Is there any reason to suppose this will be any good, or more than a bog standard Might & Magic knockoff (which I guess are rare these days)?
In other words, would anyone care if it were not a) epic vaporware and b) made by one of gaming’s cartoon villains?
[quote=“Gordon_Cameron, post:61, topic:7169, full:true”]
Is there any reason to suppose this will be any good, or more than a bog standard Might & Magic knockoff (which I guess are rare these days)?[/quote]
It’s not a Might & Magic knockoff. It’s Wizardry. It’s a distinction that won’t mean much to some but it matters to others and it’s real.
M&M: classically step based, monsters in the gameworld that you can engage whenever, including with ranged spells/attack (giving it a quirky, almost actiony feel at times). Likes to use puzzles based around key spells in game (e.g. jump/teleport). Sort of “gonzo” in terms of character progression (characters typically gain dozens or even hundreds of levels, have stats in the hundreds, etc). Past II, if there’s a monster attacking your party you can actually see it on the game screen. The 90s edition introduced the more interesting skill system, of course. It peeled back on the gonzoness a little bit.
Wizardry: classicaly step based, “pop up monster” combat that’s handle more abstractly. E.g. “you see a group of 9 creeping coins” and you get a picture of creeping coins but there’s nine. You don’t worry about targeting a specific one; you target the group and things happen (whether it’s an attack, a magic missile, or a sleep spell). Exploration is a big deal in both games but Wizardry is arguably more famous for it and especially with the 90s games (under D.W. Bradley) famed for puzzle and level design. Also got a kickin skill system in it’s 90s incarnations, but a different one (hybrid learn by doing + skill points allocated at level up).
This is all Wizardry (Cleve’s favorite game ever is Wizardry 7). There’s a concept of hitting somerthing at range but again it’s abstract. Places 1-3 (or possibly 1-4) can attack in melee only (and vice versa, except for monsters groups 1 & 2 or maybe just 1 are in melee), assuming S(hort) ranged weapons. E(xtended) or L(ong) range weapons would allow characters to hit back ranks/attack the front rank from a back rank. There’s no “I shoot arrows at the thing 8 squares away”.
Yes, 100%. There’s still a thriving market for a Wizardry type game. There’s been one released every year in Japan (iirc) since the license was acquired back in the 90s. Several have made their way over here (one was good, one meh), to decent sales as I recall. This specific branch of CRPGs is probably most underrepresented in the west (ironically perhaps; it kicked everything off). Variants on handhelds have been popular over there and over here (Etrian Odyssey, uh. . . something Adventure Academy something. I can’t remember the name).
I personally would love to see a modern Wizardry game. I don’t think such a game would have killed it on Kickstarter at the level that Obsidian has operated at, or even at say the Shadowrun Returns level. But such a project hypothetically would have attracted attention all the same and gotten funded (assuming it wasn’t associated with Cleve).
Will this satisfy me? Impossible to say. It’s sort of super dated owing to the fact that this was once coming out in 1996, and 1998 (and. . . and. . . and. . .). It’s been rewritten several times but it still retains a look and feel that screan mid 90s. I don’t mind the actual graphics but ed.g. the viewing area is very small on the screen (relative to what we would see in a modern game) and I wonder how much stuff like that will hurt it. But never mind.
There’s a market for games like this I suspect, even if it’s more of an indie market. That same group got giddy when genre clone Elminage Gothic got ported over to PC. Will they buy Grimoire? Maybe. It’s dated in design and it’s got Cleve, so it’s hard to say with certainty.
I loved RPGs, still like them a lot, depending, but I never got into Wizardry. It just felt rather formulaic, and I, um, hate puzzles.
Quoth Cleve:
Just broke into the top 50. #48 out of 3081 games on Steam Geenlight. The incline is happening.
God I hate RPGCodex.
Yeah, the Etrian Odyssey games I played were VERY much like the early Wizardry games, down to dipping toes into a new floor of a dungeon a few steps at a time before hurrying back to town to rest.
Wait, there are modern wizardries? Which one should I play? I know the Wizardry name lived on in Japan but everybody said they were completely different games.
Wiz 7 and 8 are two of my favorite games of all time. Not at the very tippy top of the rankings, but definitely in the top 20. I loved 6 too, but it might be in the 30s. I played 7 and 8 maybe 5 or 6 times over the years.
A Wizardry 9 kickstarter, with the IP and everything, would do incredibly well. Not like anyone’s using that IP in the states. A nostalgia-fueled Wizardry-like would be quite successful too.
Yeah, they made the classic kickstarter mistake of not including any information about the actual game. No screenshots or mockups. Even if it’s something people really want, you need to sell them something. I wouldn’t give fifty bucks to a Tie-Fighter 2 kickstarter with zero information about the game. It would probably end up a PvP-only MOBA like that Descent kickstarter.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved M&M X, but if it did well, why didn’t they make a sequel?
I played a build long ago, but it wasn’t complete. It was also probably at least 15 years ago, as I think I still had my RPG web site at GameSpot. Agree with that summary.
[quote=“stusser, post:68, topic:7169”]
Wait, there are modern wizardries? Which one should I play? I know the Wizardry name lived on in Japan but everybody said they were completely different games.[/quote\
Some of them were, I think. but they also did the classic dungeon crawl thing too. A bunch, apparently. The two that made it stateside were the more recent Wizardry: Lost Labrynth (or somehting; PS3 I think) and Wizardry: tales of the Forsaken Land (PS2).
Lost Labrynth is everything bad about Wizardry. It’s the classic formula, but with the idea that you need to stop and farm for all the ultra rare items that drop in the current set of dungeon levels every so often because you can’t progress without them. So you spend 10-20 hours in one dungeon on level 4 to get the party ready to make it through the next few levels, then repeat on level 7, etc. Also you had to have a priest (or maybe it was bishop) always using the class special ability (this was a mechanic the game added) every turn in combat and even then you could still get killed with insta-party kill stuff. It just saved you from getting tagged with about 80% of the insta kill stuff. Of which there was way more.
Tales of the Forsaken land was a more interesting title. Enemies appeared in the game world as silhouettes that wandered around (you initiated combat by touching them). To learn spells you had to find strange runes and then combine them. You could also upgrade spells via the runes, so you were dealing with tradeoffs. Upgrading was worth it although the system for doing it was a pain. The game added a mechanic called allied actions. These were special combat actions that used two or more party members that you could inititate. E.g. there was one that had a high chance of protecting two of the 3 front row members from potential critical attacks (the action itself “used” one column of front row + back row person). There was another that scattered the party if you felt an enemy was going to use a breath attack (which was often telegraphed). These took up the chance to use normal actions (between 2 and potentially the whole party). It was an interesting system although somewhat flawed (e.g. if you ran into a “horde” of enemies, even lesser ones you had long ago leveled past, they could destroy you if they stampeded. The AA to defend against it used the whole party, making the entire encounter weird and frustrating).
The levels of the dungeon varied in quality. There were two generic proc-gen levels. But some of them were inspired There was one level that spiraled around this huge underground waterfall. Another took place in an underground graveyard and essentially was divided into the surface areas and a tunnel network underndeath.
Overall it was an interesting game, IMO. Not Wizardry 7 level, but I appreciated the attempt to add some new mechanics.
So a terrible PS3 game and an interesting but not particularly compelling PS2 one. Not the Wizardry renaissance I was hoping for.
I dug out some old stuff to make my other post a bit more precise. Corwin played a pre-beta and then a beta. The beta was “fully-complete and playable”. He finished it two times. That was already in the past when he posted about it in 2008.
It was an external developer named Limbic Entertainment. They took over Heroes 6 from Black Hole Studios because of reasons, then made M&M X, followed by Heroes 7. Plus add.ons or DLC for all of them, making it 6 products. Half a year ago their ties with Ubi were cut.
My guess would be that while still making money, the M&M franchise is too small now for a big player like Ubi. They think their money is better invested in the next 3 Assassin’s Creed titles they’re probably developing simultaneously.
What frustrates me so much is when a publisher just “camps” an IP after making this call. I get it, I get it, there’s all sorts of reasons they might want to do so, but take the Star Control rights behind held without action first by Accolade and eventually by Atari. Till forced into selling to someone interested in actually using it by bankruptcy, these guys just held the rights and did nothing with it and it was maddening.
Cleve’s on Twitter, and he retweeted a 20 year old CGW flashback.
Someone over on the Greenlight page is claiming that Grimoire is an illegal reworking of Stones of Arnhem, a Wizardry 7 spin-off developed externally by an Australian team which Sir-Tech cancelled in the 1990s. Its rocky development history was covered in one of Matt Barton’s interviews with the Robert Strotek a few years ago.
It’s entirely possible some of the games that never made it stateside are amazing although I sort of doubt it. Japan seemed keen on imitating the first game but of course 7 is where it’s at.
You [ed] would get more from the Etrian Odyssey games, although they are a little different in terms of mechanics (especially combat; there’s a lot of classic JRPG “target the weakness” type stuff going on. And there’s no “let me go farm for equipment” instead it’s “let me farm for parts to get the next equipment to appear in the store”). I’ve long thought that the actual Wizardry evolutionary branch would benefit from a revival but we’ve never gotten one sadly.
Odd design idea, to put an article’s info box in a faux Magic card. Aaaaah, the '90s.
So what has he done in the last 10 years if it was already complete in '08? Updating it for DirectX 12?
There are several hundred pages on RPGCodex that should answer that question in exhausting detail, @rei.
I mean, he was most likely dead-lifting dump trucks to get ready to fight all the pencil-necked geeks who don’t like his clone of a 30 year old game.