1602

Wizardry 7 is a superior.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like 8 and enjoyed the heck out of it. But it does have quirky issues.

  1. The difficulty scales, making not just the road from the monastery to Arnika but pretty much all outdoor exploration/movement difficult for a long time in game. You will eventually crest the power curve, but it’s pretty steep and it takes a long time. And you had to know how to build a party, as peterb notes. If you did understand what to do in advance, you made your life a lot easier (lots of people tried to play it like every other wizardry in existence only to find those damage spells useless, and bad spell choices early are crippling since the magic users drive the party).

Arnika is a little safer but still pretty tricky (see below, but it was too easy to get swarmed by adds).

  1. Damage spells are useless. Completely and totally useless. I’m not sure what happened but the resistance ratings on even basic monsters is high. Even at middle levels, you can spend all of your spell points hurtling damage spells at enemies in a single encounter and still not be done with it. Buffs and debuffs are fantastic, though. The latter were even more powerful than in previous wizardries. And the historical instakill spells - rarely worth using more than on special occasions - all rocked here (quick sand, asphyxiate, there are a couple others).

  2. Melee is frustrating at first (typical in an RPG), but also for awhile. You can help your poor melee guys with debuffing, and there are plenty of debuffing options. But the melee characters will drive you crazy. This contributes to. . .

  3. Combat is sloooooow. Fortunately there was a dev patch that sped it up and a fan patch that sped it up evey more. Having to wait for individual monsters to move in the 3d world proved frustrating and tedious. And woe be to you if you slowed a monster. There was one nasty monster in a swamp that had an extended “damaged” animation that I slowed to start combat. I remember reading a book while those turns played out.

In this area, the move to 3d failed. But the patches made things far more bearable.

Some people were understandably put off not just by the diffuclty spike outside of the Monastery but the fact that 15-20 minutes to finish a combat wasn’t exactly rare.

The monastery actually scaled in difficulty as well, but the groups of monsters got significantly larger outside and that’s what really slowed things down.

  1. One other place where the move to 3d was a problem: it was too easy to attract extra attention in combat, and sometimes this caused issues. Like monsters “above” you in a tree-based city that are actually pretty far away based on the path to get to them, but suddenly you can’t get out of a combat with a group you just killed since they are “near by”. Not game breaking, but annoying.

  2. For some reason the developers decided they wanted all classes to be viable, and gave fighters a stupidly overpowered ability to attempt to make them “equal” with the other advanced classes. I didn’t care for this, because I rather liked the classic Wizardry basic professions/advanced professions (where the idea was you would level a character in one of the basic professions and then change them over to an advanced one. You could roll starting characters that could take advanced classes but it could take hours). I didn’t mind the attempt to give each class a little flavor (every class has a special ability, but the abilities are all over the place in terms of usefullness/balance).

Wiz 6 and 7 did have some quirks when it came to class switching. If you were so inclined (and this was not necessary to play the game) you could really power game by taking a handful of characters at a time and switching classes (going back to level 1), gaining 5-6 levels quickly, and switching again. It allowed you to accumulate huge pools of spell points, lots of spells, and even get some nice cheap skill points. Wiz 8 also basically tracked overall character level (a la 3e D&D) and also worked like 2e D&D Dual Classing in some respects. If memory serves, anyway.

1603

Sounds like I’ll be consulting gamefaqs heavily on that one.

1604

Or ask here. Or both/

1605

I only made it out of the starting monastery and (barely) to the first “real” town. Combat was SO tedious and took forever. Compounding the problem was that I had a mage of some sort and the supposed “right” way to play them was to cast spells from every school so they’d train up them all, or something like that, which made things even more tedious, as you couldn’t just cast the same spell again all the time.

1606

Endeavor to persevere.

What’s next on GOG?

1607

My kingdom for Starflight.

1608

This, very much this, along with the sequel kplzthnx. ^_^

1609

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Wasn’t there a SF2? Was it any good?

1610

In some ways it was better (trade routes, trading system, better, more fleshed out races), and in some ways worse (it actually had a finite ending, whereas in SF1 you could keep playing indefinitely). Amazing game though.

1611

The real solution to “I’d like to play Starflight again” is to play Star Control 2 instead. There’s even an open source port that works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and is freely available.

It’s basically the exact same game, except superior in every possible way.

1612

Except it isn’t the exact same game, with more traditional RPG elements and no action combat mechanic. I love Star Control 2, and the similarities are there, but Star Control 2 does not satisfy the Starflight itch.

Trig, Brian already answered but here’s my .02. I only ever played Starflight at a friends and never got to play the sequel. Starflight remains one of my biggest regrets from my formative years (in that I never got to play it regularly, and didn’t track down a copy as soon as I got my first PC). Over the years, I’ve seen mixed opinions on the sequel, but I’d play the shit out of that too.

1613

Starflight is available on abandonware sites. Does it not play with DOSBox or something? You can always buy it again if it ever gets re-released.

If that bothers you, there are copies on eBay for $150. Gee…

1614

I know. I’m not new to the internet. Nor am I a complete idiot.

None of this has anything to do with my desire to see the game on GOG, nor make it anything other than a day-1 purchase.

1615

No problem, just making sure no one is crying in a corner of their room over it.

1616

But Star Control 2 does have an action combat mechanic. I haven’t played Starflight, so I can’t speak to any similarity, but SC2 definitely has action.

1617

My personal opinion is that the user interface of Starflight has aged more poorly than other games of its generation, to the point where I don’t think most of us would find it tolerable nowadays. But to each their own!

1618

I said Starflight didn’t have action combat, not Star Control 2.

1619

The DOSBox wiki has a list. It might be a good place to start.

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/GOG_games_that_use_DOSBox

1620

Starflight and its sequel are nebulous and glacially paced. The only reason I like them is that Reiche and Ford liberally ripped them off to make the far-superior Star Control 2.

1621

One day, I will learn how to read.