Wizardry 8 Remaster

[Eldritch]

I keep coming back here every few years hoping to find a rumor/news about an upcoming remaster for this game. I'd love to see modern resolutions properly supported, updated textures that are just updates to the originals, bug fixes and the like. I'd pay $39.99 or more to see this done properly especially if they added in some workshop support.

[TekWarrior]

The property is owned by a Japanese company so it is not likely to happen.
Our best bet is to kindly ask the Russian Programmers for help
Fan patch [disk.yandex.ru]
They know more about the inter-workings of the old engine and what would be possible.

Have you played updated 1.28 build 5981 and the expanded mod with HQ textures?
There is so much new stuff in that mod.

[mpnorman10]

It sounds like you loved playing the game at some point. Please let me remind you that once you create a party and get into the game all of the details like resolution and textures disappear into what is essentially a design/development-based battle strategy game.

I am not trying to make you do anything. I am just saying that the game you love is still here. You can decide to not play it, but for me, even if the resolutions were all 4k I would hardly notice.

Game designers abandoned this type of game on the basis it was too hard. That is not your fault or mine. I suspect I will be gone long before designers eventually circle around to this depth of design, but it will happen, if there are still humans around then with the gaming spirit.

[Nuee]

An awesome game that deserves a modern remake while staying true to the original.
Alas no signs of that. So many great old games have so much more depth than newer ones, it is sad.

[Woofy]

ZimLabs has many patches and mods on it. I'm not sure if the fanpatch is on it.
Also, there is new Mod that sounds very promising on another thread.

Are there Mod reviews? I appreciate all of the Mods and don't want to downplay all of the work done for them, I just want to know which one to try next! :)

[Eldritch]

Originally posted by TekWarrior:

The property is owned by a Japanese company so it is not likely to happen.
Our best bet is to kindly ask the Russian Programmers for help
Fan patch [[url=store.steampowered.com]
They know more about the inter-workings of the old engine and what would be possible.

Have you played updated 1.28 build 5981 and the expanded mod with HQ textures?
There is so much new stuff in that mod.

I have actually tried the latest patch with the expanded mod/HQ textures. I didn't find it to be entirely stable unfortunately which has been reported by many others as well.

I may be in the minority here though because my native resolution is in 21:9 3440x1440 so that could be causing an issue with the mods.

I can't even run the vanilla game anymore without it crashing so nmnormal10 that's just not an option for me any longer sadly.

Glad to be in the company of so many others here that love this game.

[Horpner Sneed]

Bummer about your vanilla installation crashing. I have good luck running the DirectX 6.0 graphic engine in windowed mode. It's quite dim and hard to see sometimes, and the steps in Mt. Gigas base camp are tricky to get over, but it works.

[malkavius77]

Originally posted by mpnorman10:

Game designers abandoned this type of game on the basis it was too hard.

I disagree with that part. Hard games and rpgs have had a sort of resurgence in the last decade or so. Like the pathfinder games could be argued to be much harder due to all of the details you have to learn. Or the juggernaut of the Souls games. People enjoy hard games if they are good.

But I would prefer a true sequel to the series instead of a graphics update. I also know the chances of that ever happening are close to zero and if it did get a sequel none of the people that made the game so great would be involved.

Best we can hope for is a big group of russian nerds make an unofficial sequel which I would be down for.

[Woofy]

Originally posted by TekWarrior:

The property is owned by a Japanese company so it is not likely to happen.
Our best bet is to kindly ask the Russian Programmers for help
Fan patch [[url=store.steampowered.com]
They know more about the inter-workings of the old engine and what would be possible.

Have you played updated 1.28 build 5981 and the expanded mod with HQ textures?
There is so much new stuff in that mod.

Steam blocked that Fanpatch link. I haven't had that happen before. Maybe it's because of the latest STeam Updates?

[mpnorman10]

Originally posted by malkavius77:

Originally posted by mpnorman10:

Game designers abandoned this type of game on the basis it was too hard.

I disagree with that part. Hard games and rpgs have had a sort of resurgence in the last decade or so.

Good point and I do not disagree with you, except keep in mind that there are very, very different kinds of "Hard". I very much agree that players love hard games. It is game manufacturers who are not keen on players enjoying a game so much that they do not constantly buy lots more. Lots and lots of details in a game might be hard, but that is not at all the kind of "hard" that Wizardry 8 was criticized so heavily for by "Professional" Reviewers at the time (the concept of a "professional" reviewer was a dying breed, even then, but at the time of W8 release they had power). These were experienced RPG players who messed up on the design part, resulting in a party so weak and difficulty so high that the game appeared broken.

It is possible to mess up design so badly here that the game becomes too hard, i.e. failure before the first battle on the beach. That is a very different kind of hard than, for example than the famous difficulty of the "Dark Souls" games that many players love. It is also not the same as too many details being hard (examples: Civilization, Stellaris).

Wizardry 8, IMO is 50% party design (with development plan) and 50% game play, with the latter proving or disproving the quality of the former. Games like Pillers of Eternity made lots of changes to the way Attributes and abilities work to intentionally destroy the first 50% of an excellent RPG. Most current RPGs are just the second half. Pillars has a good gameplay and I like it, but it is only half an RPG, IMO.

About Pathfinder, several friends I respect are playing it a lot. I have purchased one of the games and intend to check it out more thoroughly than I have. I also like the D&D based games ala Baldur's Gate, etc. They have a first half, but were not designed for player-designed full parties (designed primarily for one character plus recruits - a shame really).

[TekWarrior]

I had a typo in it
When i pasted in the link for some reason I didn't link it up properly to the url=

[AGT_ZURU]

No Preview Images for the Patch?

I know that Upgrading the Graphics for such an old title would be a massive undertaking as the Polygons would need to be Rebuilt, 4K Textures introduced, and Rendering Improved, along with 'Gaps' (otherwise, places where you can see into the VOID) being repaired. This would likely need to be all mounted onto a New Engine, meaning you're most of the way to just making a new Game.

Does this Patch address all of these?

[Horpner Sneed]

The new taxes the old engine with higher-polygon models and higher-res textures. The engine can handle it OK on modern hardware, mostly. Some players have no problems and other experienced frequent crashes. I used the low-res textures and had a tolerable and small number of crashes. It isn't bug-free, but it was good enough for me.

There are no updates to the actual game engine itself. It an expansion rather than a remaster.

[TekWarrior]

Completely rewrite is not likely to happen as there is no money in it.

Those Russian programmers (from Fan 1.28) could probably rip out the function calls that are made to old graphic system then painfully they could be wrapped to a new engine like Unreal Engine 4

We are talking about a 23 year old game that to be honest I am surprised runs as well as it does. You can click into the menus and engine properly pauses the action and resumes the action when out of a paused state. There are modern programs that fail to do this properly and crash.

There was someone on here that had a modern engine going and I was pretty sure was doing a rewrite.

[GreatMage]

Originally posted by Eldritch:

Originally posted by TekWarrior:

The property is owned by a Japanese company so it is not likely to happen.
Our best bet is to kindly ask the Russian Programmers for help
Fan patch [[url=store.steampowered.com]
They know more about the inter-workings of the old engine and what would be possible.

Have you played updated 1.28 build 5981 and the expanded mod with HQ textures?
There is so much new stuff in that mod.

I have actually tried the latest patch with the expanded mod/HQ textures. I didn't find it to be entirely stable unfortunately which has been reported by many others as well.

I may be in the minority here though because my native resolution is in 21:9 3440x1440 so that could be causing an issue with the mods.

I can't even run the vanilla game anymore without it crashing so nmnormal10 that's just not an option for me any longer sadly.

Glad to be in the company of so many others here that love this game.

Noticed, writes a review, he found how to fix the crash
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198053431517/recommended/245450/
He said to put 1280x768, change to DirectX 7.
-------------


About launching the game with a high resolution of more than 2048x2048, a window pops up that says "Video device does not support video resolution."

There is a solution, try to download https://disk.yandex.ru/d/WsOpMM6u4yDEpg and unpack the archive to the root folder. (for example D:\Games\Wizardry 8\).

And then, the launch "3DSetup1_28b.exe " change "Glide2x" to "DirectX 7_1".

Did it help?




What about the high-quality texture?
There is an analogue, download the mod "Reforge 1.1". There are high-quality textures, also new locations and a lot of location changes, also new monsters.
https://zimlab.com/wizardry/mods/wiz8mods.htm

A couple of months ago, I found an analog of high-quality textures of all kinds, I'm going to create an archive of "Texture HD.SLF" in the "Mods" folder for fan patch 1.28.
It weighs about 5.9 gigabytes. But then to do something, it is unknown.

[TekWarrior]

Glide is working the best for me