I read that Wiz8 was the conclusion of a trilogy that began some 13 years prior in Wizardry 6. Would it be worth trying to slog through 6 and 7 to access the full breadth of the story in 8?
If you want to commit the next few years of your life to it, then yes. Great games, but a huge undertaking.
That’s the first negative thing I’ve read here I think, but monster leveling and excessive respawning are two things I hate the most in a RPG.
It got really bad, and I mean Bards Tale 3 bad after the tree city…every…single…fucking…step had a new monster… That’s when I gave up.
And its a shame, because the game is very good in my opinion.
Kinda. They are not story-rich games. Like I said earlier, wiz6 is rough graphically, but I totally support starting with wiz7.
Now that just sounds ugly, maybe there is a mod out there somewhere to help with that respawn rate, I better have a look before starting.
That’s about the same point where I stopped also. Wiz 6 is one of my favorite games of all time and I loved Wiz 7 almost as much. I have Wiz8 installed and a new party just about done with the first city area, I just need to get back to it.
Then stay the hell away from that game! You even get attacked by respawning monsters in towns!
I also stopped after the tree city. As I was playing without a guide, I didn’t know exactly where to go next. So I sort of stumbled around different areas and the leveled respawning monsters killed it for me. It doesn’t help that the battles are very slow (even that existing mod to speed them up doesn’t help much).
If you want a similar experience but not as excessive I can recommend Wizards & Warriors.
If you don’t mind my asking (and I’m hesitant to trust 10-year-old reviews here, given that it was a different time and all), but why so great, then, if not story? If the monster-fighting is grindy and obnoxious, is it just the raw gameplay that’s so fun?
Not trying to be combative; these are series I completely missed the boat on when I was younger, so I know next to nothing here. “Great RPG” has often been synonymous with “great story,” hence my assumption that I’d need to play 6 & 7 to understand/appreciate 8.
I really liked the story in 6 but as far as I recall it only really connects to 7 right at the very end. Then 7 picks up right where 6 leaves off. I recall there being more of a connection between 7 and 8 storywise. But as I said above I didn’t get all that far into 8 so far.
Well, one man’s grindy and obnoxious is another man’s treat. Wiz 7 is, strictly speaking, grindy. But it’s grindiness is nothing like Wiz 8’s really, except at the most basic level (you fight monsters to win the treasures and power the ups and such). Wiz 7 played fast on pentium chips way back in the 90s (a bug in Wizardry 7 Gold meant you had to adjust the speed slider a little every time you loaded a game, though). So yes, you do need to do lots of fighting but it can go rather quickly because combat is still very abstract, basically the same it had been since Wizardry 1.
Wiz 8 changed that by going to 3d and having monsters exist in the world (a new direction for the series, and a promising one). This caused all sorts of problems, however. Because now you had to sit and wait for monsters to approach the party when combat started. And when you’re fighting 5x phoots, 6x phoots, and 3x meaner phoots, it all takes awhile. Hey, maybe you should slow your enemies because that’s useful. And it is, except when you strike an enemy in melee there’s now a full 3d animation associated with it, and since they’re slowed it takes place in slow motion (because someone thought that would be a good idea; and it is on paper no question). The fight with a certain Crocodile thing in a certain area could take 20 minutes if you slowed it, because it’s animations were already really drawn out and it was a tough fight if tackled in the first third to half of the game.
What makes this worse is that once in combat - turn based mode - all other enemies in the vicinity switch to turn based so you gotta wait for them to all move as well. The tree city Zeitgeist is complaining about was by far the most problematic area, as it featured a series of interconnected Ewok huts via wooden plank bridges. Two bridges might be near each other but the walking distance between two points on the bridges might be far. If you got sucked into a combat on one bridge, but monsters were wandering around on the other. . . now you’ve gotta wait for them to move and it might take forever for them to find you. Anyway, a dev patch and then a fan fix helped speed up animations and movement and such, but there were some pretty ugly side effects to going to full 3d.
They both offer interesting (IMO) if minimally told stories. Now, for some people that style is a draw back but it’s how I prefer things. So you won’t be reading lots and lots of text, or watching many cut scenes, or anything like that. But there is story there, and it’s interesting to watch various groups clash while your party is caught up in the middle. Especially in Wiz 7, which featured you racing against NPC agents of the various factions to collect 7 maps to get to something. You needed to “arrive first”, trade for, or kill whomever claimed the maps to get the one you had to have or kill whoever had it and take it (the other 6 maps offered clues as to what you needed to do). The NPCs had lots of personality, though as with Wiz 8 there’s not a ton of dialog here. They’re developed enough though that they’re fairly interesting. The NPCs are still active forces in Wiz 8 but the plot is different, so you’re not so much racing against them but you definitely get chances to help/hinder some of them as you go.
They both offer strong character building mechanics in a party-based RPG setting (a big draw for the types of people posting in this thread, you know), though Wiz 8 claimed to “fix” a couple of problem’s in Wiz 7’s mechanics that were not in fact problems (the end result is not a flaw per se, but it did not improve anything either, and I might argue made things worse in a few specific, if small, cases). Wiz 8 is a good game but I wouldn’t call it a better game than Wiz 7.
Wiz 8’s scaling of enemies outside of “dungeons” brought more than a few strong-willed veteran gamers to their knees, and understandably so. It’s bad enough that once you leave the starting dungeon (extremely well crafted; unfortunately they were not all well realized) your first encounter on the world map could prove impossible to win (it didn’t help that the game had some quirks mechanically so various time-honored strategies simply didn’t work well; damage spells were largely useless e.g.). It got worse once you finally made it to safety, only to find that no Arnika is not in fact safe (it does have places you can safely rest inside but you gotta find them once in the city) as there are evil robots patrolling the streets trying to eat everything, and then you accidentally had to fight 3 groups (each one being more than a match for your young party) at once. A surprisingly number of people on forums quit the game here, or before here.
Which is too bad. It’s possible to turtle up in Arinka, and build your party up a few levels, and get to a point where you are very unlikely to get face rolled outside, and the game does improve at that point. With the extra patching, some of the game’s obnoxious behavior disappeared. For reasons I couldn’t explain to you, I was unable to get Wiz 8 working on Win-7 x64 last year. Research suggested other people could do it. Once I finally got it to launch it would crash as soon as I got in-game proper though. That was after I ditched the mod and did a reinstall. Oh, there are a couple of massive mods available for Wiz 8 somewhere, so if you do get it working there’s potentially a lot of extra gameplay available. There’s a Wiz 8 forum at VGN I think that has links and such.
Good points Peacedog. Wiz 8 can really kick you in the nuts right from the get go, that’s for sure. And I know it doesn’t help, but I have Wiz 8 running on my Win 7, 64 bit system. It was about a year ago I reinstalled, but I believe it was a straight install off of my disks, no mods.
There’s a hack for wiz8 that speeds up monster attacks and movement in combat by like 100x, so you don’t have to wait for them to take action. It’s still a lot of combat, though, since that is really the core of the game.
My main complaint with wiz8 is actually tied to that intro dungeon-- there’s nothing else really like it in the entire game. I loved the rest of wiz8 too, but some dungeoncrawling would have been nice.
I will probably try again at some point this year; I’ve got too much on my plate right now though.
Cautiously optimistic about M&M 10. Love the series, love the lore, but have little faith in Ubisoft to actually pull it together into a package that both pays homage to the source material and provides a good modern RPG experience. I suspect it’s either going to be a “re-imagining” where the classic party-based gameplay gets a Skyrim-style single character makeover, or more likely, they’ll design it as a console first title and make it into a bastardized Assassin’s Creed RPG (i.e. heavily action oriented and designed for controllers vs. keyboards).
One thing they have succeeded in doing already is making me yearn to play Might and Magic VI through IX again. I have all my original boxed copies on the shelf. Sadly I have no time. I need to become independantly wealthy so I can retire to a life of nostalgic video gaming.
That speed hack helps a lot.
Also, crowd control and defensive spells in this game are crucial to success. Moreso than with most RPGs I’ve played. Going at it with brute force gets you nowhere.
And I agree, that first dungeon was great.
Thanks for the sidebar discussion. I think I will play that first dungeon to check out the game and then leave it there.
I recommend pushing a bit further and checking things out. All of that scaley horribleness can be overcome if you are forewarned, and there a resources here - the kinds of resources you don’t talk about at parties - that can ensure that you are.
Any change of the basic gameplay in M&M, to go against what the series has been doing (e.g. stopping being party based, or going to really stimplistic character building mechanics) would be doubly hurty (and hilarious) after they posted that X image thingy. Or am I the only person who thinks this?
I am hoping we get a real M&M game. The term old school RPG has pretty much come to mean infinity engine style games. It would be nice if we had one game that reached back a little farther.
Oh wow, nostalgia city–apart from text adventures like Dungeon/Zork, M&M was my first intro to computer RPGs, with the very first one–Secret of the Inner Sanctum.