Wizardry The Wizardry Series Thread

[octavius]

The stats decrease in 2 and 3 too.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Of course since this guide isn't a strict walkthru, though, it doesn't tell me how exactly to do this. I kinda want to keep her around if possible, just so I can buy stuff for transfer later on when I feel like it. Any veterans here remember how it's done?

I don't recall exactly, but I believe all you get from Mai Lai is the location of some items in the river, if you already know where they are you can get them without giving her the claim number. Try looking for some maps online.

Maybe I'm wrong though.

 

[gman42]

Yeah I'll poke around, been busy with work and haven't had time to play much. I've been trying to kinda play it straight up from memory, IIRC you have to give her some number to get the caterpillar's hookah pipe back so you can get the mushrooms from him that shrink you down so you can escape from the jail, although I may be wrong. Might be as simple as pickpocketing the item from one or the other of them.

 

[haraw]

Alright men,

This is my tenth try at beating Wiz 7, but goddamn this game is huge.

I've done New city, Orkogre, Munkahamara, Umpani base, Nyctalinth, four levels of Dane tower, Witch and Ukpyr mountains. Rattkin ruins are done apart from the "Funhouse". I've four or five maps. Any estimates how far I am?

 

[octavius]

About half?

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Yeah I'll poke around, been busy with work and haven't had time to play much. I've been trying to kinda play it straight up from memory, IIRC you have to give her some number to get the caterpillar's hookah pipe back so you can get the mushrooms from him that shrink you down so you can escape from the jail, although I may be wrong. Might be as simple as pickpocketing the item from one or the other of them.

I believe there are also multiple ways to escape, so you don't strictly need the mushrooms

I've done New city, Orkogre, Munkahamara, Umpani base, Nyctalinth, four levels of Dane tower, Witch and Ukpyr mountains. Rattkin ruins are done apart from the "Funhouse". I've four or five maps. Any estimates how far I am?

You still have to finish Dane tower, the funhouse, explore the ocean, hit the dragon caves, sky city, and the final dungeon (which is like 2-3 times longer than all the others)

So yeah, 50-60%

 

[Fowyr]

Alright men,

This is my tenth try at beating Wiz 7, but goddamn this game is huge.

I've done New city, Orkogre, Munkahamara, Umpani base, Nyctalinth, four levels of Dane tower, Witch and Ukpyr mountains. Rattkin ruins are done apart from the "Funhouse". I've four or five maps. Any estimates how far I am?

Depends on how thoroughly you want to explore wilderness maps. As I see there are only Sea of Sorrows and its dungeons left. Probably 60-70 percents, close to 60 because of Dane's Tower and Funhouse.

 

[Eggs is eggs]

The stat decreases are either bugged or were changed in the PC version. In the Apple II version, stat decreases happen approx 1 out of 9 times. In the PC version it's 1 out of 3, so boosting your characters to the prestige classes is very difficult.

 

[gman42]

I believe there are also multiple ways to escape, so you don't strictly need the mushrooms

Yup, good call. I had forgotten that you could flash the dagger of Ramm at the guards and fight your way out instead.

Makes that whole Mai-Lai/caterpillar quest kind of a waste of time, not like you get much else out of it (other than the Hammer+1.5 from the Bork battle...sweet offhand weapon but it doesn't xfer anyway so I'm not too worried about it).

 

[newtmonkey]

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (PC)

Werdna down, game finished!

First of all, for anyone considering playing the PC version, set dosbox to CGA mode for the correct color palette (it simply replaces magenta with red and makes the game look much closer to the Apple IIC64 version).

I initially decided to give Wizardry 1 a shot on a lark, with the intention of just exploring a few levels of the dungeon until I "got it" and then skip Wiz 2-5 and move on to Wizardry 6, as I figured the Wiz series before 6 was simply too primitive to be worth playing these days.

However, as I slowly explored the dungeon and built up my party, I realized that Wizardry 1 is ridiculously good for its age and still worth playing today. I mean, what else was out there in 1981 with the depth and quality of this game? It's balanced extremely well if you play it "right" (which means mapping the game yourself and fully exploring each floor), and once you've fully explored one floor you'll typically be just strong enough to start exploring the next one.

The dungeon design is simply amazing. These aren't just labyrinths of rooms and doors like a lot of the lesser games that came after (Bard's Tale is a fine game, but many of the dungeons in that are just mazes with no rhyme nor reason), but have very recognizable features; for example, many floors are broken down into smaller sections by hallways that make them a lot easier to maintain your sense of direction. I have zero sense of direction, but I think I could draw out (very) rough maps for many of the dungeon levels by memory.

The game is also very fair, with just one exception: pit traps. There's no way to avoid them and falling into one will likely kill at least one of your weaker party members (it's apparently based on agility, which means that unless you know in advance to pump agility for your spellcasters, they have a good chance of being killed each time you walk into a pit).

As for my play-through, I initially went with a Fighter-Samurai-Priest-Thief-Mage-Bishop. The Samurai ended up doing nothing but fighting, so I should have just went with a Fighter for lower experience requirements. The Bishop ended up being dead weight very quickly, so I left him drinking in the Tavern to ID equipment and trained up another pure Mage.

The combat with Werdna was thankfully (and surprisingly) stress-free. My Fighters attacked Werdna, my Priest cast MALIKTO, and my Mages cast TILTOWAIT. My Thief cried in the corner. All the henchmen went down the first round and Werdna (thank god) wasted his turn paralyzing my Priest, and then my Fighters took Werdna down the second round before he could do anything.

I transferred my party to Wizardry 2, but will take a short break to play something else before tackling that.

 

[Eggs is eggs]

Is it fun even once you get to levels 5-9? They either ran out of disk space or development time and those levels have no events or anything of interest other than something to map and monsters to build up your party. It's probably why they went down to 6 levels for Wizardry 2 and 3.

 

[newtmonkey]

If anything, I enjoyed the game even more from levels 5-9, though it depends on whether you enjoy the mapping and combat. For someone not interested in that stuff, I don't think any Wiz game prior to Wiz 5 or 6 would be of interest.

It's not like the events in floors 1-4 are particularly interesting though, and that's due to engine limitations (for example, being unable to save the state of the dungeon floors themselves). I think 10 floors of searching statues to find items to open doors would have got really old quick.

 

[newtmonkey]

I can't help it, I'm addicted

Wizardry 2
Transferred my party forward, was shocked at how hard floor 1 is... then I realized all of my characters were naked cuz your equipment doesn't transfer over. I can't even blame being drunk on it; I just didn't pay attention to the stat window at the bottom of the screen that very obviously showed an AC of 10 for all my characters lolz.

After outfitting my party, things went much better. Completely explored floor 1 (as far as I know), defeated the armor, and will start exploring floor 2 next time I get a chance to play.

First impressions are that the first floor is just mapping; even though the enemies are obviously much more powerful than the enemies on floor 1 of Wiz 1 (since the game requires you to transfer a party forward and probably assumes an average party level of 12 or so), you can just unload your most powerful spells in literally every encounter and explore much of the floor in one go. There's not much of a mapping challenge here either, with the exception of the teleport rooms it's pretty straightforward. I am assuming the game will get more devious as I go on.

 

[BlackGoat]

I can't help it, I'm addicted

Dude, the struggle is real. Did the exact same thing after each Wiz. And Might and Magic too. "I'm going to take a break..... maybe I'll just run around in the next one for a little bit...."

 

[Tweed]

I can't help it, I'm addicted

Wizardry 2
Transferred my party forward, was shocked at how hard floor 1 is... then I realized all of my characters were naked cuz your equipment doesn't transfer over. I can't even blame being drunk on it; I just didn't pay attention to the stat window at the bottom of the screen that very obviously showed an AC of 10 for all my characters lolz.

After outfitting my party, things went much better. Completely explored floor 1 (as far as I know), defeated the armor, and will start exploring floor 2 next time I get a chance to play.

First impressions are that the first floor is just mapping; even though the enemies are obviously much more powerful than the enemies on floor 1 of Wiz 1 (since the game requires you to transfer a party forward and probably assumes an average party level of 12 or so), you can just unload your most powerful spells in literally every encounter and explore much of the floor in one go. There's not much of a mapping challenge here either, with the exception of the teleport rooms it's pretty straightforward. I am assuming the game will get more devious as I go on.

Grabbing new gear isn't too difficult, it's the maps themselves and trying to get the armor pieces that is the real trouble. In fact Wiz 2 really doesn't take too long to finish, or it didn't for me. Wiz 3 on the other hand is a total reset. I need to get back to playing it since I never finished it.

 

[newtmonkey]

Tweed
You were right, I got a ton of upgraded equipment even just exploring floor 1 (never mind the ridiculously powerful armor you get after defeating the boss).

 

[haraw]

Fucking finally. Been waiting years for this.

All in all Wiz 7 was a damn fine journey. The scope of the game is just crazy, especially if you're coming straight from the earlier installations. The distinct cities and locations, NPCs and the rival parties. Those really made me feel the world. It was a huge joy to map those key locations and explore every inch of those places filled with secrets.

Combat was great like in the other Wiz games: simple and satisfying. Luckily in the age of DOSBOX we can just CTRL+F12 to make the combat speed bearable. Character development felt much better than in Wiz 6. I spent hours to plan how to make best of changing professions, calculating missing attributes for the next changes. Good stuff.

It wasn't until the last dungeons when i went full retard. Meaning that I lost my goddamn patience for the outstretched endgame and I used walkthrough for the rest of the game. That of course killed the magic of the game. The end-part certainly makes you to lose your shit.

Great for what it is / 10

My party's last moment and some mapping sketches in the spoilers.

Spoiler

 

[octavius]

It's so nice to see that there are people more old fashioned than me, who still use pen and paper for mapping.

 

[Jason Liang]

nice names

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

I guess Sam wasn't always a monk.

 

[EruDaan]

The one thing i will never forget about Wiz 7 is ... the Funhouse in the Ratkin Ruins. Some kind of dungeon THAT one is. it almost drove me crazy the first time I tried to clear it, puzzles at all.

 

[octavius]

 

[Grauken]

The one thing i will never forget about Wiz 7 is ... the Funhouse in the Ratkin Ruins. Some kind of dungeon THAT one is. it almost drove me crazy the first time I tried to clear it, puzzles at all.

Yeah, for me the problem was that I never bought anything from NPCs in the game, so I didn't look into what they had to offer in general, and one major puzzle piece for the dungeon was an item you had to buy from one of the Rattkins in the ruins, so this was extremely frustrating, until I found out what I had to do to get past that

 

[newtmonkey]

Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds

Four floors down, this game seems almost unnecessary. I'm enjoying it so far, it's almost like a victory lap for your party after the struggle of Wiz 1, but beyond the excitement of getting ridiculously powerful equipment there's really not much to look forward to, in terms of character development. The maps are okay so far, though it's annoying getting back and forth (Malor doesn't seem to work on floor 2, the one floor on which I wish I could just teleport straight to the stairs).

I mean, it's running on the Wizardry system, so that still makes it better than 99% of contemporary RPGs. I guess that's why I'm trying to blow through this one to get on with Wiz 3 and (especially) Wiz 5. I'll save Wiz 4 for when I'm retired and more in the mindset of Werdna.

I imagine playing this without backing up your save disk would be some crazy mixture of intense anxiety when playing the game, and massive end-of-world butthurt (when you teleport into stone and lose your party and have to start all over from WIZARDRY 1), but fuck that, I'm backing my save up every night.

 

[Exhuminator]

Earlier this year I put about 25 hours into Wizardry - Tale of the Forsaken Land on PS2. I really enjoyed the game except for the ridiculous backtracking. This game will let you warp back to town, but then you have to backtrack through earlier dungeon floors to finally reach the floor you warped away from. That ridiculous backtracking eventually made me stop playing this game. To me it seemed like an asinine way to artificially lengthen the game completion time. If I could have simply warped back to the floor I originally warped away from, I would have beaten the game by now. Other than that one complaint, Tale of the Forsaken Land kicks ass. I might eventually finish the game anyway when I'm not so salty.