Is there a modern W8 game?

[Q-efx]

Is there a similar game like W8? With dozens of races, classes and play styles, much like W8?

Only stuff I found was with like 3 party members, or only 4 classes or like 3 skills etc etc... its boring...

[mpnorman10]

Unfortunately, current rpgs have the false goal of being foolproof. If you go to the Pillars of Eternity (first one) page there is, or at least was, a video there by the lead designer who described all the (horrible and misguided, IMO) things he and they did to remove from their game everything that makes Wizardry 8 great.

1) making character choices foolproof so even a new player blundering through the process will have a party capable of playing and finishing the game without extreme difficulty

2) removing all of the strategy by redefining attributes so every character needs all of them and so their effects are "linearized", i.e. so there is no major impact for raising attributes to a certain level.
2a) all characters needing all attributes is to destroy what he derogatorily calls, "min maxing", i.e. all of the strategic aspects of character creation and development which enable the characters and party to sink or swim depending upon the quality and wisdom of the choices.
2b) Strength for example is required by casters because for them it has been made to translate into the strength of their spells.
2c) The linearizing is to eliminate anything powerful from the character design process. A little bit more of an attribute means a little bit more only of whatever it does. Something like the Expert Skills in Wizardry 8 or the Novice-Expert-Master-Grandmaster exponential curve of abilities and spell effectiveness in the Might and Magic games is vigorously avoided.
Overall these measures are directly intended to make the entire creation and development process for characters less meaningful and important, instead there is a focusing on just the tactics, exploration and story aspects and eliminating character creation and development as an important part of the game (in large degree).

Modern rpgs can be fun, but do not expect an in-depth and meaningful creation of the party that opens up the possibility of utter failure. The utter lack of this in current rpgs is directly, overtly and shamefully saying players cannot handle a meaningful creation and development of characters and parties that allows them to fail utterly.

[i_nive]

Modern, per se:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/650670/Grimoire__Heralds_of_the_Winged_Exemplar_V2/

* Relations to Wizardy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimoire:_Heralds_of_the_Winged_Exemplar#Development

* Variety is huge (party of 8, as requested): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimoire:_Heralds_of_the_Winged_Exemplar#Gameplay

[CeterumCenseo]

Grimoire is definitely rather the style of Wizardry 7 than 8. It is strictly turnbased. I did not finish the game yet, so it could be there are some elements in it like in Bard's tale 2 and 3, where you have to finish something in a certain timeframe. W8 has something like that as well, the Umpani mission 1. Don't know what the designers had in mind with that, because it is the only scenario in the game where undextrous movements of the partylead to a game over screen.

I agree that Wizardry 8 was rather the exception than the mainstream, therefore no true successor exists. I do not have a complete overview of what has been published since then. From my limited feeling, the Bethesda titles come closest, but there are significant differences. I simply think, since W8 wasn't commercially successful, but complex to realize, no other company tried something similar ever.

I think all of the people here would love to see a true successor of Wizardry 8, but at this moment it seems unlikely.

I have no experience with the W8 mods, but there are plenty, with additional areas, monsters, items, quests. So maybe give them a try, if you want to get more of W8.

[Reality]

When looking for a DRPG or "Blobber" it's hard to draw lines on what counts as similiar enough.

I think the main subtypes

A: Games based on Greenberg Wizardry (1-4) "Turn based "Abstract Blobbers"
B: Games based on Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder "Real Time Blobbers"
C: Games based on Might and Magic (4-6) 1-3 are still Greenberg imitation games
D: Games based on Bradley Wizardry (6-7)

Wizardry 8 itself is a departure from both 1-4 and 6-7 (Dungeon Mapping and trap Design is unimportant compared unlike 1-4, Reclassing is very weak compared to 5-7, game is extremely puzzle light unlike 5-7, The semi-tactical combat and very good charather progression are kind of in 6-7 but not 1-4, but are taken farther in 8. Some randomness is toned down, especially charather creation randomness.

A: type modern succesors tend to be in two further subgroups

Aa: Short Length, with reclassing barely or not possible at all
Ab: Endgame and Postgame focused, with heavy reclassing

I think a lot of things that you are mentioning being disapointed with are some Aa and almost all C type games, I'm assuming Operencia, Starcrawlers, Paper Sorcerer are games you tried and found out only had a tiny number of party members or classes (or both).

Aa: Can be both lightweight indie games and Super-Heavyweight "slavishly loyal to original wizardry design philosophy" games

Ab: Type is heavily slanted toward the so-called "Japanese DRPGs", and includes things like the Class of Heroes Games, Elminage Gothic, and Stranger of Sword City

B: Sounds like you want to avoid. Personally I like the puzzle elements of Beholder/Grimrock style games but dislike their combat and charather progression, wish their was a happy middle ground~

C: is kind of the source of "4 Man" standard blobbers - M&M 1-3 were basically straight up Greenberg Wizardry Clones. M&M 4-5 begin to establish the series identity with the focus on (NPC) trainers and giving active skills to all physical classes (both spells and skills requring trainers to learn- M&M 6+ lowered the party count from 6 to 4, and doubled down on everything including the much starker line between starting classes and making class changes depend on finding trainers out in the world. 6 and 7 are often direct inspiration for many later CRPG.

D: is mostly D.W. Bradley 's game Wizards and Warriors and Grimoire~

I don't recomend Wizards and Warriors because it's a broken game. Getting it to run/crashes are a problem, but even when working properly it basically has a bad version of Wizardry 8's ability to switch between full turn based and continous turned based, but for some reason will do so on it's own every now and then and some enemy types (plants) seem to be in continous mode permeantly EVEN if the player is in turn based


I'm assuming 2014~ ish is a cutoff for modern and I'm leaving out 4 person party games like Starcrawlers and Opernicia, as well as avoiding non-PC stuff(mostly the japanese blobbers)

I'm putting artstyle warnings on some of these. If the descriptions I give are short it's because I mostly play through these once when talked into it by people and for me personally my favorite blobbers are even OLDER ones than Wiz8 because I like Wireframe dungeons, etc.

Legend of Amberland - 7 charather party, -4 Races, 8 classes, full party creation - pixel art graphics - kind of a budget game

Lords of Xulima - 6 charather party 9 classes - Kind of "overly balanced" - This game pauses for player inputs but strictly speaking it uses a round robin iniative system instead of turns.

Swords and Sorcery: Underworld - 6 charather party 4 Races 6 Classes -

Stranger of Sword City 6 charather party - 5 races, 8 classes -HEAVY Anime artstyle- I was talked into playing it, but reclassing is encouraged during maingame so it's not something I personally like

Elminage Gothic - 6 charather party, 8 races, 16 classes - This game is famous for being hard, but this partly applies to the postgame stuff - the main game is ALSO pretty hard, but I mean Wizardry 1 has enemy decapitation and breath attacks just not quite so early on. -artstyle is not anime in my opinion, but it is super cheap "cutout" looking -

There is some okay charather progression and development in some non-Blobber RPGs, but since you said "like Wizardry 8" I assume that modern games inspired by Baldur's Gate 2/Neverwinter Nights, etc would not apply.


Lords of Xulima and Swords and Sorcery are probbably my top recomendation for your original request, Legends of Amblerland was kind of more interesting to me gameplaywise but god I thought it was ugly the whole time of course my personal preference would be to convert more people to playing older games

[mpnorman10]

Reality - wow, incredible analysis. A couple questions if you permit.

Why do you categorize Might and Magic 4-6 in the same category C? I would expect you would put 4-5 and 10 in that "C" category.

Might and Magic 6-8 and Wizardry 8 definitely have a different feel during play. Yes they are all blobbers, but they open up free movement and, for the Might and Magic games they have flying which fundamentally makes the games very different. Only 4 characters in party is not so much, increased to 5 in MM8, but MM6 seems like a new and innovative direction in rpg gaming and undoubtedly one inspiration for Wizardry 8.

You definitely peaked my interest in Legend of Amberland. Your experience with a wide variety of rpgs brings me to this question. IMO the thing that makes Wizardry 8 great and not "boring" as the OP is looking for more of, is because the strategy involved in the non-RNG character and party creation and development is strategically deep, open to the possibility of failure, and open ended, i.e. there is no canned formula that makes the ultimate party in Wizardry 8. Is there anything you have found out there like that? Or is it all going the way of Pillars of Eternity with foolproofing via attribute redistribution, linearizing and avoiding "Min-Maxing"?

For Wizardry 8 a large part of the game takes place before the first battle.

[NolanDaneworth]

All rpgs i can think of - only tile-based dungeon crawlers. There are no modern open-world wizardry8-style games. The closest is Bards Tale 4.

Paper Sorcerer is nice but they say its buggy (same with bards tale 4)

As for what you can play on PSP emulator - Unchained blades, Class of Heroes 1/2

If you buy hacked psvita (henkaku + enso)(very cheap tho, 40-60$ generally) - you can download and play: Demon Gaze 1/2, Dungeon Travelers 2

btw its almost all jrpgs as Reality mentioned.

[CeterumCenseo]

@Reality:
What you write makes a lot of sense, and also shows why we will probably never see a successor of Wizardry 8.

I cannot compare my own RPG experience with yours, some of the games you mention I have never heard of, but some remarks/questions:

Why do you differentiate between categories A and D? Wizardry 1 and 7 in my view have more similarities than differences, except that the more modern games have more features and details, better graphics. So why a category of its own.
I never played Wizardry 4, but I heard it was a solo game, not party.

I understand why you limit your explanation to blobbers, to avoid information overflow. But I think it would be fair to mention other types of crpgs:
- solo games eg from Bethesda, NVN, Gothic 1 etc.
- games where each character is placed individually on the map, like in the AD&D games Pool of Radiance and successors, Baldur's Gate style, Drakensang.

@Nolan
I agree the combat system of BT4 resembles Wizardry 8 with its formation, but the game is in my opinion not open world. Character development is limited to skill allocation and fitting to equipment. Advancement is rather puzzle solving than combat driven. In the combat system I like the synergies between character actions, and the postponed attacks by channeling.
If the system is good enough to keep me interested for thousands of hours like Wizardry 8 is a complete different question..

[Reality]

Originally posted by mpnorman10:

Why do you categorize Might and Magic 4-6 in the same category C? I would expect you would put 4-5 and 10 in that "C" category.

I'm not the best to explain a deep dive on M&M but I think my feeling was that there was a big increase in I guess "world reactivity" and like a kind of hybirdization after they started to move away from the Wizardry-esque design of the first games - it's kind of like while still being Blobbers. they started to have mix in more puzzles (which was nice) and made towns a bigger feauture. Like the "purpose" of exploration is more for seeing the world and finding items instead of literal "game-ey" mapping. I think it was very good for their series identity ~

I think the way 3D environments are handled in 6-9 (not 10) deserves special mention not just because of the freedom of the flight spell, but also how it affected monster groups - especially on "field" maps or when they bunched up in a single room - technically a turn based blobber with "3 rows" of enemies claims to do the same thing but it has a very different feeling - and I think more importantly spell using enemies started using "archer rules" to hit you instead of fully exploiting the back row mechanic like they would in any "menu turn based game".

Originally posted by mpnorman10:

Might and Magic 6-8 and Wizardry 8 definitely have a different feel during play. Yes they are all blobbers, but they open up free movement and, for the Might and Magic games they have flying which fundamentally makes the games very different. Only 4 characters in party is not so much, increased to 5 in MM8, but MM6 seems like a new and innovative direction in rpg gaming and undoubtedly one inspiration for Wizardry 8.

I feel like Ultima Underworld > MM6 > Wiz 8 is more likely for historical progression in the free movement area, I think the real new thing from MM6 and Wiz 8 is combining free movement with Party based charather progresion - but that free movement by itself had showed up for a while in single charather CRPGs and some of the later Real time blobbers.

Originally posted by CeterumCenseo:

Why do you differentiate between categories A and D? Wizardry 1 and 7 in my view have more similarities than differences, except that the more modern games have more features and details, better graphics. So why a category of its own.

Wiz 1-3 have a single Mega-Dungeon and a single town, while Bradley has technically an entire interconnected world with a lot of individual areas.

For me I feel like the enemies in 6-7 are also scaled up a lot, and the ability to save anywhere ... was kind of used to justify some succeed or die things - of course old wizardry is also lethal, but it tended to be lethal over the long haul instead of on an individual battle basis - you almost never want to try a classic "fight fight fight parry parry parry", especially from the pyramid onwards in 6, or highlands onward in 7.

If it was only the new skill system and charather progression I think A and D would be combineable into 1 category, a lot of the Japanese games actulay DO add a 6-7 esque (or even a DragonQuest command list style) skill system - but the differences in town design and imo combat still make these games feel a lot more Wiz 1 than Wiz 7.

Originally posted by CeterumCenseo:

I never played Wizardry 4, but I heard it was a solo game, not party.

Wiz 4 you get a single Mage with no charather creation (although his set HP growth is way higher than a mage), but can summon monsters as party members - however they are permenatly AI controlled, and always enter battles with full health and mana - so they only die if they die in a single battle (this happens a lot)

You also get the "enemy rules" so you get 3 seperate groups of up to 9 when you summon things - it's very much like the extreme varaition that you get when they show up as enemies in all other games. I feel like the healing and Status effect monsters have good enough AI that it
isn't as bad as it sounds... but yeah it's fair to treat Wiz 4 as a single char party.

Wizardry 4 has a lot of puzzles (even key item puzzles) but mapping is still arguably the "main" puzzle. The impetus to go back down is to reach the summoning spots rather than the classic "single town" but it creates a similiar "as far as you safely can so you'll know for next time" dynamic. The game also has some vicious inventory management (monsters don't have inventory, only the main charather) and for some reason almost all human enemies will drop full sets of armor/weapons which 90% of the time you can choose to pick up but can't equip (due to being a Mage). Later on you run into Wizardry 6-7 esque key item bloat, but you do at least get bags of holding to ease the burden and expand the total inventory.

Also Wizardry 5 is worth mentioning as the "first" D.W. Bradley game, but it is very strange... The Sir-Tech company obliged Bradley to still uses resource assets and the formula of 1-4, but their is definately a friction with his design style -

it does have a single town and a single mega dungeon - but it's geometry is long and snaky instead of being 20x20 - there are no skills yet, but you still really really want to reclass - in wiz 1-3 reclassing is almost entirely optional, but in wiz 5 you'll need it at the bare minimum for the HP boosts, because an enemy group of mages later can throw Tiltowait(Nuclear Blast) at you for every mage in their entire group later on, and breath attack monsters are likewise scaled up beyond how they are in any other game - It probbably has the highest "intended final level" of any main wizardry game - It does start the Wiz 6-7 "key item based" puzzle and the heavy Bradley prose dialog, although since it uses the Wiz 1-4 spell list, there is no identify spell, so you have to either handicap your party with a Bishop or pay absurd amounts of money to identify them in stores.

I think it's okay to play a "Wizardry but even HARDER" game once it a while, but I feel like Wizardry Empire or Elminage: Gothic does it a lot better than Wiz 5 - probbably my least favorite wizardry overall - there is just an ugly sense that the difficulty was created uninteninally instead of at least being well thought out like in some of the J-games. I think in the end I would still call it a Type A game rather than D, but this more an arbitary call to make.

[Reality]

Originally posted by CeterumCenseo:

@Reality:

I understand why you limit your explanation to blobbers, to avoid information overflow. But I think it would be fair to mention other types of crpgs:
- solo games eg from Bethesda, NVN, Gothic 1 etc.
- games where each character is placed individually on the map, like in the AD&D games Pool of Radiance and successors, Baldur's Gate style, Drakensang.

I have said positive stuff about Pool of Radiance before, but I think my frustration with the direction that Japanese "TRPG" like fire emblem have taken really helped my enjoyment of it, and that other people might not be able to get past the manual spell memorization. - It's also not really a charather progression game since usually all my charathers stay in the same class from begining to end - their is some experimenting with what spells you use, or taking a lot of backstabbers, but that doesn't really work in the early Gold box games because of their low level cap.

I feel like the usual single charather progression is some kind of "skill point tree" with only enough points to fully invest in 1 of 3 (or slightly more) branches - It works really well in some games, and I think Roguelikes are my favorite but those kind of force you into it because the high death rates make having an entirely different build on your second charather important to the longevity of the game.

The big long games like Gothic, Fallout, or Witcher can be very cool with this, but some of them feel like you can cheat - like having a charather with no science skill and picking up a companion JUST for the one quest, then dropping him to go back to your normal companion. Gothic is very cool because of also kind of having a M&M Trainer / quest thing with some of the skills like getting each circle of magic spells, or the spellbook in the first place in G2.

I am slow to recomend isometric and top-down games because a lot of my favorite ones are "fringe cases" like Jagged Alliance and Battle Brothers and the new 40K mechanicus game - which are more like 90% tactics games and only 10% RPG - I think my favorite ones that are still strongly RPGs would be something like Shadowrun Dragonfall, Temple of Elemental Evil, and Blackguards 2 (although those last 2 are kind of problematic)

[CeterumCenseo]

Real thanks for your extensive explanations. I really liked to read them and understand what you mean.

[HOK1970]

Icewind Dale EE:

It's a Baldurs Gate-style remake. Less story, but the fights are more tactical and sometimes violently difficult. The Enhanced Edition offers masses of character classes and races and also plays a little more fluidly than the original version of the year 2000. A party of 6 self-created people is played.

The difficulty level is not only adjustable, it also has an effect on the experience points gained. For example, the first fight gives double the number XP on the highest difficulty level, as on Normal. Because experience points are limited, the adjustable difficulty level is another tactical component, as it can suddenly shine with characters, who need a lot of experience to complete their full development.
A special challenge is the ultra-heavy difficulty "Heart of Winter". In my opinion, a fantastic game that was not well-received, like Wizardry 8.

[Zergs]

I played the original IWD and got the EE as a laptop/tablet friendly game. Solid choice, I made a party with two archers (autoattacking), two bards (passively using buffs) and two characters that I actively controlled and it worked out great.

Solid recommend.

[HOK1970]

@Zergs: Two Bards sounds interesting and I never read about this. Are they different bards (for example Skald and Bard) and can both use bard songs at the same time?