wizardry, ultima, etc.

[Section8]

Hey -- this is only marginally off topic. I remember someone (Jasede?) posting fairly recently about the pros/cons of Wizardry VII vs. Wizardry Gold, but neither a forum search nor a quick Google search turned up the thread. Could anyone tell me what the differences are? Do both have skill-based automapping? Is one buggy? Etc.

Wizardry Gold has a few extras, which are good and bad. It has a better automap (functionally it's the same, based on a character skill, but Gold lets you have it on screen constantly. Vanilla version requires you to use your Journey Map Kit Item whenever you want to use it.

Gold also has an integrated hint book, with complete maps and map based context - bringing up the hint book will bring up the hints/solutions associated with the map square you're in. It's pretty handy, but takes away a lot from the game if you're weak-willed. The gameworld is open-ended and progress through it depends on getting your hands on various "maps" which give you riddles and puzzles that will unlock new areas. With a hintbook, you can potentially open up half of these places at very low levels. You're still prohibited by the level of critters in various locations, but it does skew things a little.

Gold is geared to be easily moddable. You can replace portraits, sounds and monster graphics very easily - something you'll want to do just to replace the shitty portraits in Gold with the much better ones from vanilla Crusaders.

But the main difference I found was that Gold felt a lot less polished. It's still the same basic game, but there are some quirks to it. Combat slows down considerably because sound effects delay it, which really sucks for when you're revisiting low-level locations. There were also a couple of other peeves I had at the time, but I haven't played Gold in nearly 10 years, so my memory is hazy.

 

[Sir_Brennus]

Difference WizGold - Wiz7

All that Section said, but you can also change the sound effects up to switching to nullsound files. So, no combat delay there.


EDIT:

In before Jasede...

 

[Jasede]

I know Brennus likes his Gold, but I really recommend plain Wizardry 7. Maybe I am the only one but I suffered so many bugs in Gold that I quit after ten minutes.

I'd go 7, unless you need the map onscreen. But why would you? See, after playing enough dungeon crawlers, you develop a sort of automap feature in your brain anyway.