andrew greenberg and d.w. bradley, you crazy motherfuckers. gaawd that loop-de-loop in the upper area of the floor was soo annoying.

i specifically remember when i started running that gauntlet i had opened a chest and it magic drained my two casters capable of casting lektofeit (return to castle spell), as the spell is on the same tier as the two best healing spells and at that moment my mage was 1 level shy of learning MALOR so i had no choice but to soldier on as that particular area closes you off. that's probably my freshest/sharpest recollection playing wiz 5 as i really didn't want to get party wiped as it was the first time i was exploring the fifth level fully and had accumulated a bunch of good loot, and that gauntlet has an enemy encounter in fixed-position behind every door.

that's when wizardry shines brightest, i think, when it manages to immerse you so completely that the dungeon itself becomes the real opponent.

edit: btw, the left area of the floor is completely optional and in fact you have to PAY 5000gp for the privilege of entering it. what do you get for your 5k? a random chance of being able to escape it! thanks wizardry! it's a no-teleoport zone and the exit has a very, very small chance of randomly appearing. they literally put a game-stopping side area in the game and then decided to force the player to pay 5000 thousand gold in order to enter it AND decided there would be absolutely no reward for doing so.

 

[aweigh]

man i made the mistake of reading the comments on the CRPG Addict's wiz 5 entry... people are so fucking casual. more codexers should post in the addict's entries to help dispel the illuminati illusions the morons who post there try to cast on him.

people talking in his GIMLET about how wiz 1-5 are not worth playing and that 6-8 are the only good games in the series. ugh painful shit to read.

 

[Celerity]

I had a lot of fun with the first few, tried 6 and couldn't really get interested. That's the extent of my experience.

And do you mean that carnival area where there's 3 paths that take you back and one that lets you escape?

As for the size of that map, you're right but only the north part has the same density as earlier maps and particularly gothic maps. Wide open spaces are pretty easily navigable.

Speaking of troll labyrinths, level 3 is a troll. You could go through this long ass asshole maze with enemies that paralyze, poison, petrify, instant kill... or turn left and take a secret door that skips all of it.

 

[Suicidal]

I have a question to the people who finished Elminage Gothic.

I'm planning to give that game another shot once I'm done with all my currently on-going and planned games. The thing that put me off it is that leveling up is completely random and you can gain anywhere from 1 to 60 hp when you level up. I read in some tips that in the beginning of the game you pretty much need to save load until you get a decent hp buff on a level up with your characters. I tried doing that and got quickly burned out on the game as a result because every time I gained a level I sighed with dread in anticipation of the next save load fiesta.

So my question is - do I really NEED to do it, or can I just ignore the level up bonuses and continue playing without thinking too much about it?

 

[aweigh]

no, you don't need to do it at all. my very first gothic playthrough i never once re-loaded the game on a level up and my party got to ibag's tower (post-game content, optional) just fine and dandy.

losing 1 point in an attribute is decided randomly by the game and happens much more infrequently than in the wizardry series. the elminage games are much more accessible in many ways. also the game keeps track of 1hp level ups and after a few the character will get a huge bump in hp.

the only time when i would recommend reloading a level up (although i never did the firs ttime around) is specifically when you just start out. level 1 chars with 8hp can get one-shotted if you stray too far into the further areas of the first dungeon, but once again, it's nowhere near as brutal as in wizardry. hell, they even include a free fountain of healing right in the first room of the dungeon. talk about decline.

so no, you don't need to worry about getting a bad level up. the game won't ever "screw over" your characters during level ups and it is ALWAYS better to level up even if you don't gain ANYTHING because:

- level determines the amount of extra attacks by the character (also by the class); just like wizardry
- level number also is part of the formula that determines thief/ninja's chance of success at lockpicking doors and disarming traps or inspecting them
- the character level is also used to help determine when/if a character will "sense" something in an event tile

in the early levels, when you're levelling up your characters in the first 3 dungeons i wholeheartedly recommend liberal usage of the spell "honey restorer" from the priest's spell book. it's the same as the lektofeit spell in wizardry and it teleports you back to the castle but you need to re-learn the spell on level up. just like in wizardry the XP curve widens after levels 12-15 or so, depending on class, so if the person with the honey restorer spell is below spell level 15 you can expect them to level up and re-learn it fairly fast.

also the alchemy spell book yields the protectorate spell when the alchemist reaches level 13 and it's the same as the ihalon spell from wizardry: allows raising one attribute by one point. forgotten when used just like honey restorer, and the tip about pre-15 level chars re-learning it fast applies as well (although obviously this would mean the character is level up in a second class if they have access to protectorate already).

edit: oh yeah, and around the halfway mark (for me it was in the royal tomb dungeon) in Gothic you start getting attribute ankh's as loot, and those function the same as in wizardry by raising the score by 1.

for my second (and future) playthough of Gothic i re-rolled level ups like mad because i want to reach ibag's tower a second time with a really min-maxed party.

as for non-save scumming ways to help your hp growth remember that vitality is the big determing factor there. during char-gen always, and i really mean this, ALWAYS max out the VIT score on every char so they get good hp starting out. the second most important attribute for the early game would be the strength one, as it determines accuracy and damage. honestly though there's no need to reload the level ups as the randomness in score gains/losses/hp's is really marginal in the elminage games. it's nothing like early wizardry games where you can get 20 hp's, new spells and 1 point in ever attribute in one level up, reload the save game, and get literally _nothing_ this time, reload again, and get 10 hp but no attributes or spells, etc. now THAT is random as fuck.

may sound boring and vanilla but if you really want to go for the absolutely most min-maxed party setup consisting of dual and triple classed characters all around i say it's best to make everyone humans, btw. their even stat distributions makes starting out as human more difficult in the beginning in most classes but their stat evenness means you can reach the attribute goals for superior classes much faster than other races most of the time; and it also means ocasionally losing 1 attribute point isn't that big of a deal.

it's very bad when your 6 luck dwarf loses 1 point in luck because you need 13 to be able to later turn him into the class you want; it's not a big deal in comparison when a 10 luck human loses 1 point though, as the class goals remain the same.

it does mean that dwarf will always do more melee damage than the human though, and have more hp, due to higher innate str and vit scores, but what really matters is having most of your characters proficient in multiple classes and thats where humans stat distribution helps a TON.

 

[Suicidal]

Ok thanks I'll just ignore the level up bonuses then

 

[Celerity]

I'm pretty sure what it does is regen the hit dice every level. So say you have 1d10, you can get 1 or 10. You gain 2 levels, it will do 3d10 and if that's higher than your current life you gain that much and if not you gain 1.

I've seen huge variances in Elminage, more than Wizardry. Wizardry never had 1-30 gains at low levels. High levels yes (mostly as a result of increasing Vit then leveling). That's why it's self correcting though and beyond low levels doesn't matter that much.

 

[Courtier]

I have a question to the people who finished Elminage Gothic.

I'm planning to give that game another shot once I'm done with all my currently on-going and planned games. The thing that put me off it is that leveling up is completely random and you can gain anywhere from 1 to 60 hp when you level up. I read in some tips that in the beginning of the game you pretty much need to save load until you get a decent hp buff on a level up with your characters. I tried doing that and got quickly burned out on the game as a result because every time I gained a level I sighed with dread in anticipation of the next save load fiesta.

So my question is - do I really NEED to do it, or can I just ignore the level up bonuses and continue playing without thinking too much about it?

This is how it works:

Basically your HP will always even out over time if it gets too low. Same goes for stats, more or less. You don't really have to worry if you get bad levelups, and while reloading/rerolling can be handy, it's not mandatory.

 

[Celerity]

Yeah, that's what I said. And Vit is probably 1st or 2nd edition D&D rules, so it starts adding more at 15 and is very backloaded (resulting in Dwarves getting a large life advantage). This is even more obvious in Elminage, since apparently life is based on class, race, and Vit and race is by far the largest factor.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

aweigh
You've mentioned Wizardries 1-3 on SNES. Do you know if fully translated rom exists and where to get it? After reading this thread I've decided to try them and all I can find is some awkward half-English, half-Japanese version.

 

[aweigh]

the story of llylgamyn collection for the snes is the one i played and the one where i finished wiz 1 and wiz 3 on. i want to play and finish all the first three again playing through the ps1 version tho; they aren't long games, unlike wiz 5.

i'll conversate the link

 

[aweigh]

as for level up randomness i do remember the snes version of wiz 5 is much more random than the ps1 version. both versions feature more lenient level up rolls than the apple 2 version, and the ibm pc (dos) version is a middle ground between the apple 2 version and the ps1 version.

earlier in this thread i posted a video of myself re-rolling level ups on wiz 5 snes for reference. a lot of randomness in terms of constant low results then a very high one, but no "in-between" rolls.

in the ps1 version i found that regardless of the amount of reloading the rolls followed a certain pattern offering either "low" rolls, "middle-ground" rolls, or rare extremely good rolls similar to the lucky rolls in the snes version.

having played many hours of elminage gothic i don't think it is more random than wizardry. it only takes me 1-10 reloads to get my desired level up in Gothic, whereas in *any* version of a wizardry i usually reload twice or triple that amount.

unlike wizardry though it's not necessary to reload levelups in Gothic unless you're aiming for extreme min-maximization as it doesn't decrease your scores as often as wizardry does, and there is also no way to get a _nothing_ result in Gothic, unlike in wizardry.

 

[aweigh]

on an tangenial note i found the crpg addict's post on wiz 5 last night and am now reading his post on wiz 6 and i found a particularly good description of why Bradley's changes in wiz 6 and onwards declined and ultimately destroy the magical wizardry formula:

"Now we come to Wizardry VI. You can save literally anywhere and without much effort. Death of an individual character means the use of a "resurrect" scroll or an Amulet of Life, neither of which is scarce, with no penalty. Death of the entire party means a reload from the last save, likely only minutes before. Restoring hit points and spell points is a matter of sleeping. Although it doesn't restore both instantly as in Might & Magic, there's no penalty to sleeping multiple times, and generally speaking if you can survive a battle, you can heal yourself to full strength afterwards. Thus, likeMight & Magic, the game's combat challenges are about individual combats and not the accumulation of combats, but unlike Might & Magic, there's no penalty for losing even individual combats. Every new combat against a boss-level creature or unfamiliar enemy can be regarded as essentially a practice round.

The end result is to make Wizardry VI's combat, for all its additional tactical considerations, a bit boring. When encountering a party of 6 undead pharaohs, I can meticulously plan my tactics, carefully selecting the right combination of attacks and spells, or I can just hold down the ENTER key and breeze through default attacks. The difference might mean that I end the combat with 33% of my hit points instead of 50%, but since restoring them is just a matter of casting and resting, that's no difference at all. I would never have dreamed of holding down the ENTER key in the firstWizardry."

saves me the time of typing it out myself.